THE PRAIRIES AND THEIR INHABITANTS.
The subject of sport has a fascinating interest for readers of almost every class. Nor is this interest lessened when the scene of such adventures is laid in the wide prairies of the Far West. On those vast plains, ocean-like in their rolling expanse, the wigwam of the red man, and the bison and other denizens of the prairie, are alike disappearing, to be succeeded by the stately and magnificent cities which are the result of American enterprise and civilisation. Lieutenant-colonel Dodge, an officer in the United States army, gives us, in his Hunting Grounds of the Great West (London: Chatto and Windus, 1877), an instructive résumé of the present aspect and position of those plains, which are still in great measure a Debatable Land, on the frontiers of which a fierce warfare is almost constantly being carried on between the wandering Indian tribes and the white settlers who are every year supplanting them.
The distinctive term ‘The Plains’ is specially applied to the area of rolling prairies extending from the mountains of Texas on the south to the British line on the north, and from the Missouri river on the east to the Rocky Mountains on the west.
Although called Plains they are never absolutely level, but present many undulations and much variety of surface. Even in their most barren stretches they are covered with short grass, but are almost without trees, which grow only in the cañons or deep water-courses. On the higher Plains this absence of trees is caused by want of water and the prevalence of high winds; and on the lower, by the prairie-fires kindled by the Indians, by the devastation caused by beavers, and by the prevalence, although in a lesser degree, of wind. In winter, on these wide Plains the storms are sometimes fearful; the icy cold north wind curdles the blood in the veins, and is speedily fatal to any living creature that is exposed to its fury; even birds fall dead in great numbers. Its destructiveness is only equalled by the terrific rain, thunder, and hail-storms which occur in summer.
No one should ever travel over the Plains without a compass, although in the unsettling misery of feeling lost, confidence is sometimes lost even in that friendly guide. In winter, from the glare of the sun on the wide waste of snow, a painful affection called snow-blindness is experienced by most travellers on the Plains. Not only is the power of vision temporarily lost, but if the skin be at all sensitive, the face and hands swell and blister, and are as exquisitely painful as if scorched by fire. In travelling, the choice of a camping-place is of the first importance; water, grass, and wood are essential requisites, and so is a knowledge of the special dangers which beset wanderers on these prairies. Camp-life, Colonel Dodge tells us, with a good tent, a nice mess-kit, plenty of bedding, a travelling kitchen, and supplies of preserved fruit and vegetables, is very enjoyable indeed. The rifle rarely fails to provide a good dinner, to which the hunters return at sunset with a keen appetite, which enables them to do full justice to the dainties of the prairie. These discussed, they collect in the cool breezy evening around the camp-fire, and with pipe and flask and song and story, the short twilight hours go merrily by.
One of the most frequent dangers to which camp-life is exposed is prairie-fire, which rises and spreads on all sides, to the height sometimes of thirty feet, half-stifling the men with smoke and heat, and driving the animals frantic with terror. Another danger arises from the sudden and severe rain-storms, which are so excessive that they may be aptly denominated water-spouts. Fancy a party of hunters in their comfortable well-appointed camp, pitched as camps often are, on the bank of a half-dry stream. After a luxurious dinner and pleasant social evening, each has retired to his own special tent, when suddenly the unmistakable rush and roar of a large volume of water awakens the traveller. In a moment he is upon his feet, rushing out into the darkness to discover if possible what it all means. The green sward of the night before is gone—water is before, behind, around him, everywhere!
When morning breaks, cold and gray, it shews, instead of the picturesque river-bluff and comfortable camp, an apparently shoreless lake, with one or two cotton-wood trees gallantly stemming the flood, on the topmost boughs of which are a few forlorn specimens of humanity, cowering before the keen wind, which as it careers along the prairie, makes sad havoc of the few fluttering remnants of their sleeping apparel. Fortunately, however, these deluges are of short continuance, and abate as quickly as they rise. Another danger, the possibilities of which are diminishing every year, arises from the stampedes to which the herds of buffalo are periodically subject. When this sudden panic seizes these immense brutes, they rush blindly on after the leaders, trampling over everything that comes in their way. Our author was camping out one night in the spring of 1871 with four wagons and a small escort. He had gone to bed, but was not asleep, when he fancied that he heard a faint, rushing sound; and suspicious that it might be a water-spout, he sprang out of his tent, and peered up the creek beside which the camp was pitched. He strained his eyes in the darkness to discover the line of foam, which is generally the precursor of an approaching deluge; but to his surprise he could discover nothing; yet the sound went on increasing, and came evidently from the prairie. Suddenly its probable cause flashed upon him, and arousing his men, he explained to them what he feared and besought them to keep calm. This was somewhat difficult, for the buffalo were already in sight, and to all appearance bearing right down upon them. ‘Our only chance,’ he said, ‘is to try to split the herd; if we cannot do that, we are lost!’ With that end in view he stationed his men fifty yards from the camp, and in trembling and fear awaited the onslaught. On, with a heavy trampling thud like thunder, rushed the unwieldy mass till they were within thirty yards of the men, who discharged their muskets and yelled with the energy of despair. A few of the foremost buffalo fell dead; the others wavered, swerved a little, and finally plunged away on one side, roaring and crashing and tumbling in the darkness over the banks of the creek.
Another danger of camp-life proceeds from rattlesnakes and vipers, which are very susceptible of cold, and at night crawl close to the person of the sleeper for warmth. One officer—a friend of Colonel Dodge’s—once found a rattlesnake coiled up beneath his pillow; and another, when drawing on his boot, felt his foot come in contact with a soft substance; he dropped the boot at once, and a huge rattlesnake glided out. Another nocturnal visitor almost as much dreaded as the snakes is the skunk, a horrible little animal about the size of a cat, which makes its way into a camp and has been known to devour the face, hands, or any uncovered part of the nearest sleeper; a skunk-bite being almost invariably followed in certain portions of the Plains by hydrophobia.
The great attraction of the Plains to sportsmen is the variety and abundance of game which they contain. First in order, as being pre-eminently an habitué of the Plains, is the buffalo, or more properly speaking, the bison, and which, in spite of its apparent ferocity, is, according to Colonel Dodge, who knows its habits well, a mild, stupid, inoffensive animal.
The elk, although disappearing even faster than the buffalo, is still to be met with on the Plains; and his great size, magnificent antlers, and splendid form, stamp him as the monarch of the prairies. He is timid, and seldom even in the last extremity employs his great strength in his own defence; what he trusts to is his skill in doubling, dodging, and hiding, which in spite of his size he accomplishes as cunningly and successfully as a hare or a fox. Many varieties of the Deer tribe are found in the Plains; of these the black-tailed deer, the red-deer, and the antelope are the most abundant, affording in the proper season boundless supplies of the most delicious venison. The mountain-sheep can scarcely be called an inhabitant of the Plains; his chosen home being amid the wild crags and rugged fastnesses of mountain-ranges. He is a fine animal, with a body somewhat resembling that of a deer, and a sheep’s head surmounted by a pair of stupendous horns. His flesh is declared by the gourmands of the hunting fraternity to be the choicest of choice morsels, a delicious compound of venison and the finest Southdown mutton.
The prairies abound with smaller animals, rabbits of two kinds, gophers, and prairie-dogs a species of marmot. The carnivora of the Plains are not numerous. First come the wolves, which hunt in packs, but whose power of making themselves disagreeable has, Colonel Dodge thinks, been greatly over-rated. This can scarcely be said of the grisly bear, which is a huge, sagacious, and pre-eminently ferocious brute. The cougar or puma, which is sometimes called the Mexican lion, is also a formidable antagonist to come to close grips with. The panther is very much the same animal on a smaller scale, and is scarcely more dangerous than the wild-cat, which is abundant and of a large size. A variety of birds are found on the Plains, flocks of quails, partridges, geese, and five species of grouse; but none of these can compete in point of size or delicacy with the wild turkey. This magnificent bird when fat is often found to weigh from twenty to twenty-five pounds.
Of the red men, the fast diminishing aborigines of the prairies, Colonel Dodge does not draw a very favourable picture. He paints them, he tells us, as he finds them, not with every attribute softened and toned down by the veil of false sentiment which the romances of Cooper and other novelists have thrown around them. The North American Indian taken as he stands is as cruel, lazy, and degraded a savage as is to be found upon the face of the earth. Virtue, morality, generosity, and honour are not only words without a meaning for him, but have no synonyms in his language. The bad qualities of the Indians are, however, no good reason for the infamous manner in which they have been treated by the agents of the American government.
Intensely conscious of his own helplessness, and conceiving that he is tossed about like a feather between the good and bad god, it is very important for the Indian to discover which of his deities is in the ascendant for the moment; and this he tries to do by divination. There is nothing so trifling but that he may deduce from it a knowledge of the supernatural; the flight of a bird, the bark of a dog, the gliding of a snake through the grass, are all full for him of a subtle intelligence; but what he principally relies upon for information is what he calls the making of a medicine. This species of manufacture, the mysteries of which are known only to himself, is undertaken upon all occasions; and besides these private acts of what may be called devotion, the tribe has from time to time a great medicine-making in common, presided over by a medicine chief. A huge structure of dressed skins called a medicine lodge is set up, with a rude image cut from a log suspended from the roof. A certain number of warriors are then selected from the assembled tribe, and a dance, which may truly be called ‘the dance of death,’ is begun. Day sinks into night and night dawns into day, and still it goes on without a moment’s intermission, till all the performers have fallen senseless to the floor, some to rise no more. If at the end of two or three days this strange ceremony is concluded without a death, the medicine chief pronounces it good medicine, and the tribe separate assured of the protection of the good god.
As soon as an Indian boy becomes a warrior he thinks of a wife; and as an Indian belle is often something of a coquette, he finds, as others have done, that the favours of wooing are ‘fashious to seek.’ At length, however, the dusky beauty is won, and the favoured lover betakes himself to the father’s lodge, and something like the following colloquy ensues. ‘You have got a daughter,’ begins the lover, ‘an ugly lazy thing; but I want a wife, and I am willing as a favour to take her off your hands.’
‘Are you speaking of my darling girl?’ says the father—‘the prettiest best girl in the whole tribe. I do not think of giving her to any one, much less to you. Why, you are a mere boy; you have done nothing to speak of; you have not taken one scalp; you have only stolen a few wretched ponies. No, no; she is not for you, unless indeed you give me twenty ponies for her.’
‘Twenty ponies!’ yells the lover. ‘One is too many.’ And thus the haggling goes on, until a bargain is struck at something like the fair market-price of the girl, who forthwith, for there is no marriage ceremony, accompanies her new husband or master to his father’s lodge. Many families generally live under one roof, and they have not upon an average more than one meal a day. A large pot full of meat is set upon the fire, and when sufficiently cooked is taken off and placed in the middle of the floor. The inmates then gather around and help themselves with their fingers. What is left is set aside, and any one who feels hungry goes and helps himself. The lodge of the Indians is made of dressed buffalo-skins, supported upon a light framework of wood. The fire is in the centre; and as the draught is very defective, the lodge is generally in cold weather full of smoke. The beds are piles of buffalo-robes and blankets, which serve as seats during the day. Furniture there is none; except a few pots, kettles, and trunks containing the dried meat and superfluous clothing of the family, may be dignified by that term. But what is wanting in upholstery is made up in dirt, everything being kept in a state of inconceivable filth. The wealth of an Indian consists in his horses and mules; and as he leads a nomadic life in fine weather, he rarely burdens himself with anything that is not easily transported. In the general division of meat and skins, the widows and orphans of the tribe are cared for, and a certain portion set aside for their maintenance.
The Indians are very fond of gambling, and also of drinking, which is a very destructive vice to them. Another of their favourite indoor amusements is story-telling, in which they take great delight. A good story-teller is a very important personage in the tribe, and is always surrounded by an eager audience.
The cruelty of the Indians is extreme; men and women alike take an exquisite pleasure in torturing their captives. Much of this cruelty, however, has in latter days arisen from vengeful hatred to the United States government, which has broken faith with them over and over again, and is still conducting a war of extermination. No wonder that under the circumstances the red man should resent the cruelties practised by his invaders, and make reprisals when opportunity offers. It is but fair to the Indians to state, that across the frontier-line in Canada, where the treaties made with them have been rigidly observed, there have been no Indian wars and no Indian massacres; and that the red men have proved themselves to be quiet and not unthriving subjects of Queen Victoria.