implements. Girls of ten years old with silver-gray hair hanging down to their knees stood around and listened.
Yes, they had earthen pots and gardens, even extensive fields of corn, beans, squashes, and sunflowers, and houses—mud huts. They lived in little forted towns that had been moved successively up, up, up the Missouri.
"I believe what you have told us," said one of the chiefs in the great council on Monday. "We shall now have peace with the Ricaras. My people will be glad. Then our women may lie down at night without their moccasins on. They can work in the fields without looking every moment for the enemy."
"We have killed the Ricaras like birds," said another, "until we are tired of killing them. Now we will send a chief and some warriors to smoke with them."
Thus was the first effort for peace in the Mandan country.
The high chill wind almost blew down the awning over the great council. The men paraded up from the boats, the blunderbuss was fired from the bow of the big bateau, the long reed-stemmed stone-bowled pipes were smoked in amity.
"Here are suits of clothes for your chiefs," said Lewis, handing out of a wooden chest the handsome laced uniforms, cocked hats, and feathers. "To your women I present this iron corn-mill to grind their hominy."
The solemn, sad-faced chiefs took the clothes and put them on. The women flew at the corn-mill. All day long they ground and ground and wondered at "the great medicine" that could make meal with so little trouble. Mortars and pestles were thrown behind the lodges, discarded.
The next day Mr. McCracken set out on his return to Fort Assiniboine, one hundred and fifty miles away, with a friendly letter to the Chief Factor, Chaboillez, enclosing the passport of Lewis and Clark from the British minister at Washington.
Yes, a passport,—so uncertain was that boundary—never yet defined. Where lay that line? To th
