There is no direct notice of this engagement in the Indian Report, but the Commissioner states that peace had prevailed among the treaty tribes during the year, with the conspicuous exception of the Kiowa, whose increasing turbulence would seem to render military operations against them advisable. In another place he states that both the Kiowa and Comanche were known to be hostile, and that the army had been ordered to chastise them, as the only way to make them respect their engagements and to stay their murderous hands. In going to Bent's fort, he says:
Citizens of the United States in advance of me as I went out, and also on my return, were brutally murdered and scalped upon the road. It is a fact also worthy of remark that the murders were committed almost within range of the guns at Fort Larned. The Indian mode of warfare, however, is such that it is almost impossible to detect them in their designs. They cautiously approach the Santa Fé road, commit the most atrocious deeds, and flee to the plains (Report, 85).
WINTER 1860—61
This winter is known as ´dálká-i Dóha Sai, "Crazy-bluff winter." While the Kiowa were encamped on the south side of the Arkansas, near the western line of Kansas, a man named Gaá-bohónte, "Crow-bonnet," the brother of the man who had been killed by the Caddo the preceding summer, raised a party for revenge. They went to the Caddo camp on the head of Sugar creek, in the present Caddo and Wichita reservation, where they encountered a Caddo looking for his horses. They killed and scalped him, and brought back with them the scalp over which the Kiowa held a scalp dance at a bluff on the south side of Bear creek (T'á-zótă´ P'a, "Antelope-corral river"), near its head, between the Cimarron and the Arkansas, near the western line of Kansas. From the rejoicing on this occasion the place took the name of Foolish, or Crazy bluff.
The picture represents a man with a scalp on a pole, while the projection at the upper end of the winter mark indicates the bluff.
Fig. 128—Winter 1860—1861—Crazy-bluff winter.
About the same time a war party went into Texas, but lost three men.
The zótă´ or driveway for catching antelope was an open corral of upright logs, stripped of their branches, with an entrance, from which diverged two lines of posts set at short distances from one another and covered with blankets to resemble men. The antelope were surrounded on the prairie and driven toward the corral until they came between the converging lines of posts, when it was an easy matter to force them into the closed circle, where they were slaughtered. The zótă´ was used for catching antelope at any season of the year. It was not used for deer, as the deer could jump over an ordinary corral.
For a description of another method, the ät'ákagúa, or "antelope medicine," see Winter [1848—49]. Antelope make regular trails from their shelter places to their grazing grounds, and the Indians sometimes caught them by digging a large pitfall along such a trail—an entire band assisting in the work—and carrying the excavated earth a long distance away, so as to leave no trace on the trail, after which the pitfall was loosely covered with bushes and grass. The hunters then concealed themselves until the herd approached, when they closed in behind and drove the frightened animals forward until they fell into the pit.