INDIAN TRIBES OF THE MISSOURI VALLEY. 379 
CO} TEL GAAS) DID, aye NYG 
V. ASSINIBOINS. 
ETHNOGRAPHICAL HISTORY. 
In regard to the origin of the Assiniboin tribe, but little authentic information can be 
obtained from their traditions, though many singular and fabulous tales are related con- 
cerning it. As a portion of a people, however, once inhabiting another district, and being 
incorporated with another nation, their history presents a connected and credible chain 
during the last century. 
The Assiniboins were once a part of the great Drie nation, residing on the tributary 
streams of the Mississippi, as the head of the Des Moines, St. Peter’s, and other rivers. 
This is evident from the similarity and almost identity of the language spoken by the 
two tribes or nations. Moreover, there lived a few years since, on the Missouri, a very 
old chief, known to the traders as “ Le Gros Frangais,” though his Indian name was 
Wali-e’-muz-a, or the “Iron arrow-point,” who recollected perfectly well the time of their 
separation from the Dakotas, which, according to his data, must have been about the year 
1760. He stated that when Lewis and Clarke came up the Missouri in 1805, his band, 
about sixty lodges, called Les Gens des Roches, had, after a long conflict, made peace with 
those bands of the Dakotas who resided on the Missouri, and that he saw the expedition 
referred to near the mouth of White Earth River. This was the first party of white men 
ever seen by them at their camps, though they had been accustomed to deal with the fur 
traders of the Mississippi, who visited the interior of their country in the winter. After 
their first separation from the Dakotas, they moved northward, made a peace with the 
Crees and Chippeways, and occupied a portion of the country on or near the Saskatchewan 
and Assiniboin Rivers, in which district some two hundred and fifty or three hundred 
lodges still reside. 
Some time after the expedition of Lewis and Clarke, or at least after the year 1777, the 
rest of the nation, at that time numbering about twelve hundred lodges, migrated towards 
the Missouri, where superior advantages for game and trade presenting themselves, they 
located permanently, and continue to reside there to the present time. 
The principal incident, and one which forms an era in their history, which they have 
Waa. 
every reason to remember, is a visitation of the small-pox in 1776 or when they 
occupied the British territory. Even yet there are two or three Indians living (1859) 
- who are marked by the disease of that period, which greatly thinned their numbers, 
though owing to their being distributed over a large district, some bands escaped entirely. 
However, the small-pox does not appear to have been as destructive to them at this period 
as it was on the Upper Missouri in 1838, which will be noticed hereatter. 
