Page:History of the Ojibway Nation.djvu/197

Rh come a numerous body, and to be the most noted western vanguard of the Ojibway tribe.

At first, while they were yet feeble in numbers, they planted their lodges on the islands of the lake for greater security against the Dakotas, who for many years after their evacuation often sent their war parties to its shores to view the sites of their former villages, and the graves of their fathers, and, if possible, to shed the blood of those who had forced them from their once loved hunting grounds.

Almost daily, the hardy bands of Ojibways who had now taken possession of the head lakes of the Mississippi, lost the lives of their hunters by the bands of the Dakotas, and they would soon have been annihilated, had not accessions from the eastern sections of their tribe continually added to their strength and numbers. In those days, the hunter moved through the dense forests in fear and trembling. He paddled his light canoe over the calm bosom of a lake or down the rapid current of a river, in search of game to clothe and feed his children, expecting each moment that from behind a tree, an embankment of sand along the lake shore, or a clump of bushes on the river bank, would speed the bullet or arrow which would lay him low in death. Often as the tired hunter has been calmly slumbering by the dying embers of his lodge fire, surrounded by the sleeping forms of his wife and helpless babes, has he been aroused by the sharp yell of his enemies as they rushed on his camp to extinguish his fire forever. On such occasions the morning sun has shone on the mangled and scalped remains of the hunter and his family.

These scenes, which my pen so poorly delineates, have been of almost daily occurrence till within a few years past, along the whole border which has been the arena of the bloody feud between the Dakotas and Ojibways.