ANCIENT AND MODERN HABITAT.—Before proceeding further it would be well to state and bear in mind that of all the Indians now residing on the Missouri River the Assiniboin appear to have made the least progress toward acquiring civilized ideas or knowledge of any kind. Superstitious, lazy, and indisposed to thought, they make no attempt to improve themselves in any way. Neither are they anxious that others should teach them; consequently they are far behind the other tribes even as regards their own savage manner of life. This will receive further explanation. They do not think the Great Spirit created them on or for a particular portion of country, but that he made the whole prairie for the sole use of the Indian, and the Indian to suit the prairie, giving among other reasons the fact that the buffalo is so well adapted to their wants as to meat and clothing, even for their lodges and bowstrings. To the Indian is allotted legs to run, eyes to see far, bravery, instinct, watchfulness, and other capacities not developed in the same degree in the whites. The Indian, therefore, occupies any section of prairie where game is plentiful and he can protect himself from enemies. With regard to any other kind of right than that of possession and ability to defend, besides the general right granted by the Great Spirit, they have not the most distant idea. The Assiniboin conquered nothing to come into possession of their habitat, they had their difficulties with surrounding tribes and still have, as others have, and continue as they commenced, fighting and hunting alternately. Their first interview with Europeans (now spoken of) was when the traders of the Mississippi pushed their traffic as far as their camps, and from whom they obtained firearms, woolen clothing, utensils, etc. Afterwards these supplies were had from the Hudson Bay Co. and, latterly, from the Americans on the Missouri River. There is every reason to believe that the introduction of ardent spirits among them was coeval, if not antecedent, to that of any other article of trade. Before the trade was opened with them by the whites they say they used knives made of the hump rib of the buffalo, hatchets made of flint stone, mallets of the same, cooking utensils of clay and wood, bones for awls, and sinew for thread, all of which articles can yet be found among them. They made with these rude tools their bows and arrows, pointing the latter with stone, and, as game was abundant, hunted them on foot or threw them into pens built for the purpose, which method they continue to use to this day. In this way they had no difficulty in supporting themselves, and so contend that they have gained nothing by intimacy with the whites but diseases which kill them off in numbers and wants which they are unable at all times to gratify. They have never sold lands by treaty, and the only treaty (with the exception of that at Laramie, 1851) was made by them through an Indian