their fellow Indians paid large prices. Peace parties of the Knistenos and Ojibways often proceeded hundreds of miles to visit their villages, chiefly for the purpose of procuring their much coveted tobacco leaf.
Wa-won-je-quon, the chief of the Red Lake Ojibways, relates that several years since, while on a visit to the earthen wigwams of the Gi-aucth-in-in-e-wug or Gros Ventres, he was informed by their old men, that the smoke of their village once arose in the vicinity of Sandy Lake. They showed him a piece of bark on which was very correctly marked the principal streams and lakes on the Upper Mississippi, and pointed him out, as the site of their former village, the entry of East Savannah River into the St. Louis, where the remains of their earthen lodges, now covered by a forest of trees, are still discernible.
Groups of these mounds are to be seen on all the principal lakes in the Upper Mississippi country. At Pukwah Rice Lake, near Sandy Lake, is a group numbering seventy of these mounds, now covered by a thick grove of maple trees. At the mouth of Pine River, which empties into the Mississippi above Crow Wing, there is a group of nineteen, in which bones have been discovered by the Ojibways.
At Gull Lake many of these mounds have also been seen by the writer. At one place there are two standing side by side, each over one hundred feet long and four feet high, and on the top of one stands a high pine tree which looks to be centuries old.
The numerous mounds on the shore of Mille Lacs are accounted for in Ojibway tradition, as the remains of the former earthen lodges of the Dakotas, whom their ancestors drove from this lake.
The mounds which are thickly scattered throughout the St Croix and Chippeway River region, are said by the Ojibways to be the remains of the former wigwams of their old enemies, the Odugamees.
