LOITERINGS AND LIFE
ON THE GREAT PRAIRIES OF THE WEST.
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BY J. M. LEGARE.
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A LOVE STORY OF THE PRAIRIES.
About the year 1820, among the Sioux, on Teton river, was a young chief whose reputation had extended throughout the West, and excited the envy and wonder, not only of the warriors of his own nation, but of every tribe, from the Chippeways, who paddle bark canoes on the western lakes, to the root-digging Shoshones at the base of the Rocky Mountains; and far and near the hearts of the young Indian girls were taken captive by the rude chivalry which added brilliancy to his invariable success. Like many other heroes, with his early history was mingled not a little of the fabulous and superhuman, and what was most singular, was, that there appeared to be some grounds for this belief, it being well known that he was not a Sioux by birth—a hunting-party of that tribe having found him, when a mere infant, lying in the open prairie, partially wrapped in a white buffalo-robe, a string of grisly-bear’s teeth around his neck, and an eagle-feather in his little clenched hand—all unmistakable evidences of exalted birth. The tradition did not stop here, for if the testimony of some was to be credited, a great war-eagle was perceived soaring away into the blue, from whose talons, beyond doubt, the child must have dropped. One thing was certain, the insignia of a chief about the young stranger admitted of no dispute, and accordingly as a chief and with no small care was he reared.
But now that Ta-his-ka (“the white buffalo,” a name given him by the Sioux, from the robe in which he was found) had grown, young as he was, to be the most prominent warrior and successful hunter from the Pacific to the Mississippi, it appeared that his parentage was not so celestial as had been by some imagined, for the Pawnees formally demanded the chief as one of themselves; and to prove their priority of right, described minutely a scar on his hip, which, whether really what they claimed it to be, or a mark of which they had obtained secret information and craftily turned to account, was found to be as they had described. The only result of this extraordinary proposal was a storm of words in the Tepe-wah-kah (council-house) of the Sioux, directed against the audacity of the Pawnees, and an amount of hate cherished between the two tribes which filled some of the lodges with scalps and others with wailing as well on the Teton, as in the vicinity of the River Platte. Ta-his-ka himself both in the council and on the prairies was foremost in opposing the Pawnees, and the trophies torn from these last were neither few nor bloodless when the young chief headed a hunting party whose search was more frequently after the hunters of the buffaloes than the herds themselves. But the latter were not readily baffled, and bringing all their ingenuity into play to entrap his person, succeeded at last one day in decoying Ta-his-ka into a ravine, where his braves were every man slain, and he himself, while performing feats worthy of a copper-colored Achilles, stunned by an arrow and disarmed instantaneously. Overjoyed at having in their possession one whose presence they superstitiously believed to be a pledge of good luck to their lodges, the captors hastened homeward, guarding him with the utmost vigilance, but always refraining from binding his limbs, as they did not despair now by large promises and offers to induce him to acknowledge his Pawnee paternity. Accordingly, the chiefs loaded him with honors and caresses, and made him proffers of squaws, horses, lodges, robes, and, in short, every thing which constitutes savage wealth; to all of which he listened with a contemptuous indifference and total silence, which was sufficient answer in itself. At this time there existed among the Pawnees a custom probably derived originally from the Mandans, remains of whose villages are to be seen even so low down the Missouri as the mouth of the Platte, the words used to designate it being found in the latter tongue; this custom was to select every alternate ten years the most beautiful female child of the tribe, who was placed under the strict guardianship of two old squaws, without whom she left the medicine-lodge neither day nor night, and between whom she was obliged to sleep until her term of years expired, in order that she might be a pure sacrifice to the Evil Spirit during the feast of green corn, at the termination of the ten years, when, in the midst of barbarous ceremonies, games, etc., the victim suddenly disappeared no one but the medicine-men knew where. This doomed girl was called Mah-pen’ke’ka-morse,[[4]] (wife of the Evil Spirit,) and they supposed, caused the fiend to abstain from injuring the tribe to which he was related by marriage. Now as Ta-his-ka was believed to be in some sort supernatural, one of the divisions of the medicine-lodge was assigned him, and the partitions in an Indian house being neither so impervious to sight nor bodily passage as plastered walls, a most unheard-of thing took place—the appointed squaw of the Evil One yielded up her heart and person to the illustrious prisoner, eluding nightly the vigilance of her duennas. As for Ta-his-ka, he loved for the first time, and with all the resistless passion of a wild but earnest soul; thus, although he was brought every moon before the council of chiefs, and the former offers renewed only to be answered by the same stern silence, (for no man had heard him speak since his capture,) he made no attempt at escape, contenting himself with merely food enough to sustain life, and scorning to touch the prairie delicacies daily set before him.