As Hennepin entered the village, he beheld a sight which caused him to invoke St. Anthony of Padua. In front of the lodges were certain stakes, to which were attached bundles of straw, intended, as he supposed, for burning him and his friends alive. His concern was redoubled when he saw the condition of the Picard Du Gay, whose hair and face had been painted with divers colors, and whose head was decorated with a tuft of white feathers. In this guise, he was entering the village, followed by a crowd of Sioux, who compelled him to sing and keep time to his own music by rattling a dried gourd containing a number of pebbles. The omens, indeed, were exceedingly threatening; for treatment like this was usually followed by the speedy immolation of the captive. Hennepin ascribes it to the effect of his invocations, that, being led into one of the lodges, among a throng of staring squaws and children, he and his companions were seated on the ground, and presented with large dishes of birch bark, containing a mess of wild rice boiled with dried whortleberries; a repast which he declares to have been the best that had fallen to his lot since the day of his captivity. [Footnote: The Sioux, or Dacotah, as they call themselves, were a numerous people, separated into three great divisions, which were again subdivided into bands. Those among whom Hennepin was a prisoner belonged to the division known as the Issanti, Issanyati, or, as he writes it, Issati, of which the principal band was the Meddewakantonwan. The other great divisions, the Yanktons and the Tintonwans, or Tetons, lived west of the Mississippi, extending beyond the Missouri, and ranging as far as the Rocky Mountains. The Issanti cultivated the soil, but the extreme western bands subsisted on the buffalo alone. The former had two kinds of dwelling,--the _teepee_ or skin lodge, and the bark lodge. The teepee, which was used by all the Sioux, consists of a covering of dressed buffalo hide stretched on a conical stack of poles. The bark lodge was peculiar to the eastern Sioux, and examples of it might be seen until within a few years among the bands, on the St. Peter's. In its general character it was like the Huron and Iroquois houses, but was inferior in construction. It had a ridge roof framed of poles extending from the posts which formed the sides, and the whole was covered with elm-bark. The lodges in the villages to which Hennepin was conducted were probably of this kind. The name Sioux is an abbreviation of _Nadouessioux_, an Ojibwa word meaning _enemies_. The Ojibwas used it to designate this people, and occasionally also the Iroquois, being at deadly war with both.