Stages were built in the camp, and for two days, every body was busy drying meat or boiling bones for marrow fat. The dried meat was packed in skin bags, or made into bundles; the marrow fat was run into bladders; and all was taken to Like-a-fish-hook village, to be stored for winter.
Goodbird at the Age of Twenty. (Redrawn from Portrait by Gilbert Saul. Report Indian Census, 1890.)
VII
FARMING
The time came when we had to forsake our village at Like-a-fish-hook Bend, for the government wanted the Indians to become farmers. “You should take allotments,” our agent would say. “The big game is being killed off, and you must plant bigger fields or starve. The government will give you plows and cattle.”
All knew that the agent’s words were true, and little by little our village was broken up. In the summer of my sixteenth year nearly a third of my tribe left to take up allotments.
We had plenty of land; our reservation was twice the size of Rhode Island, and our united tribes, with the Rees who joined us, were less than thirteen hundred souls. Most of the Indians chose allotments along the Missouri, where the soil was good and drinking water easy to get. Unallotted lands were to be sold and the money given to the three tribes.
Forty miles above our village, the Missouri makes a wide bend around a point called Independence Hill, and here my father and several of his relatives chose their allotments. The bend enclosed a wide strip of meadow land, offering hay for our horses. The soil along the river was rich and in the bottom stood a thick growth of timber.