When Buffalo Ran

by George Bird Grinnell

Standing Alone, finely dressed, was riding a handsome spotted horse led by one of her relations, and other women were coming behind, leading other horses which bore loads.

The horse ridden by Standing Alone was led up close to the lodge and my mother ran out to it. Standing Alone put her arms around my mother's neck and slipped out of the saddle on my mother's back. My sisters caught her feet and supported Standing Alone, who was thus carried on my mother's back into the lodge and her feet did not touch the ground. Then she was carried around to the back of the lodge where my sleeping place was and seated next to me on my bed. Presently food was prepared and for the dish to be offered to Standing Alone my mother cut up the meat into small pieces, so that she should have no trouble in eating her food. Then Standing Alone and I ate together and so I took her for my wife.

Many of the gifts that Two Bulls had sent with Standing Alone were distributed among my relations.

That day all my near relations came, bringing gifts of many sorts to us who were newly married. They brought us a lodge and much lodge furniture—robes and bedding, backrests, mats and dishes—all the things that people used in the life of the camp. Of these presents some were sent to the relations of Standing Alone and they in turn sent other presents to us, so that as husband and wife Standing Alone and I began our life well provided with all that we needed.

I did not again go to war that year, but spent much of my time hunting—providing food for my own family and often leaving meat at my father-in-law's lodge.

Up to this time, as I look back on it to-day, it seems to me that life had been easy for me and for the tribe. We had many skins for robes, lodges and clothing. Food was plenty. If we needed horses we made journeys to war against our enemies to the south and took what we required—but hard times were coming.

It was but a few years after I took Standing Alone for my wife, when my oldest boy was four years old, that the wars were begun between the white people and my tribe.

This was a hard time. It is true we killed many white people and captured much property, but though most of the tribe did not seem to see that it was so, my uncle and I felt that the Indians were being crowded out, pushed further and further away from where we had always been—where we belonged. After each expedition through the country by white troops and after each fight that we had with the white men, we felt as if some great hand that was all around my tribe and all the other tribes, was closing a little tighter about us all, and that at last it would grasp us and squeeze us to death.

Of that bad time and of what followed that time, I do not wish to speak, and so my story ends.