Like-a-fish-hook village stood on a bluff overlooking the Missouri, and contained about seventy dwellings. Most of these were earth lodges, but a few were log cabins which traders had taught us to build.

My grandfather’s was a large, well-built earth lodge, with a floor measuring about forty feet across. Small Ankle, his two wives and their younger children; his sons, Bear’s Tail and Wolf Chief, and his daughter, my mother, with their families, dwelt together. It was usual for several families of relatives to dwell together in one lodge.

An earth lodge was built with a good deal of labor. The posts were cut in summer, and let lie in the woods until snow fell; men then dragged them to the village with ropes. Holes were dug the next spring, and the posts raised. Stringers, laid along the tops of the posts, supported rafters; and upon these was laid a matting of willows and dry grass. Over all went a thick layer of sods.

The four great posts that upheld the roof had each a buffalo calf skin or a piece of bright-colored calico bound about it at the height of a man’s head. These were offerings to the house spirit. We Hidatsas believed that an earth lodge was alive, and that the lodge’s spirit, or soul, dwelt in the four posts. Certain medicine women were hired to raise these posts in place when a lodge was built.

Our lodge was picturesque within, especially by the yellow light of the evening fire. In the center of the floor, under the smoke hole, was the fireplace; a screen of puncheons, or split logs, set on end, stood between it and the door. On the right was the corral, where horses were stabled at night. In the back of the lodge were the covered beds of the household, and my grandfather’s medicines, or sacred objects. The most important of these sacred objects were two human skulls of the Big Birds’ ceremony, as it was called. Small Ankle was a medicine man and when our corn fields suffered from drought, he prayed to the skulls for rain.

Against the puncheon screen on the side next the fireplace, was a couch made of planks laid on small logs, with a bedding of robes. This couch was my grandfather’s bed at night, and his lounging place by day. A buffalo skin overhead protected him from bits of falling earth or a leak in the roof, when it rained.

My two grandmothers also used the couch as a bench when making ready the family meals; and the water and grease spilled by them and trampled into the dirt floor made the spot between the couch and the fireplace as hard as brick. Small Ankle filed his finger nails here against the hard floor.

The earliest thing that I remember, is my grandfather sitting on his couch, plucking gray hairs from his head. Indians do not like to see themselves growing old, and Small Ankle’s friends used to tease him. “We see our brother is growing gray—and old!” they would say, laughing. Small Ankle used to sit on the edge of his couch with his face tilted toward the smoke hole, and drawing his loose hair before his eyes, he would search for gray ones.

He had another habit I greatly admired. The grease dropped from my grandmothers’ cooking, drew many flies into our lodge, and as my grandfather sat on his couch, the flies would alight on his bare shoulders and arms. He used to fight them off with a little wooden paddle. I can yet hear the little paddle’s spat as it fell on some luckless fly, against his bare flesh. No war club had surer aim.

His couch, indeed, was the throne from which my grandfather ruled his household, and his rule began daily at an early hour. He arose with the birds, raked coals from the ashes and started a fire. Then we would hear his voice, ”Awake, daughters; up, sons; out, all of you! The sun is up! Wash your faces!”

My fat grandmothers made a funny sight, washing their faces; stooping, with eyes tightly shut, each filled her mouth with water, blew it into her palms and rubbed them over her face. No towels were used.

The men of the household more often went down for a plunge in the river. Some of the young men of the village bathed in the river the whole year, through a hole in the ice in winter.

Many bathers, after their morning plunge, rubbed their wet bodies with white clay; this warmed and freshened the skin.

My mother usually washed my face for me; I liked it quite as little as any white boy.

Our morning meal was now eaten, hominy boiled with beans and buffalo fat, and seasoned with alkali salt—spring salt we called it, because we gathered it from the edges of springs. After the meal, I had nothing to do all day but play.

My best loved toy was my bow, of choke-cherry wood, given me when I was four years old. My arrows were of buck-brush shoots, unfeathered. These shoots were brought in green, and thrust into the hot ashes of the fireplace; when heated, they were drawn out and the bark peeled off, leaving them a beautiful yellow. Buck-brush arrows are light, and I was allowed to shoot them within the lodge.

My uncle, Full Heart, a boy two years older than myself, taught me how to use my bow. In our lodge were many mice that nested in holes under the sloping roof, and my uncle and I hunted these mice as savagely as our fathers hunted buffaloes. I think I was not a very good shot, for I do not remember ever killing one.

But I had the ill luck to shoot my mother. She was stooping at her work, one day, when an arrow badly aimed struck her in the cheek, its point pierced the skin, and the shaft remained hanging in the flesh. I saw the blood start and heard my mother cry, “Oh, my son has shot me!” I dropped my bow and ran, for I thought I had killed her; but she drew out the shaft, laughing.

I was too young to have any fear of the Sioux, and I had not yet learned to be afraid of ghosts, but I was afraid of owls, for I was taught that they punished little boys. Sometimes, if I was pettish, my uncles would cry, “The owl is coming!” And in the back of the lodge a voice would call, “Hoo, hoo, hoo!” This always gave me a good fright, and I would run to my grandfather and cover my head with his robe, or hide in my fathers bed.

It was not the custom of my tribe for parents to punish their own children; usually, the father called in a clan brother to do this. My uncle, Flies Low, a clan brother of my father, punished me when I was bad, but he seldom did more than threaten.

Sometimes my mother would say, “My son is bad, pierce his flesh!” and my uncle would take an arrow, pinch the flesh of my arm, and make as if he would pierce it. I would cry, “I will be good, I will be good!” and he would let me go without doing more than giving me a good fright.

A very naughty boy was sometimes punished by rolling him in a snow bank, or ducking him in water.

One winter evening I was vexed at my mother and would not go to bed. “Come,” she said, trying to draw me away, but I fought, kicking at her and screaming. Quite out of patience, my mother turned to Flies Low. “Apatip—duck him!” she cried. A pail of water stood by the fireplace. Flies Low caught me up, my legs over his shoulder, and plunged me, head downward, into the pail. I broke from him screaming, but he caught me and plunged me in again. The water strangled me, I thought I was going to die!

“Stop crying,” said my uncle.

My mother took me by the arm. “Stop crying,” she said. “If you are bad, I will call your uncle again!” And she put me to bed.

We Indian children knew nothing of marbles or skates. I had a swing, made of my mother’s packing strap, and a top, cut from the tip of a buffalo’s horn. Many boys owned sleds, made of five or six buffalo ribs bound side by side. With these they coasted down the steep Missouri bank, but that was play for older boys.

Few wagons were owned by the tribe at this time. When journeying, we packed our baggage on the backs of ponies, or on travois dragged by dogs.

A travois was a curious vehicle. It was made of two poles lashed together in the shape of a V, and bearing a flat basket woven with thongs. A good dog with a travois could drag sixty or eighty pounds over the snow, or on the smooth prairie grass.

But a travois’s chief use was in dragging in wood for a lodge fire. In our lodge my mother and my two grandmothers, with five dogs, went for wood about twice a week. They started at sunrise for the woods, a mile or two away, and returned about noon.

It happened one morning that my father and mother went to gather wood, and I asked to go along. “No,” they said, “you would but be in our way. You stay at home!” But I wept and teased until they let me go.

My parents walked before, the dogs following in a single file. They were gentle animals, used to having me play with them; and I was amusing myself running along, jumping on a travois, riding a bit, and jumping off again.

Our road led to a choke-cherry grove, but it was crossed by another that went to the river. As we neared the place where the roads crossed, we saw a woman coming down the river road, also followed by three or four dogs in travois. I had just leaped on the travois of one of our dogs.

The packs spied each other at the same instant; and our dogs, pricking up their ears, burst into yelps and started for the other pack. I was frightened out of my wits. “Ai, ai, ai!” I yelled; for I thought I was going to be eaten up. The dogs were leaping along at such speed that I dared not jump off.

The woman with the strange dogs ran between the packs crying, “Na, na,—go way, go way!” This stopped our dogs; and I sprang to the ground and ran to my mother. I would never ride a travois again.

Taking it altogether, children were well treated in my tribe. Food was coarse, but nourishing; and there was usually plenty of it. Children of poor families suffered for clothing, but rarely for food, for a family having meat or corn always shared with any who were hungry. If a child’s parents died, relatives or friends cared for him.

My mother sighs for the good old times. “Children were then in every lodge,” she says, “and there were many old men in the tribe. Now that we live in cabins and eat white men’s foods, the children and old men die; and our tribe dies!”

But this is hardly true of the Christian families.