Page:History of the Ojibway Nation.djvu/203

Rh from Lake Superior, bands who now number about three thousand souls.

They have encountered inveterate enemies at every step of their advance, and the spots are countless, where they have battled in mortal strife with Dakotas, Odugamees, and Winnebagos. The dangers and vicissitudes of the first pioneers into this section of country were equal to, and of the same character, as beset the onward course of the hardy hunters of the Upper Mississippi.

From the time that the Lac Coutereille and Lac du Flambeau villages became of sufficient importance, as to assume the privilege of performing the rites of the Me-da-we-win within their own precincts, they were considered actually separated from the common central body and Me-da-we lodge, which had for so many years flourished and concentrated at La Pointe, of Lake Superior, and they became from that time distinct "branches of the same parent tree."

Ka-ka-ke (Hawk), the present war-chief of the Chippeway River district, is the direct descendant in the third generation of the hunter who lost his child on Lac Coutereille, and became the founder of the Ojibway village located on this lake.

Lac Coutereille is named by the Ojibways "Odah-wah-sah-ga-e-gun (Ottaway Lake), from the circumstance that some time over four generations ago, a party of Ojibway hunters discovered on its shores the frozen body of an Ottah-wah, which tribe at this time extended their hunting parties even to this remote point.