Drawing by Catlin, plate 67. vol. i., Catlin's _Eight Years_. Reproduction from _Smithsonian Report_, 1885, part ii.] [Illustration: Details of Navajo Loom Construction. U. S. Bu. Eth.] It was a sorry day when the trader brought them alcohol. By its use tribes were degraded, swindled, beggared. Occasionally some energetic chief would raise an objection, even to the point of a fight with his people, but it was like a man raising his hand to halt the north wind. The whites wanted the goods the native had, and they wanted them for nothing. Alcohol and water were next to nothing. Porcupine Bear, a Cheyenne, once protested so vigorously that he and a brother chief came near to mortal combat. He was overruled, and like Rip Van Winkle, they all agreed not to count that time. Very soon every one was full of whiskey, not excepting the noble Porcupine Bear himself. The traders poured tallow into the bottom of the measuring cup so that it should hold less than the stipulated amount, also putting thumbs and fingers in to cunningly accomplish the same cheat. As to population, it is difficult to form an exact estimate. Undoubtedly in early times the number of natives in the region forming the United States was exaggerated; the tendency now appears rather to go to the other extreme. The dwellings having been mostly of perishable materials there is little to indicate former population outside of the mounds of the Mississippi valley, and the house ruins of the South-west. The latter are so numerous as to testify either to residence for an immense period or to a population of considerable size. It was probably both. While these village sites were often only repetitions by the same people at different times, yet there are so many of them that there must also have been a goodly number of clans and tribes. Whole areas, like the region lying immediately north of the Colorado River, exhibit multitudinous remains, but, when white men first went there, only a few scattered bands of Pai Utes were found, who built nothing but brush wickiups. [Illustration: A Navajo. Photograph by J. K. Hillers, U. S. Geol. Survey.] [Illustration: Scalp-Dance of the Sioux. Drawing by Catlin, plate 297, vol. ii., Catlin's _Eight Years_. Reproduction from _Smithsonian Report, 1885_, part ii.] [Illustration: A Group of Dakotas. Photograph by U. S. Government about 1875.]