them on their expeditions, and was in daily danger of being murdered by the more riotous and hostile members of the band. He found these savages on the whole “good-natured men, affable, civil, and obliging,” and he was indebted for his life to the good-will of one of the chiefs, who protected him again and again at no inconsiderable danger to himself. The only evidence of religion among the Nadouwessies which he mentions is that they never began to smoke without first holding the pipe up to the sun, saying, “Smoke, sun!” They also offered to the sun the best part of every beast they killed, carrying it afterward to the cabin of their chief; from which Father Hennepin concluded that they had “a religious veneration for the sun.”
The diplomatic relations between the United States Government and the Sioux began in the year 1815. In that year and the year following we made sixteen “treaties” of peace and friendship with different tribes of Indians—treaties demanding no cessions of land beyond the original grants which had been made by these tribes to the English, French, or Spanish governments, but confirming those to the United States; promising “perpetual peace,” and declaring that “every injury or act of hostility committed by one or other of the contracting parties shall be mutually forgiven and forgot.” Three of these treaties were made with bands of the Sioux—one of them with “the Sioux of the Leaf, the Sioux of the Broad Leaf, and the Sioux who shoot in the Pine-tops.”
In 1825 four more treaties were made with separate Sioux bands. By one of those treaties—that of Prairie du Chien—boundaries were defined between the Chippewas and the Sioux, and it was hoped that their incessant feuds might be brought to an end. This hostility had continued unabated from the time of the earliest travellers in the country, and the Sioux had been slowly but steadily driven south and west by the victorious Chippewas. A treaty could not avail very much toward
