"They write down the words of the Mandans and the Minnetarees in their books. They are taking skins of the antelope and the bighorn and the deer, even skins of the prairie-grouse and the badger and the prairie-dog--everything they can get. They dry these, to make some sort of medicine of them. They cut off pieces of wood and bark. They put the dirt which burns in little sacks. They make pictures and make the talking papers--all the time they work at something, the two chiefs. They have a black man with them who cannot be washed white--they have stained him with some medicine of their own. He makes sounds like a buffalo, and he says that the white man made him as he is and will do us that way. We would like to kill them, but they have made their house too strong!
"They never sleep. In the daytime and in the nighttime, no matter how cold it is, one man, two men, walk up and down inside the wall. They have carried their boats up out of the water--two boats, a great one and two small. All through the woods they are cutting down the largest trees, and out of the straight logs they are making more boats, more boats, as many as there are fingers on one hand. They have axes that cast much larger chips than any we ever saw. We fear these men, because they do not fear us. We do not know what to think. They are men who never sleep. Before the sun is up we find them writing or making large chips with their axes, or hunting in the woods--not a day goes by that their hunters do not bring in elk and deer and buffalo. They do not fear us.
"We have seen no men like these. They are chiefs, and their medicine is strong!"