River, and Knife Lake have been the sites of Ojibway villages only within a few years past—within the recollection of Indians still living.[1]
Omig-aun-dib, the chief of Rice Lake, had half brothers among the Dakotas, who after the death of their common father became chiefs over their people; through the influence of these closely related chieftains, peace was long kept up between their respective villages. Ill-will, however, gradually crept in between them, as either party continually lost relatives, in the implacable warfare which was now most continually carried on between other portions of their two tribes. At last they dared no longer to make peace visits to one another's villages, though they still did not join the war parties which marched into the region of country which they respectively occupied.
As a proof of the tenacity with which they held on to one another even amidst the bloodshed which their respective tribes continued to inflict on them, the following tale is related by the descendants of Omig-aun-dib.
After the war between them had again fairly opened, a Dakota war party proceeded to Rice Lake and killed three children who were playing on the sandy shores of the lake, a short distance from the Ojibway village. One of these murdered children belonged to Omig-aun-dib, who was away on his day's hunt at the time they were fallen upon and dispatched.
When, on his return, he had viewed the mangled remains of his child, he did not weep and ask his fellows to aid him in revenging the blow, but he silently buried his child, and embarking the next morning alone in his birch canoe, he proceeded down the river toward the Dakota country.
- ↑ The Snake River Ojibways in 1836 were divided into two bands, and numbered about forty men. One band spent the summer at Lake Po-ka-gum-a; the other, on a small lake twenty miles higher on the river. About this time some of the Ojibways of Yellow Lake, Wisconsin, joined them.—E.D.N.
