Three of the head chiefs of the Pawnee Loups (6) came to pay us a visit, and lodged in our cabin. They noticed the sign of the cross that we made before and after our prayers and our meals, and when they went home, they taught all the inmates of their village to make the same sign, as something agreeable to the Great Spirit. They begged us, through their interpreter, to come and visit them. The Government had sent them a Protestant minister, (7) but they did not choose to keep him. " They knew," they told him, " that the devil accompanied such as he; and since they did not wish to have such a guest in their village, they could not admit him himself." The use of liquor is prohibited in this tribe, and when any one tries to bring them any they answer that they are crazy enough already without drink. They have also a singular custom; they eat the vermin off one another, and render the same service to those who come to visit them.
The Protestant minister of the Omahas also had to move. This tribe has a population of about 2,000 souls. Two of their chiefs, Kaiggechinke and Ohio, with twoscore warriors, came to dance the calumet, or their dance of friendship for us. Such a dance is really worth seeing, but it is not easy to give one an idea of it, because everything seems confusion. They yell and strike their mouths, at the same time performing leaps of all descriptions, now on one foot, now on the other, always at the sound of the drum and in perfect time, pell-mell, without order, turning to the right and left, in every direction and in every shape, all at once. They all evinced the greatest affection for us and prayed us to smoke the calumet with
(6) The Pawnee villages were on the Platte, about the present Fremont and Columbus.
(7) Probably the reference is to Samuel Allis or Reverend John Dunbar, Presbyterians, who went among the Pawnees in the fall of 1834. The former attached himself to the band known as Pawnee Loups, the latter to the Grand Pawnees. They remained among them until 1846, when the hostile operations of the Sioux made the country unsafe.