The braves,
their women, and their tepees had been shifted to reservations where
Governments solemnly tried to teach them to till the field, and grow
corn, and drive the cart to market; while yet they remembered the herds
of buffalo which had pounded down the prairie like storm-clouds and given
their hides for the tepee; and the swift deer whose skins made the wigwam
luxurious.
Originally Manitou had been the home of Icelanders, Mennonites, and
Doukhobors; settlers from lands where the conditions of earlier centuries
prevailed, who, simple as they were in habits and in life, were ignorant,
primitive, coarse, and none too cleanly.
They had formed an unprogressive polyglot settlement, and the place
assumed a still more primeval character when the Indian Reservation was
formed near by. When French Canadian settlers arrived, however, the place
became less discordant to the life of a new democracy, though they did
little to make it modern in the sense that Lebanon, across the river,
where Ingolby lived, was modern from the day the first shack was thrown
up.
Manitou showed itself antagonistic to progress; it was old-fashioned, and
primitively agricultural. It looked with suspicion on the factories built
after Ingolby came and on the mining propositions, which circled the
place with speculation.
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