I brought many pretty dresses and wore them too. Those who first came, if they had money and were brides, were dressed as if they lived in New York City.
We had a dance one night in our little log hotel. It was forty degrees below zero, and very cold anywhere away from the big stove. The women wanted to dance all the time and so set the table and put on the bread and cake before the company came. Five hours afterward when we went to eat, they were frozen solid. The dish towels would freeze too, as they hung on the line in the kitchen over the stove, while the stove was going, too.
One morning, after we were keeping house, my husband said, "I guess we have some spring company. You better go in and see them." I did and in the parlor was the biggest kind of an ox standing there chewing his quid. He had just come in through the open door to make a morning call. All kinds of animals ran at large then.
Mrs. William Dow—1854, Little Falls.
We came to Little Falls and built this house we are now living in in 1854. It was built right on an Indian trail that paralleled the Red River cart trail. You see that road out there? That is just where the old Red River cart road went. That is Swan River and it went between us and that. Our back door was right on their foot trail. You could step out of our door onto it. There is a big flat rock on the river up about four miles where the Chippewa and Sioux signed treaties to behave themselves. After this they were killing each other before they got out of town. You know our Indians were the Chippewas. They were woods Indians. The prairies belonged to the Sioux. They had always been enemies. Hole-in-the-Day was head chief here and a pretty good chief, too. His tribe got suspicious of him; they thought he was two-faced, so shot him, as they did his father before him. He had married a white woman, so the real chief now is a white man. I think he was on the square though. He used often to drop in for a piece of pie or anything to eat. He is buried upon the bluff here.
Swan River Ferry was three miles from Little Falls. It was on the direct road through Long Prairie to Fort Abercrombie. The Red River Cart Trail crossed the Mississippi River at Belle Prairie. There was a mill at that little place.
When the lumber jacks were driving logs they used to have their wamigans tie up in the river just outside that front door.
The Indians were camped all around here. They used to fill their moccasins with rabbit hair to take the place of stockings. Once I was standing by the river and I saw a squaw come out with a new born baby. She wasn't making any fuss over it. First she took it by the heels and plunged it in the river; then by the head and soused it in that way.
Mrs. Salome was a squaw who had married a white man. Her husband went to the war. I used to write her letters to him and she would sign them with her cross. She became very fond of me. At the time of the outbreak she said to me, "Kinnesagas?" meaning, "are you afraid?" I did not reply. Then she said "If you are, I'll hide you." She made a wigwam by the side of hers and wanted me to go into it with my children, but I would not. I liked her, but I remembered how when the Indians had had a scalp dance, I had seen her shake one of the scalps in her teeth. This was after she had married a white man. I asked her if she did not like the Indians better than the whites and she said in Chippewa, "If I do, why do I not stay with them?"
At the beginning of the outbreak the Sioux were sending runners all the time to get the Chippewas to join them. One of our men, William Nichols, spoke the Indian language as well as English. He had lived with them when he was a fur trader. He used to disguise himself as an Indian and go to the councils, so we all knew just what was going on. Old Buffalo, a chief, said, "If you go to war, I'll be a white man; I won't be an Indian any more. I'll go away and stay by myself always." We knew at once when they fully decided not to join the Sioux.