“Take care of yourself—shoot well, or you lose, You warned me, but, see! I have defeated you! I am one of the Great Spirit’s children! Wa-konda I am! I am Wa-konda!”
See Alice C. Fletcher’s paper, Tribal Structure, as included in The Putnam Anniversary Volume, Cedar Rapids, 1909, for a further exposition of the word Wa-Kon’-da.
[38] Culin. Games of the North American Indians.
[39] In a game witnessed by the writer, on the Sauk and Fox Reservation at Tama, Iowa, in 1907, the ball used was wood. This tribe is slow to acquire new ideas, nor has it advanced greatly during the last fifty years. The game was one of intense excitement and is still played along the same lines as in the earlier days of this once powerful band.
[40] Field Columbian Museum Catalog, No. 71404.
[41] The Fourteen Ioway Indians.
[42] The oldest attempt at a detailed description of the game is given by Nicolas Perrot, Memoire sur les Moeurs, Costumes et Religion des Sauvages de l’Amerique Septentrionale. First printed in Paris in 1864.
[43] See Catlin. The Fourteen Ioway Indians, page 19, for a translation in full of this song.
[44] The Fourteen Ioway Indians, page 20.
[45] Ibid., page 21. In the French translation of this pamphlet these chansons are particularly well rendered.