For many years their chiefs and head men successfully resisted the attempts to introduce spirituous liquors among them.  More than a century ago an English trader was killed at Mendota, near the present city of St. Paul, because he persisted, after repeated warnings by the chiefs, in dealing out mini wakan (Devil-water) to the Dakota braves.

With open arms and generous hospitality they welcomed the first white men to their land, and were ever faithful in their friendship, till years of wrong and robbery, and want and insult, drove them to desperation and to war.  They were barbarians, and their warfare was barbarous, but not more barbarous than the warfare of our Saxon, Celtic and Norman ancestors.  They were ignorant and superstitious.  Their condition closely resembled the condition of our British forefathers at the beginning of the Christian era.  Macaulay says of Britain:  “Her inhabitants, when first they became known to the Tyrian mariners, were little superior to the natives of the Sandwich Islands.”  And again:  “While the German princes who reigned at Paris, Toledo, Aries and Ravenna listened with reverence to the instructions of bishops, adored the relics of martyrs, and took part eagerly in disputes touching the Nicene theology, the rulers of Wessex and Mercia were still performing savage rites in the temples of Thor and Woden.”

The days of the Dakotas are done.  The degenerate remnants of that once powerful and warlike people still linger around the forts and agencies of the Northwest, or chase the caribou and the elk on the banks of the Saskatchewan, but the Dakotas of old are no more.  The brilliant defeat of Custer, by Sitting Bull and his braves, was their last grand rally against the resistless march of the sons of the Saxons.  The plow-shares of a superior race are fast leveling the sacred mounds of their dead.  But yesterday, the shores of our lakes and our rivers were dotted with their teepees, their light canoes glided over our waters, and their hunters chased the deer and the buffalo on the sites of our cities.  To-day, they are not.  Let us do justice to their memory, for there was much that was noble in their natures.

In the Dakota Legends, I have endeavored to faithfully present many of the customs and superstitions, and some of the traditions, of that people.  I have taken very little ‘poetic license’ with their traditions; none, whatever, with their customs and superstitions.  In my studies for these Legends I was greatly aided by the Rev. S.R.  Riggs, author of the "Grammar and Dictionary of the Dakota Language” “Tah-Koo Wah-Kan," &c., and for many years a missionary among the Dakotas.  He patiently answered my numerous inquiries and gave me valuable information.  I am also indebted to the late Gen. H.H.  Sibley, one of the earliest American traders among them, and to Rev. S.W.  Pond, of Shakopee, one of the first Protestant missionaries to these people, and himself the author of poetical versions of some of their principal legends; to Mrs. Eastman’s "Dacotah," and last, but not least, to the Rev. E.D.  Neill, whose admirable "History of Minnesota" so fully and faithfully presents almost all that is known of the history, traditions, customs, manners and superstitions of the Dakotas.