Traveling in February with about seventy-five Indians, it was necessary that I should stay all night in an Indian house to protect them from unprincipled white men. The Indians at the village where we stayed were as kind as could be, assigning me to their best house, where there was no smoke; giving me a feather-bed, white sheets, and all very good except the fleas. Before I went to sleep I killed four, in two or three hours I waked up and killed fourteen, at three o’clock eleven more, and in the morning I left without looking to see how many there were remaining. But Indian houses are not the only unpleasant ones. Here we are at a hotel, the best in a saw-mill town of four or five hundred people; but the bar-room is filled with tobacco-smoke, almost as thick as the smoke from the fires which often fills an Indian house. Here about fifty men spend a great portion of the night, and some of them all night, in drinking, gambling, and smoking. The house is accustomed to it, for the rooms directly over the bar-room are saturated with smoke, and I am assigned to one of these rooms. Before I get to sleep the smoke has so filled my nostrils that I can not breathe through them, and at midnight I wake up with a headache so severe that I can scarcely hold up my head for the next twenty-four hours. It is not so bad, however, but that I can do a little thinking on this wise: Who are the lowest--the Indians, or these whites? The smoke is of equal thickness: that of the Indians, however, is clean smoke from wood; that of the whites, filthy from tobacco. The Indian has sense enough to make holes in the roof where some of it may escape; the white man does not even do that much. The Indian sits or lies near the ground, underneath a great portion of it; the white man puts a portion of his guests and his ladies’ parlor directly over it. Sleeping in the Indian smoke I come out well, although feeling like smoked bacon, and a thorough wash cures it; but sleeping in that of the white man I come out sick, and the brain has to be washed.