still appear, icy and sparkling here and there on the blackened hillsides.
After we left Denison, we passed two little towns in the first fifty miles; in the second half of the distance only a few small farms. The winter is rigorous in upper Iowa and will keep back colonization for some time to come. Dubuque, on the Mississippi, is the principal town of the State. There are four churches there with a bishop and Catholic charitable institutions.
Reaching Sioux City I took up my lodging with the young curate of the place, Reverend J. Curtis. He practices the holy ministry here with the greatest zeal and edi fication. He enjoys the highest consideration among Protestants as well as Catholics. He is a pupil of the great Irish seminary All-Hallows, which every year sends its young, fervent apostles, filled with virtues and talents, to the various parts of the globe where the bishops may have called for their aid. In the twenty-five years that this seminary has been in existence, over 300 pupils have been sent out to foreign missions.
Sioux City has a little Catholic congregation of about fifty families; the greater part are Irish, the rest Germans or French. Mr. Curtis' mission extends 130 miles north of the Missouri river, and he ministers to more than 200 families scattered over this distance. The number grows each year.
The good chief Pananniapapi, with a band of twentyeight Yanktons, has just arrived in Sioux City. We are hourly expecting a steamboat which is to take us all together to his country. He is on his way home from Washington where he has been at the summons of the Secretary of the Interior to transact some business for his tribe.
In my interview with him he told me with his natural simplicity that a young chief of his tribe and a near relative, who had gone east with him, had been attacked with a vomiting of blood during their stay in the capital, which soon brought him to great weakness, so that they lost all 55