Shoshone tepee with sagebrush windbreak.
This discouraged the Indians. They said that the squaws could pack wood if they wanted any, that it was their work anyhow. That ended the wood hauling.
I got the Indian boys to help me fix up the sled again. We pulled it up on a hill with a horse and turned it towards camp. I wanted some of the boys to get on with me and slide down, but they were afraid. They said they wanted to see me do it first, so away I went. Then they came down with the horse and we pulled the sled up again. By hard begging, I got two of them on the sled. As soon as we started, one jumped off, but the other stayed with me. When we reached the bottom, he said it was the finest ride he ever had. The next time several of the boys were ready to try it, and five of us got on. Away we went to the bottom. Oh, what fun we had! It was not long till they all wanted to get on, and the heavier we loaded it, the faster it would go. When the track got slick, the sled would carry us nearly to camp.
We kept this up for days. When the track was well made, we would pull the sled up without a horse. All of the big boys and girls joined in the coasting, and sometimes the older Indians would ride too. The sled was kept going all the time, until we wore the runners out. After that for fun we turned to fishing and hunting chickens and rabbits. Sometimes we would go for antelope, but when we went for them, some of the older Indians would go with us to keep us from killing too many. The Indians were always careful to preserve the game.
Everything went off peacefully this winter. There was no quarreling nor fighting. One young papoose and an old squaw died. We lost no horses. We were a long way from the Crows, so we had no Crow scares. I had a very good time, and mother seemed to enjoy the winter as well as I did.
Along towards spring seven or eight of us little boys were in the cottonwoods shooting birds when one boy’s arrow hit the side of a tree, glanced, and struck me in the leg. The boy was badly scared, for he thought I was going to kick him to pieces, but I told him to stop crying, that I knew it was an accident. He quit crying, and the other boys thought that I was getting to be a pretty good fellow after all, for before this they believed that if any one hurt me there would be a kicking scrape right away.
Spring came at last. We moved down the river about fifteen miles where we could get better grass for our horses. Here were plenty of white-tailed deer and antelope, some elk, and a few mountain sheep. Ducks and geese also were plentiful.
We stayed here until about the middle of May. The big fish they had told me about began to come up the river. And they were really big ones; two of them made all the load I could carry. They must have weighed thirty or thirty-five pounds each. Mother and Hanabi dried about two hundred pounds of these fish. I afterwards learned that they were salmon. The first that came up were fat and very good, but they kept coming thicker and thicker until they were so thin that they were not fit to eat.
After a while we moved camp again, going down the river a little farther and then up a deep and rocky canyon where there had been many snowslides during the winter. We crossed over snow that had come down in these slides that was forty or fifty feet deep and was as hard as ice. There was not very much timber in the canyon, and the cliffs were very high. Years afterwards very rich gold mines were found in this place, a mining camp was started, and great quartz mills were built.[3]