Schoolcraft. [[141]]
XXI. THE SHADOW CANOE
A Legend of Minnehaha Falls
(Dakota)
In a wigwam by the Falls of Minnehaha lived an Indian brave with his family. Ampata was his wife, and two happy children played in the sunshine around his wigwam. The little family went in the winter with their tribe farther south, and the smoke of their village fires could be seen for many miles.
Here Ampata embroidered the moccasins with colored quills and grasses; these moccasins were for her husband and her children. Here she made the buckskin suit for her hunter. She sewed it with strings of sinew saved from the deer whose skin she had carefully tanned.
They all went back to the north in the summer time, back to the fall of waters in the Great Father of Waters and to the Falls of Minnehaha. There was good fishing in these waters, and their wigwam stayed there all the summer. [[142]]
In the north she wove baskets of willows and baked dishes of clay. She found the red clay and the yellow for her husband’s war paint; he was a great warrior and wore two eagle feathers in his scalp lock.