they were to be out over night. There they slew a bear. It is said that some of them boiled a foot of the bear; and after they had finished cooking it, they then ate it up. Now, when they that were absent came back, lo, by that time the bear-foot must have been eaten up.
Thereupon they (who came late) sulked, and so parted company (from the others). They truly are the ones that are called They-who-sulked-on-Account-of-the-Bear-Foot. Stories are told of them; it is said that they now are on the other side of the height of land where the source of the Mississippi River is. They are the Bear-Foot Sulkers.
A syllabary was in use among some Algonquin at a very early period. One was used by Eliot at Natick in his missionary labors with that Massachusetts dialect; another was used by LaCombe and other Jesuit missionaries in their work among the Ojibwa and the Cree of Canada. The syllabary employed by Eliot was in Roman letters, and the one used by LaCombe and others was and still is in what are called "Cree characters."
The adoption of the syllabary by the Sauk, Fox, and Kickapoo is of very recent date. It is not certain at present which of these dialects was the first to take it up; but the one that was the first to learn it no doubt quickly taught it to the other two. It seems pretty certain, also, that the system was deliberately borrowed from an outside source, most likely from an Algonquin people that had had experience with the writings of Christian missionaries. It shows no trace of development from the old figurative representations, realistic or conventional, to the phonetic scale. The old form of writing is rarely practised these days, and the jump from the old to the new must have been sudden. The syllabary is in general use among the younger people and by a limited number of the more elderly. Boys and girls handle it with more ease and speed than the older folk.
