their only mode of escaping from certain destruction at the hands of the Big Medicine!
Last summer a great Assiniboin brave or chief left his tribe and came down to attend the Great Indian Council that was held in the Platte valley, near Fort Laramie. When he returned to his own country they told him that several members of his family had eaten too many cherries and died, having been attacked by cholera. The bereaved chief at once loaded his gun with fine shot and went out against some cherry trees, full of fruit, that were near the place. Then he addressed them, as if the fruit and the trees had been alive, and accused them of being the murderers of his children and relations. "And now," he said, " it is the hour of my vengeance, I shall kill you also," and thereupon fired several times into the trees. " Now that you are dead," says he, picking up the fruit that had fallen, " I will finish you by eating you up." But unfortunately he ate too much - the cholera seized him and in a few hours he too was dead.
8 Now if you want something about Indians to fill a corner with, here is an anecdote, not altogether savage. I doubt in fact if your Precis Historiques contain many better. Among the converted Indians on the Canadian frontier there was once a certain Jean Baptiste, whose further appellations are unknown to me; doubtless he was the owner of other vowels and consonants, forming one of those terrifying names, well called by the Americans " jaw-breakers."
Jean Baptiste it appears had done a little thieving in his time, and when he was converted the Black-robe enjoined upon him to restore two dollars to the Calvinist minister of the neighborhood. Jean Baptiste accordingly presented
3 From a letter to Father Terwecoren, December 6, 1854.