From my window, at the boarding-house, my eye was constantly attracted by these picturesque groups.  I was never tired of seeing the canoes come in, and the new arrivals set up their temporary dwellings.  The women ran to set up the tent-poles, and spread the mats on the ground.  The men brought the chests, kettles, &c.; the mats were then laid on the outside, the cedar-boughs strewed on the ground, the blanket hung up for a door, and all was completed in less than twenty minutes.  Then they began to prepare the night meal, and to learn of their neighbors the news of the day.

The habit of preparing food out of doors gave all the gypsy charm and variety to their conduct.  Continually I wanted Sir Walter Scott to have been there.  If such romantic sketches were suggested to him, by the sight of a few gypsies, not a group near one of these fires but would have furnished him material for a separate canvas.  I was so taken up with the spirit of the scene, that I could not follow out the stories suggested by these weather-beaten, sullen, but eloquent figures.

They talked a great deal, and with much, variety of gesture, so that I often had a good guess at the meaning of their discourse.  I saw that, whatever the Indian may be among the whites, he is anything but taciturn with his own people; and he often would declaim, or narrate at length.  Indeed, it is obvious, if only from the fables taken from their stores by Mr. Schoolcraft, that these tribes possess great power that way.

I liked very much, to walk or sit among them.  With, the women I held much communication by signs.  They are almost invariably coarse and ugly, with the exception of their eyes, with a peculiarly awkward gait, and forms bent by burdens.  This gait, so different from the steady and noble step of the men, marks the inferior position they occupy.  I had heard much eloquent contradiction of this.  Mrs. Schoolcraft had maintained to a friend, that they were in fact as nearly on a par with their husbands as the white woman with hers.  “Although,” said she, “on account of inevitable causes, the Indian woman is subjected to many hardships of a peculiar nature, yet her position, compared with that of the man, is higher and freer than that of the white woman.  Why will people look only on one side?  They either exalt the red man into a demigod, or degrade him into a beast.  They say that he compels his wife to do all the drudgery, while he does nothing but hunt and amuse himself; forgetting that upon his activity and power of endurance as a hunter depends the support of his family; that this is labor of the most fatiguing kind, and that it is absolutely necessary that he should keep his frame unbent by burdens and unworn by toil, that he may be able to obtain the means of subsistence.  I have witnessed scenes of conjugal and parental love in the Indian’s wigwam, from, which I have often, often thought the educated white man, proud of his superior civilization, might learn