BUSHNELL] VILLAGES WEST OF THE MISSISSIPPI 15 
tered groups, and often moved from place to place. However, there 
were some long-occupied sites, as at Red Lake, Sandy Lake, on the 
shores of Leech Lake, where the Pillagers gathered, and the more 
recently occupied villages at Mille Lac, sites once covered by the 
settlements of the Mdewakanton. These villages, which should more 
properly be termed “gathering places,” at once suggest the various 
descriptions and accounts of the great village of the Illinois, which 
stood on the banks of the upper Illinois during the latter part of 
the seventeenth century and was many times visited by the French. 
When the Ojibway and Sioux gathered at Fort Snelling, at the 
mouth of the Minnesota River, during the summer of 1835 in the 
endeavor to establish peace between the two tribes or groups, they 
were encamped on opposite sides of the fort. Catlin, who was there 
at the time, wrote of the temporary camp of the Ojibway: “their 
wigwams made of birch bark, covering the frame work, which was 
of slight poles stuck in the ground, and bent over at the top, so as 
to give a rooflike shape to the lodge, best calculated to ward off 
rain and winds.” (Catlin, (1), Il, p. 137.) Unfortunately, the 
original painting of the camp does not exist in the great collection of 
Catlin paintings now belonging to the National Museum, Wash- 
ington. In the catalogue of the collection printed in London, 1848, it 
appears as “334, Chippeway Village and Dog Feast at the Falls of 
St. Anthony; lodges build with birch-bark: Upper Mississippi.” 
An outline drawing of the picture was given as plate 238 to illus- 
trate the account quoted above, but how accurate either description 
or sketch may be is now quite difficult to determine. However, it is 
doubtful if the structures had flat ends, as indicated, and mats may 
have formed part of the covering. Catlin continued his narrative 
and told of the removal of the camp (p. 138): “After the business 
and amusements of this great Treaty between the Chippeways and 
Sioux were all over, the Chippeways struck their tents by taking 
them down and rolling up their bark coverings, which, with their 
bark canoes seen in the picture, turned up amongst their wigwams, 
were carried to the water’s edge; and all things being packed in, 
men, women, dogs, and all, were swiftly propelled by paddles to the 
Falls of St Anthony.” They reached “an eddy below the Falls, and 
as near as they could get by paddling.” Here the canoes were un- 
loaded and the canoes and all else carried about one-half mile above 
the Falls, where they again embarked and continued on their way. 
It is interesting to contemplate this scene and to realize it was en- 
acted within the limits of the present city of Minneapolis so short a 
time ago. A beautiful example of the light birch-bark canoe of the 
Ojibway is shown in plate 10, a, and a photograph of two old Ojib- 
way Indians with similar canoes is reproduced in plate 10, 6. The 
