“Well, the Indians were in our way,” said Lieutenant Parker. “If they had behaved themselves——”
“Yes, and seen their buffaloes all killed before their eyes. I tell you, lieutenant, you don’t know what a buffalo is to an Indian. It furnishes him with everything he needs, including skins for his tepee, robes to keep him warm in midwinter and sinews for sewing his clothes together. A white man kills them just to make a record. Sometimes he takes their tails home to hang up in his study and sometimes he don’t. There are but few buffaloes left, and they are in Yellowstone Park. I hope the Government will take a hand in protecting them.”
Lieutenant Parker could not say a word against this, for he knew it was all true. He knew how he would feel if some people stronger than his own should follow him year after year, take his land away from him, and destroy the only means he had of making a living. He had never looked at it in this way before. He supposed that the redskins were born with a natural enmity against the whites, and that nothing could turn them from a desire to take vengeance on them. He did not know that he blamed the Indian so much, after all.
“When the Sioux Indians who had been sent away to inquire into the matter came back,” continued Carl, “they brought with them the news that they had seen the Messiah himself, that they had talked with him, and that when the proper time came he was going to help the Indians, and not the whites.”
“That shows that they meant to get up a war,” said Parker, forgetting, so deeply was he interested in the story, that he had promised not to interrupt any more.
“It certainly looks that way. The Sioux said he would be here by the time the grass was green in the spring; but, in order to speed his coming, they must engage in a dance which was to last five days.”
“That accounts for the exhaustion that some of the dancers experience. They go on until they are completely played out and then swoon from the effects of it.”
“That is my idea exactly,” said the guide. “A great many people who have witnessed the dance lay it to hypnotism. Now, what does that mean?”
“I don’t know that I can tell you,” said Parker, after thinking a moment. “It is a certain form of sleep, brought on by artificial means, in which there is a suspension of certain bodily powers and unusual activity of others. That is as near as I can get at it. And when they come back to earth again—I don’t know whether they lie or not—they tell big stories of what they have seen in the spirit land.”
“And they are going to keep it up until we go to war with them,” said Carl earnestly. “You see they have got their homes to fight for, and when the time comes for the Indians to take possession of this country, all the whites and tribes who do not believe as they do will be overwhelmed by a flood; but the believers, those who did the dancing, will escape by fleeing to the tops of the mountains.”