[57] This account is taken from files of the Denver newspapers published at the time of the massacre.
[58] Ouray did not profess the Catholic religion, despite his early training. He believed in the Ute god, and in a happy hunting-ground, and also in a bad place, where wicked people cannot meet their friends.
[59] There is more in this legend of a primitive, superstitious people, from an ethnological view of its details, than would be suspected at first. The story of the sacrifice and the medicine-man wrapping himself in the bloody hide of the buffalo, the use of the pine as fuel, and the prostration of the multitude, while communion is held with the Great Spirit, is the same ceremony that was observed by the Druids, and religious peoples before them. This peculiar offering of blood was common to the Indian who in the early years of the century occupied a portion of the territory east of the Mississippi. It will be remembered by the student of American history that when the war of 1812-1815 was pending, the celebrated Tecumseh and his brother, the Shawnee Prophet, called the tribes together, in order to induce them to side with the English. At that famous council they sacrificed a spotless red heifer on a high altar, and the medicine-man wrapped the bloody skin around him, while all the savages present prostrated themselves and communed with the Great Spirit to know what to do. The result was that Tecumseh's plans were defeated, for the Indians were told by the Great Spirit to side with the Americans.
In the eleventh Book of the Æneid, Virgil relates the same observance on Mount Soracte, where there was a temple dedicated to Apollo, and a sacrifice made annually to the god, who represented the sun. Arruns in his prayer says:—
Apollo, thou of gods
The mightiest, who in guard the sacred mount
Soracte holdest, and whom first of all
We worship, unto whom are heaped the fires
The piney branches make, and whom adore
Thy votaries, as we walk, by pious zeal
Sustained, on burning coals.
[60] The White Chief, by George P. Belden. Edited by General James S. Brisbin. Published by C. F. Vent; Cincinnati, 1872.
[61] Niobrara.
[62] The Southern Cheyennes, Kiowas, and Arapahoes waged an unrelenting war along the whole line of the border from Nebraska to Texas, under the leadership of the dreaded Sa-tan-ta.
[63] Jack Stead was a runaway sailor boy. He was on the Peacock when it was wrecked years ago near the mouth of the Columbia River. He lived for years in the Rocky Mountains, and was the first man to report to the United States government the Mormon preparations to resist it. He had a Cheyenne wife, was a good story-teller, and loved whiskey.
[64] William Frederick Cody (“Buffalo Bill”), the scout, guide, and Indian fighter, was born on the 26th of February, 1846, in a primative log-cabin in the backwoods of Iowa. In 1852, the family removed to Kansas, where the father of young Cody, two years later, became a martyr to the Free State cause. From the moment the family was thus deprived of its support, the only boy, though a mere child, at the age of nine years, commenced his career. As a collaborator in the preparation of this work, he has been prevailed upon to relate all the incidents of his life, so far as they confined to the region of which this volume treats. [E-text editor's note: They encompass chapters 16 and 17 in their entirety. In the original book, every paragraph appeared in quotation marks.] For his further adventures in the Arkansas Valley and south of it, see The Old Santa Fé Trail.