“After this, a party of Hidatsas went to visit the Mandans. The Mandan chief took an ear of corn, broke it in two, and gave half to the Hidatsas for seed. This half ear the Hidatsas took home, and soon every family in the village was planting corn.”
My father had been listening, as he sat smoking on the other side of the fire. “I know that story,” he said. “The name of the Mandan chief was Good-Fur Robe.”
My grandmother then put me to bed. I was so sleepy that I did not notice she had eaten up all the corn I had parched.
Winter came again, and spring. As soon as the soil could be worked, my mothers and old Turtle began cleaning up our field, and breaking new ground to add to it. Our first year’s field had been small; but my mothers added to it each season, until the field was as large as our family needed.
I was too little to note very much of what was done. I remember that my father set up boundary marks—little piles of earth or stones, I think they were—to mark the corners of the field we claimed. My mothers and Turtle began at one end of the field and worked forward. My mothers had their heavy iron hoes; and Turtle, her old-fashioned digging stick.
On the new ground, my mothers first cut the long grass with their hoes, bearing it off the field to be burned. They next dug and loosened the soil in places for the corn hills, which they laid off in rows. These hills they planted. Then all summer in this and other parts of the field they worked with their hoes, breaking and loosening the soil between the corn hills and cutting weeds.
Small trees and bushes, I know, were cut off with axes; but I remember little of this labor, most of it having been done the year before, when I was yet quite small. My father once told me that in very old times, when the women cleared a field, they first dug the corn hills with digging sticks, and afterwards worked between them with their bone hoes.
I remember this season’s work the better for a dispute that my mothers had with two neighbors, Lone Woman and Goes-Back-to-Next-Timber. These two women were clearing lands that bordered our own. My father, I have said, to set up claim to our land, had placed boundary marks, one of them in the corner that touched the fields of Lone Woman and Goes-Back-to-Next-Timber. While my mothers were busy clearing and digging up the other end of their field, their two neighbors invaded this marked-off corner. Lone Woman had even dug up a small part before she was discovered.
My mothers showed Lone Woman the mark my father had placed. “This land belongs to us,” they said; “but we will pay you and Goes-Back-to-Next-Timber for any rights you may think are yours. We do not want our neighbors to bear us any hard feelings.”
We Indians thought our fields sacred, and we did not like to quarrel about them. A family’s right to a field once having been set up, no one thought of disputing it. If any one tried to seize land belonging to another, we thought some evil would come upon him; as that one of his family would die or have some bad sickness.