makes her a new cowskin lodge, complete, with new lodge poles, lining, and back rests.  A chiefs daughter would already have plenty of good clothing, but if the girl lacks anything, it is furnished.  Her dress is made of antelope skin, white as snow, and perhaps ornamented with two or three hundred elk tushes.  Her leggings are of deer skin, heavily beaded and nicely fringed, and often adorned with bells and brass buttons.  Her summer blanket or sheet is an elk skin, well tanned, without the hair and with the dew-claws left on.  Her moccasins are of deer skin, with parfleche soles and worked with porcupine quills.  The marriage takes place as soon as these things can be provided.

During the days which intervene between the proposal and the marriage, the young woman each day selects the choicest parts of the meat brought to the lodge,—­the tongue, “boss ribs,” some choice berry pemmican or what not,—­cooks these things in the best style, and, either alone, or in company with a young sister, or a young friend, goes over to the lodge where the young man lives, and places the food before him.  He eats some of it, little or much, and if he leaves anything, the girl offers it to his mother, who may eat of it.  Then the girl takes the dishes and returns to her father’s lodge.  In this way she provides him with three meals a day, morning, noon, and night, until the marriage takes place.  Every one in camp who sees the girl carrying the food in a covered dish to the young man’s lodge, knows that a marriage is to take place; and the girl is watched by idle persons as she passes to and fro, so that the task is quite a trying one for people as shy and bashful as Indians are.  When the time for the marriage has come,—­in other words, when the girl’s parents are ready,—­the girl, her mother assisting her, packs the new lodge and her own things on the horses, and moves out into the middle of the circle—­about which all the lodges of the tribe are arranged—­and there the new lodge is unpacked and set up.  In front of the lodge are tied, let us say, fifteen horses, the girl’s dowry given by her father.  Very likely, too, the father has sent over to the young man his own war clothing and arms, a lance, a fine shield, a bow and arrows in otter-skin case, his war bonnet, war shirt, and war leggings ornamented with scalps,—­his complete equipment.  This is set up on a tripod in front of the lodge.  The gift of these things is an evidence of the great respect felt by the girl’s father for his son-in-law.  As soon as the young man has seen the preparations being made for setting up the girl’s lodge in the centre of the circle, he sends over to his father-in-law’s lodge just twice the number of horses that the girl brought with her,—­in this supposed case, thirty.