1849-’50.—No. I. Crows steal all the Dakotas’ horses.
No. II. The Crows stole a large drove of horses (it is said eight hundred) from the Brulés. The circle may denote multitude, at least one hundred, but probably is a simple design for a camp or corral from which a number of horse-tracks are departing.
No. III. Crow Indians stole two hundred horses from the Minneconjou Dakotas near Black Hills.
Interpreter A. Lavary says: Brulés were at the headwaters of White River, about 75 miles from Fort Laramie, Wyoming. The Dakotas surprised the Crows in 1849, killed ten, and took one prisoner, because he was a man dressed in woman’s clothes, and next winter the Crows stole six hundred horses from the Brulés. See page [142].
1850-’51.—No. I. Cow with old woman in her belly. Cloven hoof not shown.
No. II. The character is a distinct drawing of a buffalo containing a human figure. Clément translated that “a buffalo cow was killed in that year, and an old woman found in her belly”; also that all the Indians believed this. Good-Wood, examined through another interpreter, could or would give no explanation, except that it was “about their religion.” At first the writer suspected that the medicine men had manufactured some pretended portent out of a fœtus taken from a real cow, but the Dakotas have long believed in the appearance from time to time of a monstrous animal that swallows human beings. This superstition was perhaps suggested by the bones of mastodons, often found in the territory of those Indians; and the buffalo being the largest living animal known to them, its name was given to the legendary monster, in which nomenclature they were not wholly wrong, as the horns of the fossil Bison latifrons are 10 feet in length. The medicine men, perhaps, announced, in 1850, that a squaw who had disappeared was swallowed by the mammoth, which was then on its periodical visit, and must be propitiated.
No. III. A Minneconjou Dakota, having killed a buffalo cow, found an old woman inside of her.
Memorandum from interpreter: A small party of Dakotas, two or three young men, returning unsuccessful from a buffalo hunt, told this story, and it is implicitly believed by the Dakotas.
Major Bush suggests that perhaps some old squaw left to die sought the carcass of a buffalo for shelter and then died. He has known that to occur.
