Turning to me he spoke: “My daughter, I have tried to raise you right. I have hunted and worked hard to give you food to eat. Now I want you to take my advice. Take this man for your husband. Try always to love him. Do not think in your heart, ‘I am a handsome young woman, but this man, my husband, is older and not handsome.’ Never taunt your husband. Try not to do anything that will make him angry.”
I did not answer yes or no to this; for I thought, “If my father wishes me to do this, why that is the best thing for me to do.” I had been taught to be obedient to my father. I do not think white children are taught so, as we Indian children were taught.
For nigh a week my father and my two mothers were busy getting ready the feast foods for the wedding. On the morning of the sixth day, my father took from his bag a fine weasel-skin cap and an eagle-feather war bonnet. The first he put on my head; the second he handed to my sister, Cold Medicine. “Take these to Hanging Stone’s lodge,” he said.
We were now ready to march. I led, my sister walking with me. Behind us came some of our relatives, leading three horses; and, after them, five great kettles of feast foods, on poles borne on the shoulders of women relatives. The kettles held boiled dried green corn and ripe corn pounded to meal and boiled with beans; and they were steaming hot.
There was a covered entrance to Hanging Stone’s lodge. The light was rather dim inside, and I did not see a dog lying there until he sprang up, barking wu-wu! and dashed past me. I sprang back, startled. Cold Medicine tittered. “Do not be foolish,” called one of our women relatives. Cold Medicine stopped her tittering, but I think we were rather glad of the dog. My sister and I had never marched in a wedding before, and we were both a little scared.
I lifted the skin door—it was an old-fashioned one swinging on thongs from the beam overhead—and entered the lodge. Hanging Stone sat on his couch against the puncheon fire screen. I went to him and put the weasel-skin cap on his head. The young man who was to be my husband was sitting on his couch, a frame of poles covered with a tent skin. Cold Medicine and I went over and shyly sat on the floor near-by.
The kettles of feast foods had been set down near the fireplace, and the three horses tied to the corn stage without. Hanging Stone had fetched my father four horses. We reckoned the weasel cap and the war bonnet as worth each a horse; and, with these and our three horses, my father felt he was going his friend one horse better. It was a point of honor in an Indian family for the bride’s father to make a more valuable return gift than that brought him by the bridegroom and his friends.
