50 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



weeks, and at still others once a month. This was all the real business 

 he had to occupy him — travelling between cabin and agency ware-houses 

 for twenty-five years ! All this time he was brooding over the loss of 

 his freedom, his country rich in game, and all the pleasures and satis- 

 factions of wild life. Even the arid plains and wretched living left him 

 he was not sure of, judging from past experience with a government that 

 makes a solemn treaty guaranteeing him a certain territory "forever," 

 and takes it away from him the next year if it appears that some of 

 their own people want it, after all. 



Like the Israelites in bondage, our own aborigines have felt the sweet 

 life-giving air of freedom change to the burning heat of a desert as 

 dreary as that of Egypt under Pharaoh. It was during this period of 

 hopeless resignation, gloomily awaiting — what? no Indian could even 

 guess — that his hardy, yet sensitive, organization gave way. Who can 

 wonder at it ? His home was a little, one-roomed log cabin, about twelve 

 by twenty feet, mud-chinked, containing a box stove and a few sticks of 

 furniture. The average cabin has a dirt floor and a dirt roof. They 

 are apt to be overheated in winter, and the air is vitiated at all times, 

 but especially at night, when there is no ventilation whatever. Fam- 

 ilies of four to ten persons lived, and many still live, in these huts. For- 

 tunately the air of the plains is dry, or we should have lost them all ! 



Eemember, these people were accustomed to the purest of air and 

 water. The teepee was little more than a canopy to shelter them from 

 the elements; it was pitched every few days upon new, clean ground. 

 Clothing was loose and simple, and frequent air and sun baths, as well 

 as baths of water and steam, together with the use of emollient oils, 

 kept the skin in perfect condition. Their food was fresh and whole- 

 some; largely wild meat and fish, with a variety of wild fruits, roots, 

 and grain, and some cultivated ones. At first they could not eat the 

 issue bacon, and on ration days one might see these strips of unwhole- 

 some-looking fat lying about on the ground where they had been 

 thrown on the return trip. Flour, too, was often thrown away before the 

 women had learned to make bread raised with cheap baking-powder and 

 fried in grease. But the fresh meat they received was not enough to 

 last until the next ration day. There was no end of bowel trouble when 

 they were forced by starvation to swallow the bacon and ill-prepared 

 bread. Water, too, was generally hauled from a distance with much 

 labor, and stood about in open buckets or barrels for several days. 



As their strength waned, they made more fire in the stove and sat 

 over it, drinking rank coffee and tea that had boiled all day on the same 

 stove. After perspiring thus for hours, many would go out into the 

 bitter cold of a Dakota winter with little or no additional clothing, and 

 bronchitis and pneumonia were the inevitable result. The uncured 

 cases became chronic and led straight to tuberculosis in its various forms. 



