They had a very creditable evening party, and the peace was not broken. Later I visited the Agency amusement hall where a number of whites, visitors from the countryside and more than one mixed-blood couple of education, were enjoying themselves to the latest jazz. Now I am no authority on dancing and, having lived among Indians, I am not easily shocked; but the postures and attitudes of those South Dakota whites were—well, a trifle extreme, to say the least of it. “We have looked at them both,” said an old Sioux to me, anxiously. “Au-tay-ah-pe (Father), there may be something wrong with the Indian’s drum dance, but—I do not like the white man’s fiddle dance.” I told him very frankly which I thought the worse. There is no use in trying to bluff an old Indian. He can see through a hypocrite quicker than any man I know. This is not a sentimentalist defence of the old Indian dance. I have bitterly excoriated the “secret” dances of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, but could never get sufficient backing from the Department to end them. Such indecencies may be found among all primitive peoples, and those of the Pueblos who indulge in them are most primitive—the barbarians of San Felipe, Santo Domingo, and other decadent backward pueblos. But I have tried to envision the social side of an alien people who have no other form of diversion than the spectacle of the dance. Were the Government to put them on a moving-picture circuit—but we were discussing the decencies. And, to repeat: When we have established among them an amusement as appealing, simple, and inoffensive, it will be time for the condemnation of those features that are innocuous and foreign. And it will be long before I shall forget the comparison, by an Indian, between the dance of the Sioux with drums and sleighbells, a noisy soul-stirring hullabaloo, and—the seductive, suggestive “white man’s fiddle dance.” XVII SERVICE TRADITION When first, as an employee of the Government, I answered the grave salutation of the red man, the buffalo roamed at will over the great plains of the Sioux country; the iron horse had not crossed the Minnesota boundary; the dull, plodding ox was the courier and herald of the culture that was stowed in embryo in the prairie schooner; Chicago was just beginning to throw off its swaddling-clothes under a blanket of smoke; St. Paul was the frontier to the Northwest ... and that was only a generation ago.—McLaughlin: My Friend, the Indian