Tracks and trails; or, Incidents in the life of a Minnesota territorial pioneer

Tracks and Trails presents incidents in the life of a Minnesota pioneer and touches on many facets of frontier life in the second half of the nineteenth century. It depicts the settlers' contact and conflict with the Sioux and Chippewas, two Native tribes living on the east and west banks of the Mississippi River in Minnesota, from an ethnocentric perspective typical of white views at that time. Born in Illinois in 1848, Nathan Dally moved to Minnesota with his family at the age of eight and lived in the North Star state for the next seventy-two years. He details the family's 500-mile journey from Putnam, Illinois, to Clearwater Lake (Stearns County), Minnesota, in 1856. Along the way, Dally first saw the abundance of the western territories: piles of triangular lead bars, freshly cast from the smelters, lying along mining sites, and swarms of black bass swimming undisturbed in the lakes. The rest of the book describes life after settlement in the new land. There are sketches of the rich natural resources in and around Clearwater Lake, and descriptions of the encounters between whites and Native Americans, which were filled with suspicion and mistrust on both sides and sometimes ended in bloodshed. There were also intertribal clashes between the Sioux and Chippewa peoples. Dally blends his accounts of confrontations between Indian tribes and between whites and Native Americans with vivid descriptions of frontier life. He recalls the living conditions in white settlements, the appearance and internal arrangements of Indian dwellings, the division of labor by gender within the Indian population, the Native peoples' reverence for nature, and even the way they smoked a pipe whose stem was "almost two feet" long.