us the
money for our lands.'

I give this interview, and what transpired there, as a sample of the
treatment which the Indians were in the habit of receiving at the hands
both of the General Government and the State authorities. Not the wisest
kind of treatment, one would think, this which Red Iron received, taking
all the circumstances into account. The reader will be surprised,
however, that Governor Ramsey, not content with 'breaking' the chief, as
he called it--the greatest dishonor which he could inflict upon an
Indian of rank--sent him, when the council broke up, to the guard house,
under an escort of soldiers! This impolitic official ought to have
remembered that the fire was even then ready for the kindling, which
finally burst out in such fearful devastation over his devoted State;
that it was enough to have cheated the Indians, without thus inflaming
their already excited passions, by heaping so great an indignity upon
the person of their chief. But he was regardless of everything except
the display of his own power and authority. No doubt he thought he was
acting for the best, and that the dirty redskins needed to be held with
a high hand. But it was bad thinking and doing, nevertheless; a most
shortsighted and foolish policy, which came wellnigh, as it was, to an
Indian outbreak.

The braves of Red Iron retired under the leadership of Lean Bear, a
crafty fellow, eloquent in his way, and now irreconcilably mad against
the whites; and when he had led them about a quarter of a mile from the
council house, they set up a simultaneous yell, the gathering signal of
the Dacotah. Ere the echoes died away, Indians were hurrying from their
_tepees_ toward them, prepared for battle. They proceeded to an eminence
near the camp, where mouldered the bones of many warriors. It was the
memorable battle ground where their ancestors had fought, in a Waterloo
conflict, the warlike Sacs and Foxes, thereby preserving their lands and
nationality.

A more favorable occasion, a more fitting locality for the display of
eloquence which should kindle the blood of the Indian into raging fire,
and persuade him to any the most monstrous and inhuman deeds, could not
have been chosen even by Indian sagacity. An old battle ground, where
the Sioux had been victorious over their enemies; the whitened bones of
the ghastly skeletons of their ancestors who fought the battle,
bleaching on the turf, or calling to them from their graves below to