Uncle Dick nodded, and Rob went on, referring to his Journal. “And then the big chief said what they had done was O.K., and asked the white men to ‘take pity on them’—which I think is an old Indian term of asking for some more gifts. Anyhow, the upshot was they smoked the peace pipe and ate ‘some of the most Delicate parts of the Dog which was prepared for the fiest and made a Sacrefise to the flag.’ Then they cleared away the floor, built up a fire in the lodge, and ‘about 10 Musitions began playing on Tambereens’—which made a ‘gingling noise.’ The women came in and danced, with staffs decorated with scalps, and everybody sang and everybody promised to be good.”
“Some party!” said Jesse, slangily; but Rob, now excited, went on with the story:
“Poor Clark nearly got sick from lack of sleep. But the next day the Sioux held on to the cable again and wanted to stop the boat till they had more tobacco. Then Lewis told the chiefs they couldn’t bluff him into giving them anything. Clark did give them a little tobacco and told the men not to fire the swivel. Then they ran up a red flag under the white, and the next Sioux that came aboard they told that those two flags meant peace or war, either way they wanted it, and if they wanted peace, they’d all better go back home and stay there, and not monkey with the buzz saw too long—well, you know, Uncle Dick, they didn’t really say that, but that was what they meant.
“The Sioux followed alongshore and begged tobacco for fifty miles, clean up to the Ree villages, near the mouth of the Cheyenne River. Oh, they found the Sioux, all right; and glad enough they were to get through them, even paying tribute as they had done.”
“That’s a fair statement of the Teton affair,” nodded the leader of the party. “Many a white life that tribe took, in the seventy-five years that were to follow. For the next hundred miles there were either Sioux or Rees pestering and begging and keeping the party uneasy all the time.”
“And I’ll bet they were glad to get to the Rees, too,” commented John. “Those half-Pawnees raised squashes, corn, and beans. But by now, if they had had a good shotgun or so along, they could have killed all sorts of swans, brant and other geese, and ducks, for they were running into the fall migration of the wild fowl. Grouse, too, were mentioned as very numerous. They stuck to big game—it was easy to get meat when you could see a ‘gang of goats’—antelope—swimming the river, and the hills covered with game.”
“Uncle Dick,” resumed Rob, as they again gathered around the map and Journal spread down on the tent floor, “those men must have had some notion of the country, even had some map of it.”
“Yes, they had a map—made by one Evans, the best then to be had, and I suppose made up from the fur traders’ stories. But it was incomplete. Even to-day few maps are anywhere near exactly accurate. For instance, when they came to the Cheyenne River—which, of course, the traders called the Chien, or Dog, River—Clark said that nothing was known of it till a certain Jean Vallé told them that it headed in the Black Hills.
“Of course, it’s all easy now. We know the Black Hills are in the southwest corner of South Dakota, and that the Belle Fourche River of the old cow country runs into the Cheyenne, which flows almost east, into the Missouri. But if Mr. Vallé had not been out to the Black Hills, Lewis and Clark would not have been able to give this information. Then, again, while they were at the Ree village, on October 10th, two more Frenchmen came to breakfast, ‘Mr. Tabo and Mr. Gravolin,’ who were already in this country.
“To me, one of the most interesting things is to see the overlapping and blending of all these things—how the turkey once overlapped the antelope and prairie dog; how the Rees, who were only scattered branches of the Pawnees, properly at home away down in Kansas—overlapped the Sioux, who sometimes raided the Pawnees below the Platte.