I asked of the Indian, “Wa go nin-iu?” (“How do you call that?”) Thinking I wanted to know the name for a stream, he replied, “Sebe.” This is the same as sipi in Missis-sippi.
“I knew it,” groaned Stewart. “There is no such river as the Sebe laid down on the map. We’re lost in an unknown region.”
“It occurs to me,” I said, “that this is a judgment on me. When I think of the number of times in my life when I have walked past bar-rooms and neglected to go in and take a drink, I must think that it is a retribution.”
“And I say,” replied Stewart, “that if you ever do get
back to civilisation, you’ll be the old --- toper that ever was.”
When we came to the camp we found there by mere chance a large party of surveyors. As there were thirty or forty of us, it was resolved, as so many white men had never before been in that region, to constitute a township and elect a member to the Legislature, or Congress, or something—I forget what; but it appeared that it was legal, and it was actually done—I voting with the rest as a settler. I, too, am a Minnesot.
We railroad people formed one party and sat at our evening meal by ourselves, the surveyors made another, and the Indians a third table-d’hôte. An open tin of oysters was before us, and somebody said they were not good. One only needs say so to ruin the character of an oyster—and too often of “a human bivalve,” as the Indiana orator said. We were about to pitch it away, when I asked the attendant to give it to the Indians. It was gravely passed by them from man to man till it came to the last, who lifted it to his mouth and drank off the entire quart, oysters and all, as if it had been so much cider. Amazed at this, I asked what it meant, but the only explanation I could get was, “He like um oyster.”
This was a charming excursion, all through the grene wode wilde, and I enjoyed it. I had Indian society, and learned Indian talk, and bathed in charming rushing waters, and saw enormous pine trees 300 feet high, and slept al fresco, and ate ad libitum. To this day its remembrance inspires in me a feeling of deep, true poetry.
I think it was at Duluth that one morning there was brought in an old silver cross which had just been found in an Indian grave on the margin of the lake, not very far away. I went there with some others. It was evidently the grave of some distinguished man who had been buried about a hundred years ago. There were the decayed remains of an old-fashioned gun, and thousands of small beads adhering, still
in pattern, to the tibiæ. I dug up myself—in fact they almost lay on the surface, the sand being blown away—several silver bangles, which at first looked exactly like birch-bark peelings, and, what I very much prized, two or three stone cylinders or tubes, about half an inch in diameter, with a hole through them. Antiquaries have been much puzzled over these, some thinking that they were musical instruments, others implements for gambling. My own theory always was that they were used for smoking tobacco, and as those which I found were actually stuffed full of dried semi-decayed “fine cut,” I still hold to it. I also purchased from a boy a red stone pipe-head, which was found in the same grave. I should here say that the pipe which had been bought away from me by the man above mentioned had on it the carving of a reindeer, which rendered it to me alone of living men peculiarly valuable, since I have laboured hard, and subsequently set forth in my “Algonkin Legends” the theory that the Algonkin Indians went far to the North and there mingled with the Norsemen of Greenland and Labrador. The man who got the pipe promised to leave it to me when he died, but he departed from life and never kept his word. A frequent source of grief to me has been to see objects of great value, illustrating some point in archæology, seized as “curiosities” by ignorant wealthy folk. The most detestable form of this folly is the buying of incunabula, first editions or uncut copies, and keeping them from publication or reading, and, in short, of worshipping anything, be it a book or a coin, merely because it is rare. Men never expatiate on rariora in literature or in china, or talk cookery and wines over-much, without showing themselves prigs. It is not any beauty in the thing, but the delightful sense of their own culture or wealth which they cultivate. When there is nothing in a thing but mere rarity and cost to commend it, it is absolutely worthless, as is the learning and connoisseurship thereupon dependent.