SUMMER 1861
T'óigúăt Äpäñ´tsep-de K`ádó, "Sun dance when they left the spotted horse tied." The picture shows the spotted or pinto horse tied to the medicine lodge.
Fig. 129—Summer 1861—Pinto left tied.
This dance was held near a canyon, on the south bank of upper Walnut creek, entering the Arkansas at the Great Bend in Kansas. The event recorded throws another curious light on Indian belief. At the sun dance no one but the taíme priest must attempt any "medicine," but on this occasion a man called Dogúatal-edal, "Big-young-man," became "crazy" and committed sacrilegious acts, tearing off his feather headdress and throwing it upon the taíme image, and afterward, when they were smoking to the sun, taking the pipe and throwing it away. No reason is given for these strange actions, except that he was temporarily crazy, as he had never acted strangely before, but the Indians believe that, as his conscience troubled him after he came to his senses, he gave this horse to the taíme as an atonement. At the close of the dance he tied a spotted horse to one of the poles inside the medicine lodge and left it there, where it probably died. Such a thing as tying a horse to the medicine lodge had never before been heard of, although a horse was sometimes sacrificed to the sun by tying it to a tree out upon the hills and leaving it there to perish. The old war chief Gaápiatañ twice sacrificed a horse in this manner, once during the cholera of 1849, when he offered a gray horse as a propitiatory sacrifice for himself, his parents, and brothers and sisters; also again, in the smallpox epidemic of 1861—62 (see [next year]), he offered a fine black-eared horse, hobbling it and tying it to a tree, with a prayer to the spirit of the disease to take his horse and spare himself and his children and friends. On both occasions his faith appears to have been rewarded, as none of his relatives died. The horse offered on this last occasion was of the kind called t'á-kóñ, "black-eared," considered by the Kiowa to be the finest of all horses.
Dogúatal-édal afterward led a small war party, seven in number, including one woman, into Mexico. None of them ever returned, all the warriors having been killed, probably by Ute warriors, among whom the woman was found living by Big-bow and his companions when they visited that tribe in 1894. It was on this occasion that the Kiowa tribe gained the first intimation concerning the fate of the party. The woman was then the wife of a Ute and the mother of three of his children. Big-bow wanted her to return home with them, especially as her son by her Kiowa husband was still living, but her Ute husband was unwilling to come, and she refused to leave him and her three other children.