When asked if the Indians of today followed many of the customs of their ancestors, he answered that they did not. Occasionally the older Indians, in memory of the days of their supremacy, dressed themselves to correspond and acted as in other days, but the younger generation knows nothing of those things and is as the white man. In Oklahoma they go to school, later engage in farming or enter business. "Civilization has done much for them," said Gray Eagle. "They are hard workers and have ambitions to accomplish great things and be better citizens. Only we old Indians, who remember the strenuous times of the early days, have the wild blood in our veins. The younger ones have never even seen a buffalo."
Then he told of his early life in the county and related interesting stories of the past—Gray Eagle, the Indian chief, and John Williamson, the pioneer, talking together, at times, in a tongue that to us was strange, but to them an echo of a very real past.
The Loup he called Potato Water, because of the many wild potatoes that formerly grew upon its banks. Horse creek he remembered as Skeleton Water, the Pawnees one time having fought a band of Sioux on its banks. They were victorious but lost many warriors. Their own dead they buried, leaving the bodies of their enemies to decay in the sun. Soon the banks of the creek were strewn with skeletons and ever after the creek was known to the Indians as Skeleton Water. The Cedar was known as Willow creek, Council creek as the Skidi, and the Beaver as the Sandburr.
LOVERS' LEAP
By Mrs. A. P. Jarvis
I pause before I reach the verge
And look, with chilling blood, below;
Some dread attraction seems to urge
Me nearer to the brink to go.
The hunting red men used to force
The buffalo o'er this frightful steep;
They could not check their frantic course;
By following herds pressed down they leap,
Then lie a bleeding, mangled mass
Beside the little stream below.
Their red blood stained the waving grass,
The brook carnation used to flow.
Yet a far more pathetic tale
The Pawnees told the pioneer
Of dusky maid and stripling pale
Who found in death a refuge here.
The youth had been a captive long,
Yet failed to friendly favor find;
He oft was bound with cruel thong,
Yet Noma to the lad was kind.
She was the chieftain's only child,
As gentle as the cooing dove.
Pure was this daughter of the wild;
The pale-face lad had won her love.
Her father, angered at her choice,
Had bid'n her wed a chieftain brave;
She answered with a trembling voice,
"I'd rather lie within my grave."
The day before the appointed eve
When Wactah was to claim his bride,
The maid was seen the camp to leave—
The pale-face youth was by her side.
She led him to this dangerous place
That on the streamlet's glee doth frown;
The sunlight, gleaming on her face,
Her wild, dark beauty seemed to crown.
"Dear youth," exclaimed the dusky maid,
"I've brought thee here thy faith to prove:
If thou of death art not afraid,
We'll sacrifice our lives to love."
Hand linked in hand they looked below,
Then, headlong, plunged adown the steep.
The Pawnees from that hour of woe
Have named the place The Lovers' Leap.