In his fur the breeze of morning
Play’d as in the prairie grasses.”
Norman watched him leap surely from branch to branch, over the deep abyss below, and then gathered some pretty flowers within reach, and asked the guide to gather some graceful hare-bells that hung over the steep cliff.
Another look from the head of the falls, and a few more flowers gathered, which they pressed, together with the rose-buds from Owah-Menah, and they got into the carriage.
Soon they reached Fort Snelling, in which Norman was very much interested. They drove round the deserted barracks, no longer astir with “the pomp and circumstance of war.” Norman would have enjoyed seeing the sentinel on duty and the soldiers on parade. His mother thought of the lonely lives the officers and their families must have led on that frontier post, far, far as it then was from the center of civilized life.
The fort commands a noble view, placed as it is on a commanding bluff at the junction of the Mississippi and the St. Peters rivers. The valley of the St. Peters, sloping upward, with its sunny fields, its aromatic grasses, and noble groves, stretches onward in its beauty as far as the eye can reach. In this valley is found the fine red stone of which the Indians make the bowls of their pipes; the red paint the Sioux use so much, and the blue and green clay used in painting, are also found here. This lovely valley had recently been the scene of a bloody battle between the Sioux and Chippewas, and the driver told Norman that he had seen some of wounded Indians carried through St. Anthony by some of their tribe.
From the earliest times these two nations have been at war; a feud transmitted from generation to generation.
How few of these Indians have learned the great lessons of loving kindness which the white men ought to have taught them. Steadily retreating from their broad prairies, their great lakes and rivers, before the advancing tread of the white man, they have not, as they gave up their beautiful homes, got a title to a grander and more glorious inheritance in the spirit land. How many have received firewater and fire-arms, at the hand of the white man! how few have taken from him the cup of salvation! Some of the customs of the Sioux seem to indicate that they have come from Asia, across the narrow straits that divide the two continents. They offer sacrifices and prayers to an unknown God; they have feasts of thanksgiving after deliverance from danger; they offer meat and burnt-offerings; they burn incense. These customs, together with their peculiar countenances and utterances, their own traditions, and the testimony of other nations, have convinced careful observers that they are descendants of a race of Asiatics.[[3]]
[3]. Pike’s Expedition.
The road winds around the hill on which the fort is built, and Norman saw many swallows flying into nests excavated in the banks of white sand-stone.