seven or eight years old, handled his bow and arrows with admirable dexterity, for though the distance was considerable he never missed, and he always went promptly to put the little piece of money into his poor mother's hands. I rejoiced in his good success: he was the only one who had a chaplet and medal about his neck, and I learned that he had been baptized by the Rev. F. Van Quickenborne.(2) Toward evening I paid a visit to Pashishi's village, situated on the river.
The soil all around seemed to me very rich, the woods that I traversed on my way were superb and the prairie smiling and beautiful. There this good chief might live quiet and happy, if he had the courage to embrace our holy religion, for he acknowledges it to be the only true one, and he often tells how " in a dream, the ancient Fathers of the Society, who had formerly visited his tribe, appeared to him and reproached him with the hardness of heart of his nation and their perversity in stubbornly refusing to receive and follow the law of Christ; that that is the cause why the Great Spirit has abandoned them to all sorts of irregularities and to the impositions of a false prophet (Keokuk, of whom I will tell you hereafter) ; and that none of them should escape his wrath in the other world."
We stopped for two hours at the Black-snake Hills [St. Joseph, Mo.]. There I had a long talk with J[oseph] R[oubidoux], who keeps a store and runs his father's fine farm. He showed me a great deal of affection and kindness, and expressed a wish to build a little chapel there, if his father can manage to get some French families to come and settle near them. The place is one of the finest on the Missouri for the erection of a city.
At one of the landings or paths, where the boat had
(2) Rev. Charles Felix Van Quickenborne; born 1788 in Ghent, died near St. Charles, Mo., August 17, 1837. The first Jesuit to enter the Mississippi valley after the re-establishment of the Society. One of Father De Smet's teachers at Whitemarsh, and his conductor to Missouri.