a_) was the center of their
country. They cultivated corn and tobacco, and hunted the elk, the
beaver and the bison. They were open-hearted, truthful and brave. In
their wars with other tribes they seldom slew women or children, and
rarely sacrificed the lives of their prisoners.

For many years their chiefs and head men successfully resisted the
attempts to introduce spirituous liquors among them. More than a century
ago an English trader was killed at Mendota, near the present city of
St. Paul, because he persisted, after repeated warnings by the chiefs,
in dealing out _mini wakan_ (Devil-water) to the Dakota braves.

With open arms and generous hospitality they welcomed the first white
men to their land, and were ever faithful in their friendship, till
years of wrong and robbery, and want and insult, drove them to
desperation and to war. They were barbarians, and their warfare was
barbarous, but not more barbarous than the warfare of our Saxon, Celtic
and Norman ancestors. They were ignorant and superstitious. Their
condition closely resembled the condition of our British forefathers at
the beginning of the Christian era. Macaulay says of Britain: "Her
inhabitants, when first they became known to the Tyrian mariners, were
little superior to the natives of the Sandwich Islands." And again:
"While the German princes who reigned at Paris, Toledo, Aries and
Ravenna listened with reverence to the instructions of bishops, adored
the relics of martyrs, and took part eagerly in disputes touching the
Nicene theology, the rulers of Wessex and Mercia were still performing
savage rites in the temples of Thor and Woden."

The days of the Dakotas are done. The degenerate remnants of that once
powerful and warlike people still linger around the forts and agencies
of the Northwest, or chase the caribou and the elk on the banks of the
Saskatchewan, but the Dakotas of old are no more. The brilliant defeat
of Custer, by Sitting Bull and his braves, was their last grand rally
against the resistless march of the sons of the Saxons. The plow-shares
of a superior race are fast leveling the sacred mounds of their dead.
But yesterday, the shores of our lakes and our rivers were dotted with
their _teepees,_ their light canoes glided over our waters, and their
hunters chased the deer and the buffalo on the sites of our cities.
To-day, they are not. Let us do justice to their memory, for there was
much that was noble in their natures.

In t