Page:History of the Ojibway Nation.djvu/256

246 juncture, and yelling their war-whoop, rushed to the rescue of their discomfited allies. The Ojibways resisted their new enemies manfully, and it was not till their ammunition had entirely failed, that they in turn showed their backs in flight. But few would tell the sad tale of defeat and the death of brave men, had not the party of sixty warriors from Sandy Lake, who were to have joined them at the mouth of Snake River, arrived at this opportune moment, and landed at the head of the portage. Eager for the fight, and fresh on the field, the band rushed forward and withstood the onset of the Odugamies and Dakotas, till their friends could rally again to the battle.

After a short but severe contest, the warriors of the two allied tribes were forced to flee, and the slaughter in their ranks is said to have been great. Many were driven over the rocks into the boiling floods below, there to find a watery grave. Others, in attempting to jump into their narrow wooden canoes, were capsized into the rapids. Every crevice in the cliffs where the battle had been fought, contained a dead or wounded enemy. The Ojibways suffered a severe loss in the death of a large number of their bravest warriors. The brother of Waub-o-jeeg was numbered among the dead, and the war-chief himself carried on his person the marks of the sanguinary fight, in a wound on his breast. But a few of the Odugamies escaped, and from this time they forever gave up the contest with the victorious Ojibways. They retired to the south, far away from the reach of the war-club, which had so often made them to weep, and now so nearly exterminated their warriors.

The old Ojibway chief, "Great Buffalo," of La Pointe, says that the fire of the Odugamies was, by this last stroke, nearly extinguished, and they were reduced to fifteen lodges. A second time they went weeping to the village of the Osaugees, who had intermarried with them to a con-