If the
tourist happens to follow these women for more wholesale examination of
their wares, he will be led to a double-ended Mackinaw-built
sailing-craft with red-dyed sails, half pulled out on the beach. In the
stern sit two or three bucks wearing shirts, jean trousers, and broad
black hats. Some of the oldest men may sport a patched pair of
moccasins or so, but most are conventional enough in clumsy shoes.
After a longer or shorter stay they hoist their red sails and drift
away toward some mysterious destination on the north shore. If the
buyer is curious enough and persistent enough, he may elicit the fact
that they are Ojibways.
Now, if this same tourist happens to possess a mildly venturesome
disposition, a sailing-craft, and a chart of the region, he will sooner
or later blunder across the dwelling-place of his silent vendors. At
the foot of some rarely-frequented bay he will come on a diminutive
village of small whitewashed log houses. It will differ from other
villages in that the houses are arranged with no reference whatever to
one another, but in the haphazard fashion of an encampment. Its
inhabitants are his summer friends. If he is of an insinuating address,
he may get a glimpse of their daily life. Then he will go away firmly
convinced that he knows quite a lot about the North Woods Indian.
And so he does. But this North Woods Indian is the Reservation Indian.
And in the North a Reservation Indian is as different from a Woods
Indian as a negro is from a Chinese.
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