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LOUIS

"My mother must be over seventy years of age... and yet to this day she cannot speak of my brother Louis' death without her eyes filling with tears. He was older than myself... My father had placed him in the Omaha Mission School, as he placed all of his children... His desire to educate them... as the white people were educated, was very strong.

"At the time of Louis's death, he was probably nine or ten years old. ...The most vivid impression that remains in my memory of that sad time is... as I looked out on a reach of prairie, at about the distance of a mile away, some men emerged from the hillsides.... They were singing a dirge.... Each of them was dragging an unstripped willow-branch, which trailed on the ground. 

"When they came close enough to be recognized,  I saw the blood streaming from the left arm of each of them. The broken end of the willow-branch was thrust through the thick flesh of the upper arm of each one, while the tops and the boughs leaves and all, trailed on the ground. They had walked the distance of a mile, singing the death-dirge, in honor of my dead brother.