380 PREFACE 



In the manuscript there appear two quite distinct handwritings, 

 and so it is possible that this particular manuscript is a copy of an 

 original which was retained by the author. 



Dr. F. V. Hayden made extensive use of this report in prepara- 

 tion of his "Contributions to the Ethnography and Philology of 

 the Indian Tribes of the Missouri Valley." Philadelphia, C. Sherman 

 & Son, 1862. But he did not give Mr. Denig proper credit for using 

 verbatim numbers of pages of the manuscript without any indication 

 that he was copying a manuscript work from another writer whose 

 position and long experience among them made him an authority on 

 the tribes in question. This piece of plagiarism was not concealed 

 by the bald statement of Doctor Hayden that he was " especially 

 indebted to Mr. Alexander Culbertson, the well-known agent of the 

 American Fur Co., who has spent 30 years of his life among the 

 wild tribes of the Northwest and speaks several of their languages 

 with great ease. To Mr. Andrew Dawson, superintendent of Fort 

 Benton; Mr. Charles E. Galpin, of Fort Pierre; and E. T. Denig, 

 of Fort Union, I am under great obligations for assistance freely 

 granted at all times." 



Mr. Edwin Thompson Denig, the author of this manuscript re- 

 port, was the son of Dr. George Denig and was born March 10, 1812, 

 in McConnellstown, Huntingdon County, Pa., and died in 1862 or 

 1863 in Manitoba, probably in the town of Pilot Mound, in the vicin- 

 ity of which his daughters live, or did live in 1910. His legally mar- 

 ried wife was the daughter of an Assiniboin chief, by whom he had 

 two daughters, Sara, who was born August 10. 1844, and Ida, who 

 was born August 22, 1854, and one son, Alexander, who was born May 

 17. 1852, and who was killed by lightning in 1904. 



To his early associates Mr. Denig was a myth, more or less, having 

 gone West as a young man and having died there. He lost caste 

 with his family because of his marriage with the Assiniboin woman. 



Mr. Denig entered the fur trade in 1833 and became very influ- 

 ential among the tribes of the upper Missouri River. He was for 

 a time a Government scout; then a bookkeeper for the American 

 Fur Co. Earlier he had gone to St. Louis and became connected 

 with the Choteaus and the American Fur Co. Before he was 30 

 years of age he was living among the Indians as the representative 

 of these two companies in that vast and almost unknown region 

 between the headwaters of the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers 

 inhabited by tribes of the Sioux. 



Mr. Denig became a bookkeeper for the American Fur Co. at 

 Fort Union, situated near the mouth of the Yellowstone River, of 

 the offices of which for a time, about 1843, he was superintendent. 

 Because of his thorough and comprehensive knowledge of the Indians 



