Seeing is believing,
and off _Lean-Man_ goes with a fat wallet. We wander into the stores to
see what purchases the Indians will make. One young blade is looking at
a box of stogies, and the clerk says, "He can afford to blow in his wad
on perfumes and cigars, that chap, he got a silver-fox last winter."
They tell the story of how old Maurice, Chief of the Chipewyans, put
his first treaty money in a cassette and kept it there all the year
because he had heard one white man tell another that money grows, and he
wanted to see if a white man lies when he talks to another white man.
Sometimes, though, the Indian scores one on the white. This was markedly
the case when the first treaty payments were made at Lesser Slave. Two
young Jews had followed the treaty party all the way in from Edmonton
with an Old Aunt Sally stand where you throw wooden balls at stuffed
figures at ten shies for a quarter. "Every time you hit 'em, you get a
see-gar!" They thought they were going to clear out the Indians, but it
took a bunch of Lesser Slave braves just an hour and a quarter to break
the bank at Monte Carlo. As an appreciative onlooker reported, "Them
chaps pinked them dolls every time.
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