The actual surrender of Upper Louisiana in 1804 added geographically Minnesota West, included in that province, to Minnesota East, then part of Crawford County, Indiana. The whole region was still occupied by aborigines, and a generation was to pass before any of it became white man’s country. Two great nations divided the territory: the Chippeways, of Algonquin stock, occupying the north and east; the Sioux or Dakotas the south and west. Both were immigrant from early eastern habitats, the Chippeways moving north of the lakes (Lake Superior split the stream), the Sioux south of the same. When first seen by white men, the latter held the country about the sources of the Mississippi, the head of Lake Superior, and to the St. Croix. The Chippeways were first to obtain guns from the white man, and began at once to push the Sioux before them. In Hennepin’s time (1680) the principal villages of the Sioux were in the Mille Lacs region. By the close of the Revolutionary War the Chippeways had driven them south of the Crow Wing and west of the Mississippi, leaving them only a precarious hold on the margin of their old hunting grounds. From their earliest encounters the two nations had been unremitting foes. But for occasional truces they were always at war; and this perennial feud did not cease till the government in 1863 moved the Sioux beyond the Missouri, out of the reach of the Chippeways. The two nations possessed in common the well-known characteristics of the red man, physical, mental, and social, but a difference of environment had established marked peculiarities. The Chippeways were men of the forest and stream; their women gathered wild rice, excellent for food. The Sioux, men of the prairie, were the taller and more agile, but the Chippeways outmatched them for strength and endurance. Both peoples had already been profoundly affected by contact with white men. If the missionary had not broken the power of the medicine-man and converted them to the true faith, the trader had revolutionized their whole manner of life. He had given the Indian the gun for his bow and arrows, axes and knives of steel for those of stone, and the iron kettle for the earthen pot. The Mackinaw blanket and the trader’s strouds had replaced garments made from skins, and ornaments of shell and feathers had given way to those of metal and glass.