Page:History of the Ojibway Nation.djvu/476

466 the head chief of the Ojibways arrived, and the Sioux chief of the old village, Panisciowa, was the first person he sent, who held out his hand, but the Ojibway would not take it. The Sioux chief, indignant, raised a war party, and the next day surrounded the Ojibways, who had placed their women and children behind the log huts of the old cantonments, and were ready to fight. Before any blood was shed, the agent, and colonel of the fort, effected a reconciliation.

Beltrami, the Italian traveller, was on the 9th of September, of this year, at Leech Lake, and found the Ojibways there in two factions, one under Cloudy Weather, and the other under Aish-ke-bug-e-koshe or Flat Mouth. Cloudy Weather's son-in-law had been killed by the Sioux, a few days before, and they were meditating a war party, but at length agreed to go and consult with agent Taliaferro. Soon after, Flat Mouth was in his tent, at full length, "like old Silenus in a state of intoxication."

Keating, the historigrapher of Major Long's expedition, in 1823, to the sources of the Minnesota, and from thence to Lake Winnipeg, and the north shore of Lake Superior to Sault Ste. Marie, doubted whether the population of the Ojibway tribe had ever been large, and after mentioning that they were divided into many local bands, uses this language: "We can form no idea of the population of each of these bands or of the whole nation, but although we travelled over about fourteen hundred miles of country claimed by the Chippeways from the main fork of Red River to the Sault de Ste. Marie, the whole amount of Indians we fell in with did not exceed one hundred. We heard of no traditions respecting their origin upon which any confidence might be placed. The tales we heard were