Would you paint it, on your palette place all colors yet produced by the ingenuity of man. Mix them with rainbow drops. The pale faced moon will lend a shade, the stars another and the sun still another as he drops blood-red down through the mists of the sea. Stir and mix with matchless skill until you have of colors half a hundred and shades as many more. Now boldly dash the stupendous walls, castles, pinnacles, turrets, columns, and minarets where already they are gleaming a bright vermilion as they from Vulcan’s fiery furnace issued long ago.
When you have these colors fixed let Phaethon drive down the gorge in his chariot of fire leaving behind the gleam and the glow of it.
PAINT POTS ON SHORE OF YELLOWSTONE LAKE.
Here, the Sioux chiefs, crouching by their camp fires muttered their griefs and their woes. Here Rain in the Face cried out in revenge, revenge on the White chief with the Yellow Hair.
Yonder lay Sitting Bull with his three thousand warriors hidden in cleft and cave. Into the fateful snare dashed the White chief with his pitiful three hundred men. Like a mountain torrent Sitting Bull and his braves swept down upon that gallant band, and but one was left to tell the story of the Little Big Horn, but one to tell of the gallant stand of Custer and his brave men.
Only two survived of all that noble band, one, Curly, the half-breed scout, and the other, “Comanche,” the horse of Captain Keogh. Comanche was found several miles from the battle field with seven wounds. He recovered and the secretary of war detailed a soldier as his attendant.
Here, too, the Crow took revenge when driven back by the white man. Here they peopled the boiling, hissing springs and the steaming geysers with evil spirits, while beyond the mountains lay the Happy Hunting Ground.
A small remnant of this band gathered at the head of the Grand Cañon and there resolved with Spartan courage to die rather than be removed to a distant land there to die of homesickness and longing for the blue sky and the breath of the sweet air of their beloved mountains.
They built a raft and set it afloat at the foot of the Upper Falls feeling the peace and security that the mountains give, but they were rudely awakened one morning by the sharp crack of the white man’s rifle, the soldiers were upon them. Hastily boarding their raft they pushed it out into mid-stream. The strong current gathered the craft tossing it and pitching it onward on its foamy crest. The soldiers gaze in wonder, forgetting to fire. On, on, faster whirls that frail craft while above the wild roar of the water floats the death song.