The first meeting of the Cherry Creek sewing circle was a decided success—that is to say, the first ever held there under the civilizing auspices of a paternal Government, since from time immemorial the Sioux women have been accustomed to get together in the fashion common to all other women under the sun. For nobody knows how many hundreds of years they have plied their feminine implements—such as awl of bone and sinew of deer—and with dyed quills of the porcupine and hand-wrought of trader-bought beads, with skins tanned to a velvety softness or costly broadcloth of red and blue, have made and decorated their native finery with no mean skill, the while their tongues were busy with soft syllables of domestic chat and village gossip, after the universal feminine pattern.
The time was now ripe, it seemed, for some advance along these time-honored lines. Indeed, this small settlement on Cherry Creek is still among the most primitive on the whole Sioux reservation, having no day-school or settled mission of its own, and several of the women had expressed a wish to learn of their sophisticated sister the complicated art of the white woman’s dress-making.
So here they were, gathered under the picturesque brush arbor to the number of a score or more, the younger attired as gayly as tropical birds, the elder in sober plumage of dingy browns and grays, all with demurely drooping plaits of hair and shoulders modestly draped in the invariable shawl. Most were primly seated on common wooden chairs, while a few of the older and more conservative preferred a blanket on the hard-trodden earth floor.
Stella had a table full of work cut out and basted; puritanical checked gingham dresses and wide print aprons, together with boxes of thimbles and needles and thread; and the lesson proceeded, at first with some constraint, but soon with a loosening of tongues and a torrent of soft laughter and musical dialect.
Of course, all who had babies had brought them on their patient backs, and several youngsters of Chaskay’s age or younger were tumbling about the floor or running races over the sunshiny prairie. There were almost as many dogs as children, and a certain Miss Day, who had neither, appeared with the pretty, striped face of her pet ’coon peeping coquettishly over one shoulder.
Presently refreshments were served in orderly fashion by the two young hostesses—tea, boiled rice flavored with meat, the plums gathered the day before, and a quantity of small, flaky, biscuit baked that morning by Yellow Star.
“I should like to make biscuit like those,” Miss Day remarked, after an astonishing number had been consumed.
“Can you teach me to make the spongy bread of the white people?” asked another.
“My husband has often asked for the apple-pie he had at school,” chimed in a little bride.
“We will have a cooking-class,” laughed the young field matron, “and learn to make all these and many more. You must all keep chickens and milk a cow or two; then we can have ever so many good things—things fit to build strong bodies for your children.”