62 AUTUMN NOTES IN IOWA 



tour, coarseness of flower and involucre, and de- 

 cided *' stickiness." The genus, named Grindelia, 

 after a Eussian botanist, is a western one in the 

 main. One finds its representatives on the plains 

 east from the Rockies, and on the clay or gravel 

 bluffs of San Juan and Whidby Islands, in Puget 

 Sound. Greene gives Grindelia squarrosa — the 

 '^ broad-leaved gum-plant" — as ''not common," 

 and the writer has so far never observed it in 

 lowa.^^ 



James Rischell, in Black Hawk's Autohiog- 

 raphy, says of the Foxes: "As late as 1763, 

 their village at Prairie du Chien was more sub- 

 stantially built and provided with evidences of a 

 higher civilization than any other Indian town in 

 the Northwest." One can yet see Indians paddling 

 across the river to the prairie of the dogs. It was 

 somewhere in this vicinity also — just where is 

 not clear from the Aiitohiography — that after the 

 great massacre of Sacs along the Wisconsin River, 

 the defeated Indians attempted to cross the Mis- 

 sissippi to possible safety. Black Hawk narrates 

 the incident with characteristic simplicity: ''As 

 many women as could commenced swimming 

 the Mississippi with their children on their backs ; 

 a number of them were drowned, and some shot 

 before they could reach the opposite shore." 



13 See Appendix, Note 8. Lewis describes it as " Taken at our 

 camp at the Maha vilage August ITtli 1804," 



