and, as years went on, openly lamented that “the Indians were beginning to find out what lands were worth;” while the Indians, anxious, alarmed, hostile at heart, seeing themselves harder and harder pressed on all sides, driven “to provide other sources for supplying their wants besides those of hunting, which must soon entirely fail them,”[1] yielded mile after mile with increasing sense of loss, which they were powerless to prevent, and of resentment which it would have been worse than impolitic for them to show.
The first annuities promised to the Sioux were promised by this treaty—$3000 annually for ten years to the Yankton and Santee bands; to the other four, $2000. The Yankton and Santee bands were to pay out of their annuity $100 yearly to the Otoes, because part of some land which was reserved for the half-breeds of the tribe had originally belonged to the Otoes. “A blacksmith, at the expense of the United States; also, instruments for agricultural purposes; and iron and steel to the amount of $700 annually for ten years to some of the bands, and to the amount of $400 to the others; also, $3000 a year ‘for educational purposes,’ and $3000 in presents distributed at the time,” were promised them.
It was soon after these treaties that the artist Catlin made his famous journeys among the North American Indians, and gave to the world an invaluable contribution to their history, perpetuating in his pictures the distinctive traits of their faces and their dress, and leaving on record many pages of unassailable testimony as to their characteristics in their native state. He spent several weeks among the Sioux, and says of them: “There is no tribe on the continent of finer looking men, and few tribes who are better and more comfortably clad and supplied with the necessaries of life. * * * I have travelled several years already among these people, and I have not had my scalp
- ↑ Treaty of Prairie du Chien.
