Old Indian trails

by Walter McClintock

Then Strikes-on-Both-Sides sang the old song and gave me directions for the care of my new medicine bundle. By day it must hang from a tripod behind my lodge. At sunset I should bring it inside and burn sweet grass as incense.

One day a strange Indian came to our camp. As soon as he entered Little Creek’s lodge, I heard angry words from my Indian sister. She upbraided the visitor. She said he had a forked tongue; what he had said was not true; he spread [[76]]the report that Little Creek was so ill that some of his relatives came in haste; they thought he was dying. It is offensive to an Indian woman to have a report spread about that anything is the matter with her man. She feels ashamed and humiliated, as though she had neglected him.

Near the end of our stay on the prairie, a storm came from the northwest, a sullen cloud mass with forked lightning and a whirling wind that smote Mad Wolf’s tepee and twisted it out of shape. My lodge shook as though it were going over. Then the wind suddenly leaped into the south and the storm quickly ended. The women carried Mad Wolf’s Medicine Bundles to a place of safety in Little Creek’s lodge; and as soon as they had repaired the damage, they carried the bundles back.

Then Mad Wolf moved our camp from the open plains to his winter home in the sheltered valley of Cutbank River. The old chief led the way, riding at the head of our line, tall, erect, and stately, across the broad table-land. Little Creek and I were behind, driving the horses and cattle, riding backwards and forwards, rounding up and heading off, until we drove them back to his ranch in the valley.

There Mad Wolf had a cabin built of logs for shelter from winter storms and blizzards, also corrals and low-lying sheds for cattle and horses. But in good weather he and his family preferred living in tepees.

On both sides of the valley were cutbanks, which led to grass-covered plateaus overlooked by high hills—fine range for both cattle and horses. West were the snowy summits of the Rocky Mountains; east and south the Great Plains; and north a massive ridge grass-covered and bare of trees—the Hudson Bay Divide which formed an unbroken line of high hills against the horizon.

Strikes-on-Both-Sides pitched my tepee in the valley across a meadow from Mad Wolf’s camp, near a large rock [[77]]in a bend in the river where the dark water slowly eddied round and round in a deep pool. She was the favorite child of the old chief; always cheerful and kind and skilled in the arts of Indian women. She was so watchful and alert that no bird or animal near camp ever escaped her keen eyes. She brought me a present of brook trout just caught from the river, also some pulp from the heart of a cottonwood tree, a delicacy with a flavor like maple sap. She and her mother made braids of sweet grass for perfume to put with my clothes, and little buckskin bags of fragrant balsam and meadow-rue berries.

My Indian sister made fun of the rough sticks I used for lodge-pins; she was ashamed to have visitors see them. She said they might spread a report that the Mad Wolf family did not look after their white son. So she made me a set of twenty lodge-pins of conventional style—chokecherry wood with the bark peeled off and painted red, leaving two narrow rings of bark at the top, also a set of small pins for fastening together the front of my tepee.

In the afternoon, friends often came to go with Mad Wolf into the sweat lodge—White Calf, the head-chief; Horn, an old hunter and trapper; White Grass, and Heavy Breast. The structure they used for their sweat was on the bank of the river. It was made of willow branches twined into an oval frame and covered with robes and blankets. Inside was a hole in the ground for hot stones. Four men entered at a time. They spouted water on the stones and kept wetting their hair. Because of the steam rising from the stones, the bathers kept their heads close to the ground and chanted and prayed to the Sun, Moon and Morning Star. After an hour, with four intervals for fresh air, they came out, and with shouts plunged into the cold river for a reaction.

The sweat-bath was used mostly by older men—never by women. Men who were ill went in to pray for healing [[78]]power. It was used in ceremonies of all kinds, also to secure dreams and for pleasure. It was taken by men moved to anger, or depressed by the death of a near friend or relative.