We were now passing through the country of the Mandans, Gros Ventres, and Ricarees, the country through which old Hugh Glass crawled his hundred miles with only hate to sustain him. To the west lay the barren lands of the Little Missouri, through which Sully pushed with his military expedition against the Sioux on the Yellowstone. An army flung boldly through a dead land—a land without forage, and waterless—a labyrinth of dry ravines and ghastly hills! Sully called it "hell with the lights out." A magnificent, Quixotic expedition that succeeded! I compared it with the ancient expeditions—and I felt the eagle's wings strain within me. Sully! There were trumpets and purple banners for me in the sound of the name!
Late in the evening we reached the mouth of the Little Missouri. There we found one of the few remaining mud lodges of the ancient type. We landed and found ourselves in the midst of a forsaken little frontier town. A shambling shack bore the legend, "Store," with the "S" looking backward—perhaps toward dead municipal hopes. A few tumble-down frame and log shanties sprawled up the desultory grass-grown main street, at one end of which dwelt a Mandan Indian family in the mud lodge.
A dozen curs from the lodge resented our intrusion with canine vituperation. I thrust my head into the log-cased entrance of the circular house of mud, and was greeted with a sound of scolding in the Mandan jargon, delivered by a squaw of at least eighty years. She arose from the fire that burned in the center of the great circular room, and approached me with an "I-want-your-scalp" expression. One of her daughters, a girl dressed in a caricature of the white girl's garments, said to me: "She wants to know what you've got to trade." To this old woman of the prairie, all white men were traders.
"I want to buy," I said, "eggs, meat, bread, anything to eat."
| Boats Laid Up for the Winter at Washburn, N.D. | Washburn, N.D. |
The old woman looked me over with a whimper of amused superiority, and disappeared, soon reappearing with a dark brown object not wholly unlike a loaf of bread. "Wahtoo," she remarked, pointing to the dark brown substance.
I gave her a half-dollar. Very quietly she took it and went back to her fire. "But," said I, "do you sell your bread for fifty cents per loaf?"
The girl giggled, and the old woman gave me another piece of her Mandan mind. She had no change, it appeared. I then insisted upon taking the balance in eggs. The old woman said she had no eggs. I pointed to a flock of hens that was holding a sort of woman's club convention in the yard, discussing the esthetics of egg-laying, doubtless, while neglecting their nests.