"After I arrived at the top of the Medicine Bluff, I looked off at the vast expanse which surrounded me. I saw the village of my people; I could hear the dogs bark and the children laugh; I could hear my own family mourning, as if some one had been taken from them; I saw the buffalo covering the prairie, and the cunning wolf lying in wait to pounce upon his prey. When I again looked all around me, and beheld the young warriors in their pride and strength, I asked myself: 'Why do I live any longer? My fires have gone out. I must follow my fathers. The world is beautiful to the young, but to the old it has no pleasure. I will go there!'
"With this upon my mind, I continued: 'Far away toward the setting sun are the hunting-grounds of my people.' Then I gathered all my strength and leaped from the giddy height before me. I knew no more of the woes of this life. I was caught up in mid-air and suddenly transported to a country where game was countless; where there was no wind, no rain, no sickness; where all the great chiefs of the Comanches who had ever died were assembled; where they were all young again, and chased the buffalo and feasted as when on earth. There was no darkness. The people were continually happy. Beautiful birds sang on the trees. The war-whoop was never more heard."
The old chief had been rejuvenated, and now came back to his people with all his youthful vigor, to live again with his own tribe. The story of the strange warrior captivated the Indians.
He at once became an oracle and great medicine-man in his tribe; his power to cure the sick was wonderful, and his counsel was implicitly obeyed ever afterward.
Medicine Bluff has of course lost much of its prestige among the Indians, for the reason that since the extinction of the buffalo and other large game the tribes have been scattered, being generally pretty closely confined to the reservations, with the children taught in schools, and the superstitions, or at least many of them, having passed gradually out of the remembrance of the new generation, known only to the few old warriors left.
The savage, like the white man, in his disappointments and miseries sometimes resorts to suicide as a cure-all for and end-all of life's burdens. Among the powerful Comanches Medicine Bluff was, for an unknown period, one of their famous places, like the Vendome Column in Paris, from which to terminate an unsatisfactory and miserable existence. The bluff was also a rendezvous for the young warriors, who were to go for the first time in battle with the tried soldiers of the tribe, to propitiate the Great Spirit.
The sun in that nation, as in the old tribe of Natchez, symbolized their god. For three consecutive mornings the youthful aspirant for military honors was obliged to go to the highest point of the great hill, where, armed with his buffalo hide, and alone, he was with the utmost reverence to present the front of his shield to the early morning sun as its rays gilded the rocky crags of the mountain, assuming the attitude of a warrior in the heat of battle, on guard against his enemy's spear and shower of arrows. This ceremony on the part of the novitiate, if reverently performed, gave his shield invulnerable power.
A story told to many of us during the campaign referred to, by one of the oldest of the Comanches, the oldest Indian I have ever seen—"Little Beaver," of the Osages—is very interesting, showing to what an art the despised savage of thirty years ago reduced story-telling. The dried-up old warrior prefaced his tale by stating that he was so aged "that he was brother of the highest peak of the Wichita Mountains," at the foot of which we were camped on a cold December night in 1868. Here is the story:
So many years ago that it seemed like a dream even to the narrator, the Comanches were the greatest tribe on earth. Their warriors were as numerous as a herd of buffalo on the Arkansas in the fall. They were more cunning than the coyote. Their herd of ponies contained so many animals—all fine and fat—that no man could count them in a year. All the other Indians of the plains and mountains feared and trembled at the name of Comanche.