Book excerpt: Excerpt from Indian Stories Many years ago I lived among the Indians and knew them well. They were very different from the Indians of to-day. It would be hard now to find any Indians who are as close to the original traditions as were those old friends of mine. I want to give the boys and girls of to-day a chance to see the Indian as I saw him, and to know how he lived and what he thought. It is a pleasure to tell this story; for I came to love the Indian, and I had great respect for him and for his manner of life. When I first lived among the Dakotas, they were still strongly prejudiced in favor of the old ways, tradi tions and customs. They looked back-with regret upon earlier times, when they lived, unmolested, the wild, free life of the forests. They said that their ancestors were better men than they, because their ancestors lived closer to the Great Spirit, by whom the actions of all Indians were guided. I give the stories as they were told to me by old men who knew and loved the old-time ways, and who wanted to give me the real facts because they saw that I respected their customs and believed in them. In these stories I share with the boys and girls of to-day, who can never know the old-fashioned Indians, my recollections of a busy and happy life among them, at a time when they had not unlearned all the old customs. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.