62 The Winning of the West 



offering an agreeable contrast to those of some of 

 our own frontiersmen, with a ready smile and 

 laugh, and ever eager to join in any merrymaking. 

 On Sundays and fast-days he was summoned to 

 the little parish church by the tolling of the old bell 

 in the small wooden belfry. The church was a rude 

 oblong building, the walls made out of peeled logs, 

 thrust upright in the ground, chinked with moss 

 and coated with clay or cement. Thither every man 

 went, clad in a capote or blanket coat, a bright silk 

 handkerchief knotted round his head, and his feet 

 shod with moccasins or strong rawhide sandals. 

 If young, he walked or rode a shaggy pony ; if older, 

 he drove his creaking, springless wooden cart, un- 

 tired and unironed, in which his family sat on 

 stools. 29 



The grades of society were much more clearly 

 marked than in similar communities of our own 

 people. The gentry, although not numerous, pos- 



29 "History of Vincennes," by Judge John Law, Vin- 

 cennes, 1858, pp. 18 and 140. They are just such carts as 

 I have seen myself in the valley of the Red River, and in 

 the big bend of the Missouri, carrying all the worldly goods 

 of their owners, the French Metis. These Metis ex-trap- 

 pers, ex-buffalo runners, and small farmers are the best 

 representatives of the old French of the West; they are 

 a little less civilized, they have somewhat more Indian 

 blood in their veins, but they are substantially the same 

 people. It may be noted that the herds of buffaloes that 

 during the last century thronged the plains of what are now 

 the States of Illinois and Indiana furnished to the French 

 of Kaskaskia and Vincennes their winter meat; exactly 

 as during the present century the Saskatchewan Metis 

 lived on the wild herds until they were exterminated. 



