My mother, an active woman, often had her fire started before her neighbors. While she got supper, my father sat and smoked. Friends frequently joined him, and they would sit in a circle, passing the pipe around, telling funny stories and laughing. My father was a capital story teller.
For supper we had deer or antelope meat, boiled or roasted, and my mother often fried wheat-flour dough into a kind of biscuits that were rather hard. Corn picked green the year before, and boiled and dried, was stewed in a kettle, making a dish much like the canned com we buy at the store. More often we had succotash, hominy boiled with fat and beans. We drank black coffee, sweetened; my mother put the coffee beans into a skin, pounded them fine with an ax, and boiled them in an iron pot. You see, we were getting civilized.
When supper was ready, my mother would call “Mi-ha-dits—I have done!” and my father would put up his pipe and come to eat. My mother gave him meat, steaming hot, in a tin dish, and poured coffee into a cup; another cup held meat broth, which made a good drink also. We did not bring wooden feast bowls with us, as some families did.
My mother and I ate with my father, much as white families do; a robe or blanket was spread for each to sit upon.
I wore moccasins and leggings; and my hair was braided, Indian fashion, in two tails over my shoulders, but my mother had made me a white man’s vest, of black cloth, embroidered all over with elk teeth. I was proud of this vest, and cared not a whit that I had no coat to wear over it.
The seventh day out, we made camp near the Cannon Ball River. My father had sent two mounted scouts ahead, with a spy glass, to see if they could find the herds; at evening, they returned with the report, “There is a big herd yonder!” Everybody got ready for the hunt the next morning, and my father made me happy by telling me that I might go along.
Quirt (Indian Whip.)