WINTER 1837—38
A´daltem Etkúegán-de Sai, "Winter that they dragged the head." The figure above the winter mark shows a horseman carrying a bloody scalp upon a lance and dragging a bloody head at the end of a reata.
Fig. 76 — Winter 1837—38—Head dragged.
Three Comanche, two men and a woman, were camped alone one night in a tipi on the Clear fork of the Brazos (Ä´sese P'a, "Wooden-arrowpoint river"), in Texas, when one of them noticed somebody raise the door-flap and then quickly drop it again; he told the others, and as silently and swiftly as possible they ran out, and jumping over a steep bank of the creek hid themselves just a moment before their enemies returned and fired into the vacated tipi. The Comanche returned the fire from their hiding place and then made their escape to a Kiowa camp near by. In the morning the Kiowa returned to the spot, together with the Comanche, and found a dead Arapaho lying where he had been shot; they scalped and beheaded him, and brought the head into camp dragging at the end of a reata. The old German captive, Bóiñ-edal, then a little boy and who had been with the Indians about two years, witnessed this barbarous spectacle and still remembers the thrill of horror which it sent through him.