Page 126, l. 10: “I have come to call you.” Buffalo-Bird Woman means that her father invited his son-in-law to come and live in his earth lodge. If he had not sent this invitation, the young couple would have set up housekeeping elsewhere.
Page 128, l. 37: “Only a strong, well-fed pony could go all day on wet ground.” Nature designed the solid hoof of the horse for a prairie or semidesert country. A pony finds it hard to withdraw his hoof in wet spongy soil, and soon tires. A deer or buffalo, with divided hoof, runs upon wet ground with comparative ease. Every farmer’s boy knows that an ox will walk through a swamp in which a horse will mire.
Page 142, l. 26: “With two fingers crooked like horns, the sign for buffaloes.” So many languages were spoken by our Indian tribes, that they found it necessary to invent a sign language so that Indians, ignorant of each other’s speech, could converse. A well-trained deaf mute and an old plains Indian can readily talk together by signs.
Page 143, l. 4: “Creeping up the coulees.” A coulee in the Dakotas is a grassy ravine, usually dry except in spring and autumn, and after a heavy rain.
Page 157, l. 19: “They starved, because they are hunters and raise no corn.” The Hidatsas and Mandans as agriculturists felt themselves superior to the hunting tribes. Small-Ankle refers here to the western, or Teton, Sioux. The eastern Sioux were corn raisers.
Page 158, l. 10: “My mothers and I were more than a week threshing.” In the summer of 1912, the author had Buffalo-Bird Woman pace off on the prairie the size of her mothers’ field, as she recollected it. It measured one hundred and ninety yards in length by ninety yards in width. Such were some of the fields which in olden days were cultivated with wooden sticks and bone hoes.
SUPPLEMENT
HOW TO MAKE AN INDIAN CAMP
Young Americans who wish to grow up strong and healthy should live much out of doors; and there is no pleasanter way to do this than in an Indian camp. Such a camp you can make yourself, in your back yard or an empty lot or in a neighboring wood.