Evening Republican, Volume 18, Number 176, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 July 1914 — Old Chippewa Indian Chief Views Wonders of City [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Old Chippewa Indian Chief Views Wonders of City

MINNEAPOLIS, MINN. —John Smith, or Wa-be-ne-gew-wes, for more than a hundred years chief of the once powerful tribe of Chippewa Indians, who is one hundred and twenty-eight years old, as he reckons it, and whose

existence as a boy 116 years ago is vouched for by government records, has left for his tepee. He came here to see before death the great city that has risen in his lifetime where once the wilderness was unbroken. The last of the great Indian chieftains of the country, bent and shrunken by age, still is able to walk about, and all his faculties have been retained. . Two small bright eyes in the depths of a face so seamed and

wrinkled and withered that no words can visualize it looked out on the city, , “Too many wagons," said the old chief. The solitude of the northern woods called him and he suffered from homesickness. To Charlie Brunell, or “Little Cloud,” who, with his wife and six-months-old baby, came along, with the old chief, he complained of the noise. “Old, old,” he said in English. But he lapsed into the Chippewa tongue and spoke through an interpreter when he said: “My people are going. Soon I will go. IL came to see Minneapolis before I die." In the grea't Indian uprising of 1862, the most historic warfare incident in Minnesota, he with other runners went north after the New Ulm massacre, to warn the white people. of their danger. Other runners fell, pierced by Sioux arrows, but Wa-be-ne-gew-wes got through and his friendliness for the whites and his efforts in their behalf mark a part of the history of that time. “Now my people are dying, my youth is gone,” he said. And he is very sensitive on one point, for last winter while hunting he froze his nose. “Blood run cold like squaw,” he said.