Indians’ pine for seventy-five cents a thousand. “Now, as to your next question, whether there was more drinking among the Indians then than now. I am glad to say that for many years after 1873, when I first knew them, there was, one may say, no drinking among the Indians. The mixed-bloods, who were mostly French-Canadian mixed bloods, always drank a little, but the Indians were remarkably free from it. The White Earth Indians lived twenty-two miles from the railroad, the nearest place where they could get liquor; they were almost that distance from the nearest white men. The Red Lake Indians were one hundred miles from the railroad, the Cass Lake one hundred, the Leech Lake seventy miles. They were almost as far from any white men, except the Government employees and the missionaries. So they were secluded from the white man and his vices. But the great reason of their immunity was the missions. The influence of the Gospel and the church in their secluded position kept them safe. It is no reflection on the White Earth Indians to say that in the place from which they had been removed in 1868—Crow Wing—they had fallen most dreadfully under the dominion of the ‘firewater,’ both men and women. They were in a most dreadful state of degradation from that cause. But never was the power of the Gospel more signally shown than in their cleansing and renovation on the White Earth reservation. I never saw a drunken Indian nor even one that I thought had tasted liquor. They had become communicants of the church, had their family prayers, their weekly prayer meetings from house to house, where they exhorted each other to steadfastness in the Christian life. What had such a people to do with liquor? Some of them, who at Crow Wing had been in the lowest depths, told me that they had not tasted liquor in twenty years, others for other periods; and I know they told the truth. Among all the chiefs, numbering perhaps twenty, on White Earth Reservation, there was just one who drank, and he, I am informed, had the liquor supplied to him by a mixed-blood, who, in payment, got him to swing the Indians to his schemes. [Illustration: OJIBWA, BLIND, FROM TRACHOMA, PINE POINT, WHITE EARTH RESERVATION, MINNESOTA ]