Note I-44 — Chapter I · ITINERARY: ST. LOUIS TO ST. PAUL, AUGUST 9TH-SEPTEMBER 21ST, 1805.

I think Pike never once hits what a grammarian would consider the proper way to write this phrase. Wherever he happens upon it, the gender or the number gets awry. The hitch in pluralizing seems to be because the first s is sounded before the initial vowel of the next word, but the last s is silent, because the French seldom articulate their letters at par. Folle avoine, literally "fool oat"—a phrase also reflected in the Latin term avena fatua—is the Canadian French name of the plant known to botanists as Zizania aquatica, and to us common folks as wild rice, wild oats, water-rice, water-oats, Indian or Canadian rice or oats, etc. My friend Prof. Lester F. Ward, whom I desired to prepare the botanical definitions for the Century Dictionary, and who did write them, with the assistance of Mr. F. H. Knowlton, after the lamented death of Prof. Sereno Watson, Prof. Asa Gray's successor at Cambridge, defines Zizania as "a genus of grasses, of the tribe Oryzeæ. It is characterized by numerous narrow unisexual spikelets in a long, loose androgynous panicle, each spikelet having two glumes and six stamens or two more or less connate styles." This would be news to the Menominees, though these Indians subsisted so largely upon the seeds of the plant that the French called them les Folles Avoines, and the English knew them as the Rice-eaters. This rice grows in profusion in all the lacustrine regions of the N. W., and is regularly harvested by all the Indians of that country, to be sold or bartered as well as eaten by them. Its great size, its purplish spike-like heads when ripe, and its omnipresence, render it one of the most conspicuous products of the region. The Indians do not cut the stalk as we reap our cereals, because the loose grains fall so readily that the easiest way to gather them is to simply shake or beat them into a canoe. As to the polyglot council which Pike held with the Puants, we may hope without believing that the Winnebagoes were deeply impressed by the combination of New Jersey and Canadian French which fell upon their ears through the Dakotan tongue. It is true that the Winnebagoes come of Siouan stock, and so have some linguistic affinity with the Sioux; but the dialect they acquired is conceded by all philologists to be peculiar to themselves, and peculiarly difficult to utter. The Winnebago spoken at this council was probably as different from the Dakotan as Latin is from its cognate Greek, or even as Pike's French was from that spoken in Montreal or Paris. The Winnebagoes call themselves by a name which is rendered Otchagra by Long, Howchungera by Featherstonhaugh, Hotcañgara by Powell; also Ochungarand, Hohchunhgrah, and in various other ways which authors prefer and printing-offices permit: see note37, p. 31. Since Charlevoix they have been known as Puans, Puants, or Stinkers—and they deserve to be. Their vernacular is noted for the predominance of the growler or dog-letter r, litera canina of the Latin grammarians.