Page:History of the Ojibway Nation.djvu/229

Rh this act settled the foundation of a lasting good-will, and was the commencement of an active communication between the British and Ojibways of Lake Superior.

A brief notice may not be considered amiss in this place, of the chief Ma-mong-e-se-da, who acted in this important affair as the representative of hie tribe. His father was a member of the Reindeer Clan, and belonged to the northern division of the tribe. He moved from Grand Portage on the north shore of Lake Superior when a young man, to the main village of his tribe at Shaugha-waum-ik-ong. Becoming noted as an active and successful hunter, and having distinguished himself at the battle of Point Prescott, where the Ojibways destroyed so many of their enemies, he married a woman of the La Pointe village, who had been the wife of a Dakota chief of distinction during the late term of peace which the French traders had brought about. The renewal of the war had obliged her to separate from her Dakota husband, and two sons whom she had borne him, one of whom afterwards became a celebrated chief, whose name, Wabasha, has descended down in Dakota and Ojibway traditions to the present times.

Ma-mong-e-se-da (Big Feet), was the offspring of his mother's second marriage with the young hunter of the Reindeer Clan. He became noted as he grew up to be a man, for the fearless manner in which he hunted on the best hunting grounds of the Dakotas, on the lower waters of the Chippeway River, and an incident worthy of note is related as having happened to him during the course of one of his usual fall hunts. His camp on this occasion consisted of several lodges of his own immediate relatives. They had approached near the borders of the Dakota country, in the midland district lying between the Mississippi and Lake Superior, when, one morning, his camp was fired on by a party of Dakota warriors. At the second volley,