Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 2.djvu/140

124 friends. At Weston I was offered a position as tin peddler—not an unpromising prospect. But I said "No "again; Oregon before that, and that in a slave state, too. I therefore proceeded with my arrangements, hiring, along with four others, our baggage hauled to Saint Joseph, then but a mere village of two or three stores and one hotel. There I met an intending Oregon immigrant, who gave me confirmation of the steamboat man's report as to men of means needing single men to help them on the journey. I whirled my cap up and said, "Boys, here is the fellow that goes to Oregon, or dies in a sand bank."

At Weston I had my first personal impressions of the North American Indians. The Iowa tribes, the Sacs and Foxes, had recently been placed upon a reservation on Wolf River, some thirty miles west, and had come to town to receive their annuities. They were performing their war dances in front of the few business houses, and asking small contributions in return, wherewith to get whiskey. They were large, powerful men, and one of the biggest and oldest hugged me, and planted a slobbery kiss on my cheek in requital for a dime. This took out of me a great lump of Fennimore Cooper's ideal Indian—which I had previously imbibed. The following night these Indians broke into a shack used as a saloon, and had a great debauch. Next morning, however, I went across the river to the camps of the Indians to inspect their manner of life, but there were few of them to be seen; one man I found alone in the camp. He was a strongly formed .person, and seemed to make as much a study of me as I of him; a man, apparently of great self-control. I was to see him again as chief of his rough and reckless young men.

Next morning one of the young men who had traveled on the same boat with me from Saint Louis, Willard H. Rees, joined me on the way in a journey to reach the