TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Footnote anchors are denoted by [number], and the footnotes have been placed at the end of the book.

Some minor changes to the text are noted at the [end of the book.] These are indicated by a dashed blue underline.

THE BOOK OF THE
AMERICAN INDIAN

An Indian Scout
Illustration from
A BUNCH OF BUCKSKINS
by Frederic Remington
Originally published by
R. H. Russell, 1901

THE BOOK OF THE
AMERICAN INDIAN

Written by

HAMLIN GARLAND

Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters

Pictured by

FREDERIC REMINGTON

Harper & Brothers Publishers

New York and London

THE BOOK OF THE
AMERICAN INDIAN

Copyright, 1923
By Hamlin Garland
Printed in the U.S.A.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

WAHIAH—A SPARTAN MOTHER

THE BOOK OF THE
AMERICAN INDIAN

WAHIAH—A SPARTAN MOTHER

I

From a casual point of view the Indian Agency at Darlington was dull and commonplace if not actually dispiriting. The sun blazed hot in the roadway which ran between the licensed shops, the office and the issue house. Lean dogs were slinking about. A few bedraggled red women with shawls over their heads stood talking softly together on the trader’s porch. A group of warriors in the shade of the blacksmith shop were discussing some ancient campaign, while now and then a clerk in shirt sleeves, his hands full of papers, moved across the plaza, his step quickened by the sting of the sun.

A little back from the street the school building sat bleakly exposed on the sod, flanked on each side by still more inhospitable dormitories—all humming with unseen life. Across the river—the one grateful, gracious touch of all—the yellowed conical tents of the Cheyennes rose amidst green willows, and far beyond, on the beautiful velvet green of the prairies, their untethered ponies fed.

To the careless observer this village was lonely, repulsive; to the sympathetic mind it was a place of drama, for there the passions, prejudices, ancestral loves and hates of two races met and clashed.

There the man of the polished stone age was trying, piteously, tragically trying, to take on the manner of life of a race ten thousand years in advance of him, and there a few devoted Quakers were attempting to lead the nomads into the ways of the people of the plow.

The Cheyennes, at the time practically military prisoners, had given but a nominal consent to the education of their children, and many individuals openly opposed it. For the most part the pupils in the school wore buckskin shirts and were the wastrels and orphans of the tribe, neglected and stupid. The fine, bold sons of the principal chiefs would not surrender their freedom, and their contempt for those who did was expressed in the cry, “Ahyah! Whiteman, Whiteman!”

It will appear that the problem before the teacher of the Cheyenne and Arapahoe school in those days was not merely to govern the pupils in the schoolroom, but to induce men like Tomacham and Tontonava to send their own brave and handsome sons. With great native wit and shrewdness, Seger, the newly appointed master, said to the agent: “Our point of attack is the child. The red man’s love for his offspring is very deep. We must also convince the mothers. They are the conservative forces.”

The young teacher, Seger, had already won many friends among the chief men by his unfailing helpfulness as well as sympathy with their ways, and not content with the few pupils he had, he went out among the tepees pleading the cause of education with the fathers in the hearing of the mothers.

The old men listened gravely and for the most part courteously—never interrupting, weighing each word as it fell. Some of them admitted the reasonableness of his plea. “We think you are telling us the truth,” they said, “but our hearts will not let us go with you on the road. We love the old things. We do not like these new things. We despise the white man’s clothing—we do not want our sons to go crop-haired like a black man. We have left the warpath—never to go back to it. What is before us we do not know—but we are not yet ready to give our children into your hands.” And the women sitting near applauded and said, “Aye, aye!”

Seger argued: “What will you do? The buffaloes are gone. The elk and deer are going. Your sons cannot live by hunting—they must live as the white man lives—by tilling the earth.”

“All that is strange,” darkly answered Tomacham. “We are as the Great Spirit made us. We cannot change. If the Great One wished us to be white why did He not make us so in the first place?”

Nevertheless, Seger’s words sank deep in the ears of Tomacham and Wahiah, his wife, and one day the chief appeared at the door of the school bringing his son Atokan, a splendid young lad of fourteen—handsome as a picture of Hiawatha, with his fringed leggins, beaded shirt, shining, braided hair and painted cheeks. Behind—a long way back—came the mother.

“You see I have brought my son,” began the chief after Seger’s delighted greeting.

“It is good. He will make a fine man.”

The chief’s face clouded. “I do not bring him to become like these,” and he pointed at a couple of stupid, crop-haired boys who stood gaping at him. “I bring my son to learn to read and write, but he must not be clipped and put into white man’s clothing. He can follow your ways without losing his hair. Our way of dress pleases us better.”

Seger was obstinate. “I will not take him. If he comes he must do as the rest—and he must obey me!”

The old chief stood in silence looking on his son, whose grace and dignity appealed even to the teacher’s unæsthetic mind, and his eyes grew dim with prophetic sadness. The mother drew near, and Tomacham turned and spoke to her and told her what the white man said.

“No, no!” she wailed.

Then Tomacham was resolved: “No, my friend, I cannot do it. Let me have him one more day. I cannot bear to leave him to become a white man to-day. See, there is his mother, waiting, weeping; let him be a small, red brave till to-morrow. I have given my word; I will bring him.”

With some understanding of the chief’s ache in the heart Seger consented, and Tomacham let his young warrior stay home for one more day of the old kind.

What sorrowful ceremonies took place in that well-smoked tepee Seger did not know, but next day the chief came again; he was very sorrowful and very tender, but the boy’s face was sullen, his head drooping.

Slowly the father said: “Friend, I have thought all night of what you have said to me. The mother is singing a sad song in our tepee, but we have decided. We give our boy into your hands; teach him the road.”

And with a quiet word to his son the heroic red man turned and went away to hide his quivering lips. It was as if he had given his son to an alien tribe, never to see him again.

When the mother saw her boy next day she burst into a moan of resentful pain. All his wild, free grace was gone. His scissored hair was grotesque. His clumsy gray coat pinched his shoulders, his trousers were absurdly short, and his boots hard and clumsy. He slunk into the circle of the fire like a whipped dog and would not lift his head even in reply to questions. Tomacham smoked hard to keep back the tears, but his mind was made up, his word given. “We are on the road—we cannot turn back,” he said, though it cut him to the heart to see his eaglet become a barnyard fowl.

II

By this time Seger had reduced the school to something like order, and the pupils were learning fast; but truancy continued to render his afternoon sessions farcical, for as soon as they had eaten their midday meal many of the children ran away to the camp across the river and there remained the entire afternoon. Others paid no heed to the bell, but played on till weary before returning to the school. In all this rebellion Atokan was a leader, and Seger, after meditating long, determined on a form of discipline which might have appalled the commander of a regiment of cavalry. He determined to apply the rod.

Now this may seem a small thing, but it was not; it was a very momentous thing. It was indeed the most dangerous announcement he could make to a warlike tribe chafing under restraint, for red people are most affectionate parents and very seldom lay violent hands upon their children or even speak harshly to them. Up to this time no white man had ever punished a red child, and when Seger spoke to the agent about it he got no help; on the contrary, the old Quaker said:

“Friend Seger, I think thee a very rash young man and I fear thee will involve us all in a bloody outbreak.” Then he added, “Can’t thee devise something else?”

“I must have discipline,” argued Seger. “I can’t have my pupils making a monkey of me. There are only four or five that need welting, and if you give me leave to go ahead I’ll make ’em toe the mark; otherwise, I’ll resign.”

“Thee can go ahead,” testily exclaimed the agent. “But thee sees how we are situated. We have no troops in call. Thee knows, also, that I do not approve of force; and yet,” he added, in reflection, “we have made a failure of the school—thee alone seems to have any control of the pupils. It is not for me to criticize. Proceed on thy way, but I will not be responsible for any trouble thee may bring upon thyself.”

“I will take all that comes,” responded Seger—who had been trained in the school of the Civil War, “and I will not involve you in any outbreak.”

That night Seger made his announcement: “Hereafter every scholar must obey my bell—and return to the schoolroom promptly. Those who do not will be whipped.”

The children looked at him as if he had gone crazy.

He went on: “Go home and tell your people. Ask them to think it over—but remember to be here at sunset, and after this every bell must be obeyed instantly.”

The children ran at once to the camp, and the news spread like some invisible vapor, and soon every soul in the entire agency, red and white alike, was athrill with excitement. The half-breeds (notoriously timorous) hastened to warn the intrepid schoolmaster: “Don’t do that. They will kill you.” The old scouts and squaw-men followed: “Young feller, you couldn’t dig out of the box a nastier job—you better drop it right now and skip.”

“I am going to have discipline,” said Seger, “or tan the jacket of every boy I’ve got.”

Soon after this he met Tomacham and Tontonava, both men of great influence. After greeting him courteously Tomacham said:

“I hear that you said you were going to whip our children. Is this true?”

“It is!” answered Seger, curtly.

“That is very wrong and very foolish,” argued Tontonava. “We did not give our children into your care to be smitten with rods as the soldiers whip mules.”

“If the children act like mules I will whip them,” persisted Seger. “I punish only bad children—I do not beat good ones.”

“It is not our custom to strike our children. Do you think we will permit white men to do so?” asked Tontonava, breathing hard.

Assuming an air of great and solemn deliberation, Seger said, using the sign language to enforce his words: “Go home and think of this. The Great Father has built this schoolhouse for your children. He has given them warm clothing and good food. He has given them beds to sleep in and a doctor to help them when they are sick. Now listen. Miokany is speaking. So long as they enjoy all these things they are bound to obey me. They must obey me, their teacher,” and he turned and left the two old men standing there, amazed and indignant.

That night all the camps were filled with a discussion of this wondrous thing. Seger’s threat was taken up formally by the men in council and informally by the women. It was pivotal, this question of punishment—it marked their final subjection to the white man.

“If we lose our children, then surely we are doomed to extinction,” Tomacham said.

“Let us fight!” cried fierce Unko. “What is the use of sitting here like chained wolves till we starve and die? Let us go out against this white man and perish gloriously.” And a few applauded him.

But the graver men counseled patience and peace.

“We do not fear death—but we do not wish to be bound and sent away into the mysterious hot lands where our brethren languish.”

“Then let us go to the school and frighten ‘Johnny Smoker’ so that he will not dare to whip any child,” cried Unko.

To this Tomacham answered: “‘Johnny Smoker’ is my friend. I do not wish to harm him. Let us see him again and counsel with him.”

“No,” answered Unko. “Let us face him and command him to let our children alone. If he strikes my child he must die.”

And to this many of the women cried out in piercing nasal tones: “Ah, that is good—do that!”

But Wahiah, the mother of Atokan, looked at the ground and remained silent.

III

When the pupils next assembled they were as demure as quails, and Seger knew that they had been warned by their parents not to incur their teacher’s displeasure; but Atokan looked aside, his proud head lifted. Beside him sat a fine boy, two years younger, son of Unko, and it was plain that they were both ready to rebel.

The master recognized the gravity of the moment. If he did not punish, according to his word, his pupils would despise him, his discipline was at an end; and to stripe the backs of these high-spirited lads was to invite death—that he knew better than any white man could tell him. To provoke an outbreak would be a colossal crime, and yet he was a stubborn little man—persistent as a bulldog—capable of sacrificing himself in working out a theory. When a friendly half-breed came late that night and warned him that the camp was in debate whether to kill him or not he merely said: “You tell them I am doing the will of the Great Father at Washington and I am not afraid. What they do to me will fly to Washington as the light flies, and the soldiers will come back as swiftly.”

Immediately after school opened next morning several of the parents of the children came quickly in and took seats, as they were accustomed to do, along the back wall behind the pupils. They were graver than usual—but otherwise gave no sign of anger and remained decorously quiet. Among them was Wahiah.

The master went on with firm voice and ready smile with the morning’s work, well aware that the test of his authority would come after intermission, when he rang the bell to recall his little squad to their studies.

As the children ran out to play all the old people followed and took seats in the shade of the building, silent and watchful. The assistant teacher, a brave little woman, was white with excitement as Seger took the bell some ten minutes later and went to the door personally to give the signal for return. He rang as cheerily as if he were calling to a feast, but many of the employees shuddered as if it were their death knell.

The larger number of the children came scurrying, eager to show their obedience, but a squad of five or six of the boys remained where they were, as if the sound of the bell had not reached them. Seger rang again and called personally: “Come, boys, time to work.”

At this three others broke away from the rebellious group and came slowly toward him, but Atokan and the son of Unko turned toward the river.

A Kiowa Maiden

That Indian parents are very proud of their children’s progress is evidenced by the eagerness with which they send their sons and daughters to the schools established by the Government on the different Indian reservations. The Kiowa maiden here pictured is one of the many Indian girls and boys who more and more are availing themselves of the opportunity to obtain an education and thus fit themselves to take their places in civilized society.

The Red Man’s Parcel Post
Illustration from
A PILGRIM ON THE GILA
by Owen Wister
Originally published in
Harper’s Magazine, November, 1895

Seger made a pleasant little speech to the obedient ones and ended: “I know we are to be good friends in the future as we have been in the past,” but a little shiver passed over the school as he went out, stern faced and resolute, to recall the truants.

The wife of Unko rose and scuttled away to give the alarm, but Wahiah stood with her robe drawn over her lips as if in struggle to repress a cry. Tomacham smoked on quietly, waiting the issue.

Meanwhile, Atokan strolled along the path, shooting his arrow at small objects on the ground, apparently oblivious of his teacher’s hastening footsteps.

When within hearing Seger called: “You know the rules, Atokan. Why do you not answer the bell?”

Atokan made no reply, and Seger was tempted to lay hands upon him; but to do this would involve a smart chase, and, besides, he was too wise to seem to be angry. He followed the boys, pleading with them, till Atokan turned and said: “You go away. Bimeby I come.”

“You must come now!”

“You going whip me?”

“Yes!”

“Then I don’t come.”

After half an hour of this humiliating parley Seger had the dubious satisfaction of seeing the truant set his face toward the schoolroom—for Atokan knew his father and mother were waiting, and into his heart came the desire to test “Johnny Smoker’s” courage. With insolent slowness he led the way past the group of his elders, on into the schoolroom, followed by twenty-five or thirty Cheyennes and Arapahoes. Some of the men were armed and all were stern. The women’s faces were both sour and sad. It was plain that something beside brute force must be employed in dealing with the situation. Seger knew these people. Turning suddenly to Tomacham he asked:

“My friend, what do you send your children to school for?”

Taken by surprise, the chief hesitated. “To learn to read and write and speak like the white man.”

“What do you think I am here for?”

“To show our children the way,” he reluctantly answered. “But not to punish them.”

Seger was addressing the women through the chief. “Do you think I can teach your children if they are out shooting birds?”

“No, I do not think so.”

“Do you think it would be honest if I took pay for teaching your children and let them run to camp all the time?”

“No, I think it is necessary that the children be kept in school—but you must not whip them.”

Seger faced Unko. “What kind of a person do you want to have teach your children—a liar?”

“No, a liar is bad for them.”

Unko saw the drift of Seger’s remarks, and he moved about uneasily, the butt of his pistol showing from beneath his blanket.

Seger then said in a loud voice, “I am not a liar!” and repeated this in signs. “I told your children I would whip them if they did not obey me, and now I am going to do it! You know me; I do not say ‘I am your friend,’ and then work evil to your children. Jack, come here!” A little boy rose slowly and came and stood beside his teacher, who went on: “This is an orphan. He was dying in his grandmother’s tepee when I went to him. I took him—I nursed him—I sat by his bed many nights when you were asleep. Jennie,” he called again, “you come to me!” A shy little girl with scarred face tiptoed to her beloved teacher. “This one came to me so covered with sores that she was terrible to see. I washed her—she was almost blind. I made her see. I have done these things many times. There is not a child here that has not been helped by me. I am not boasting—this is my duty, it is the work the Great Father has told me to do. It is my work also to make your children obey me. I am the friend of all red men. I have eaten in your lodges. I have been in council with you. I am not a liar. It is my duty to whip disobedient children, and I will do it. Atokan, come up here!”

The boy rose and came forward, a smoldering fire in his black eyes. As Seger laid a hand on his shoulder and took up his whip Wahiah uttered a shuddering moan. A sinister stir went through the room. The white man’s dominion was about to be put to the final test. In Wahiah’s heart a mighty struggle was in progress. Love and pride in her son demanded that she put an end to the whipping, but her sense of justice, her love for Seger and her conviction that the boy was wrong kept her fixed and silent, though her lips quivered and the tears ran down her face. Tomacham’s broad breast heaved with passion, but he, too, remained silent.

“Will you obey me?” asked the master.

Receiving no answer, he took firm hold of Atokan’s collar and addressed the spectators. “Little Unko is younger than Atokan. He was led away by him. I will therefore give both whippings to Atokan,” and he brought the hissing withe down over the boy’s shoulders. Again a moan of involuntary protest went through the room. Never before had a white man struck a Cheyenne child and remained unpunished for his temerity—and no other man, not even the agent himself, could have struck that blow and survived the wrath of Tomacham.

Atokan seized the lapel of his coat in his teeth, and bit hard in order to stifle any moan of pain the sting of the whip might wring from him. His was the heart of a warrior, for, though the whip fell hissing with speed he uttered no cry, and when the rod was worn to a fragment he remained silent as a statue, refusing to answer a single word.

Seger, convinced that the punishment was a failure unless it conquered the culprit, caught up another willow withe and wore it out upon him, to no effect—for, casting a glance at the pieces lying on the floor, the boy’s lips curled in a smile of disdain as if to say: “I am a warrior; I do not cry!”

Realizing his failure, Seger caught him with a wrestler’s twist, threw him across his knee, and beat him with the flat of his hand. The suddenness of this attack, the shame of the attitude, added to the pain he was already suffering, broke the boy’s proud spirit. He burst into loud lamentation, dropped to the floor, and lay in a heap, sobbing like a child.

Straightening up, the teacher looked about him, expecting to meet a roused and ready group of warriors. Every woman and all the children were wildly moaning and sobbing. The men with stern and sorrowful faces were struggling in silence to keep back the tears. The resolute little white man had conquered by his logic, his justice, his bravery.

“Atokan, will you obey me?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” the boy answered—his spirit broken.

Turning to the mother, Seger very gently said: “I do not like to do this, Wahiah; it hurts my heart as it does yours, but it was necessary. Tomacham, once I was a soldier—like you. I was taught to obey. You may kill me for this, but the Great Father at Washington will say, ‘Miokany died doing his duty.’ I know how hard it is for you to plow and reap and do as the white man does, but it must be done or you will die. Your children can do nothing till they learn to speak the tongue. I am here to do that work. The children must stay in school. They must obey me. I do not whip good children who obey—only those who are bad. Now you old people go home and think over what I have said, and we will return to our lessons.”

Then a wonderful, an incredible, thing happened! Tomacham rose and took Seger’s hand and shook it silently in token of conviction. But Wahiah, the mother of Atokan, with tears still streaming down her cheeks, pressed the teacher’s hand in both of hers and looked into his face as if to speak, but could not; then snatching her son’s symbols of freedom, his bow and arrows, she broke them over her knee and stamped on the fragments in the face of all the school. “Obey Miokany,” she commanded, with Spartan vigor, and, turning swiftly, went out, followed by the sad and silent chieftain.

NISTINA

NISTINA

There was lamentation in the lodges of Sunmaker’s people, for the white soldiers had taken away the guns of Hawk’s young warriors, and now they were to be sent away into lands of captivity. Huddled in big wagons, the young men sat, downcast and sullen, ashamed to weep, yet choking with grief and despair.

“Had I known this,” said Hawk to the captain of the escort, “I would have died fighting,” and this defiant word he uttered in the harsh, booming tone of a village crier. It was heard by everyone in the camp, and the old women broke forth into wailing war songs, which made the fingers of sedate old sages clinch.

But the blue-coated soldiers, ranked and ready, stood with loaded guns in their hands, calmly observant, and the colonel sat his horse, not far away, ready to give the signal for departure.

Hawk, young, handsome, and reckless, for some ruffianism put upon him by a band of cattlemen, had organized a raid of retaliation, and for this outbreak the government was sending him and his band to Florida—a hot, strange land, far in the South. He, as its unconquered leader, sat bound and helpless in one of the head wagons, his feet chained to a rod, his hands ironed, and working like the talons of an eagle.

It was hard to sit thus in the face of his father and mother, but it was harder yet to know that Nistina, the daughter of Sunmaker, with her blanket over her face, sat weeping at the door of her father’s lodge. All the girls were moaning, and no one knew that Nistina loved Hawk—no one but her inseparable friend, Macosa, the daughter of Crane.

Hawk knew it, for they had often met at the river’s edge of a morning, when she came for water.

Now they were to part without one word of love, with no touch of hands, never to see each other again, for it was well known that those who went into that far country never returned—the breath of the great salt water poisoned them.

At last the colonel uttered a word of command. A bugle rang out. The piercing cries of the bereaved women broke forth again, wild and heart-breaking: the whips cracked like pistol shots, the mules set their shoulders to the collars, and the blue chariots and their hopeless captives moved slowly out across the prairie.

Hawk turned his head and caught one last glance from Nistina as she lifted her face to him, flung her robe over her head, and fell face downward on the earth, crushed, broken, and despairing.

With teeth set like those of a grizzly bear, the young chief strained at his cords, eager to fight and die in the face of his tribe, but the white man’s cruel chains were too strong. He fell back exhausted, too numb with despair to heed the taunt of the white soldier riding beside the wheel, cynical, profane, and derisive.

And while the young prisoner sat thus, with bowed head and low-hanging, lax hands, the little village of his people was lost to view—hidden by the willows on the river’s bank.

In the months which followed, the camp of Sunmaker resumed its accustomed round of duties and pleasure. The babes rollicked on the grass, the old men smoked placidly in their council lodges, and planned their next buffalo hunt; the children went reluctantly to the agency school of a morning, and came home with flying feet at night. All seemed as placid as a pool into which a suicide has sunk; but no word came to Nistina, from whose face the shadow never lifted. She had never been a merry girl like Macosa. She had been shy and silent and wistful even as a child, and as the months passed without a message from Hawk, she moved to her duties as silent as a shadow. Macosa, when the spring came again, took another lover, and laughed and said, “They have forgotten us, that Elk and Hawk.”

Nistina had many suitors, for was she not Sunmaker’s daughter, and tall and handsome besides? Mischievous Macosa, even after her marriage, kept her friend’s secret, but she could not forbear to tease her when they were alone together. “Hawk is a bad young man,” she said. “He has found another girl by this time. Why don’t you listen to Kias?” To such questions Nistina made no answer.

At the end of a year even Sunmaker, introspective as he was, could not fail to remark upon her loneliness. “My daughter, why do you seem so sad? There are many young men singing sweet songs for you to hear, yet you will not listen. It is time you took thought of these things.”

“I do not wish to marry,” she replied.

Then the old father became sorrowful, for he feared his loved one had placed her heart on some white soldier, and one day he called her to him and said: “My daughter, the Great Spirit decreed that there should be people of many colors on the earth. He called each good in his place, but it is not good that they mate one with the other. If a white man comes to speak soft words into your ears, turn away. He will work evil, and not good. Why do you not take a husband among your own people, as others do, and be content? You are of the age when girls marry.”

To this she replied: “My heart is not set on any white man, and I do not wish to marry. Let me stay with you and help to keep your lodge.”

The old man’s voice trembled as he said: “My daughter, since my son is gone, you are my staff. It is good to see you in our lodge, but I do not like to see you sad.”

Then she pretended to laugh, and said, “I am not sad,” and ran away.

When she was gone Sunmaker called Vetcora and told her what had happened. She smoked the pipe he handed to her and listened patiently. When he had finished speaking, she said:

“She will come round all right. All girls are not alike. By and by the true one will come, and then you’ll see her change her song. She will be keeping her own lodge soon.”

But Sunmaker was troubled by his daughter’s frequent visits to the agency across the river, and by her intimacy with Neeta, the daughter of Hahko, who had been away to school, and who had returned much changed, being neither white woman nor red.

She was living alone in a small hut on the river bank, and was not a good woman for Nistina to visit.

He could not know that his daughter went there because Neeta could read the white man’s papers, and would know if anything had happened to Hawk. No one knew, either, that Nistina slyly asked about learning to read. She laughed when she asked these questions, as though the matter were of no consequence. “How long did it take you to learn to read? Is it very hard to learn to write?”

“Oh no; it is very easy,” Neeta replied, boastingly, and when Nistina went away her eyes were very thoughtful.

Again and again she called before she could bring herself to the point of asking Neeta to go with her to the head of the school.

Neeta laughed. “Ho! Are you going to school? You will need to hump low over your toes, for you will go among the smallest girls.”

Nistina did not waver. “Come, go with me.”

With a smile on her face Neeta led the way to the office of the superintendent. “Professor Morten, I bring you a new scholar.”

Morten, a tall, grave-faced man, looked up from his desk, and said: “Why, it’s Nistina! Good morning, Nistina.”

“Mornin’,” said she, as well as she could.

“She wants to go to school, eh? Well, better late than never,” he added, with a smile.

“Tell him I want to work and earn money,” said Nistina.

When Neeta interpreted this, the teacher exclaimed: “Well, well! This is most astonishing! Why, I thought she hated the white man’s ways!”

“I think she want to marry white man,” remarked Neeta.

Mr. Morten looked at her coldly. “I hope not. You’re a mighty smart girl, Neeta, but I don’t like the way you carry on.”

Neeta smiled broadly, quite unabashed. “I’m all settled down now—no more skylarking round. I’m keeping house.”

“Well, see that you keep settled. I don’t understand this change in Nistina, but you tell her I’ll put her in charge of Mrs. Morten, and we’ll do the best we can for her. But tell her to send all these white men away; tell her not to listen to them.”

To Nistina Neeta said, “He says he will let you help his squaw, and she will teach you how to read and write.”

Nistina’s heart failed her when she heard this, for she had seen Mrs. Morten many times, and had heard many disturbing stories of her harshness. She was a tall, broad-shouldered woman, with keen gray eyes and a loud voice.

At last Mr. Morten turned, and said: “Nistina, you may come this afternoon after four o’clock, and we will arrange the whole matter. I am glad you are going to forsake Indian ways, which are very bad. Be a good girl, and you will be happy.”

When Neeta had explained what he said Nistina burst into a low cry, and, covering her face with her blanket, rushed away.

“That’s the last you’ll see of her,” said Neeta, maliciously. “She likes the Indian ways best.”

But Nistina was moved by a deeper impulse than fickle-hearted Neeta could comprehend. A sick boy had returned from Florida a few days before—a poor dying lad—and to Nistina he had brought word from young Hawk. “I am studying so that I can send words on paper, like the white man,” the message ran. “By and by I will send a white word to you.”

This message instantly sank deep, although Nistina gave no sign. She had more than the usual shyness of the maidens of her tribe, and it was painful to her to have even this vague message transmitted by another.

The girl thought long. She wished to send a message to her lover, but for some days could not bring herself to confide in Neeta. Days went by, and her resolution remained unformed. Nearly every evening she had been going to see Neeta, but always her courage had failed her, and then came the thought: “I, too, will learn to write and to read, and then I can tell him how much I love him, and that I will wait till I am old and I will love no one else.”

There was a great deal of gossip among the red women. “She is going to marry a white soldier, that Nistina,” they said. “She is working for money to buy fine beads and cloth.”

“It may be,” said her stepmother. “She does not open her heart to me. She talks no more than an owl.”

The teachers marveled at ’Tina’s dullness in arithmetic and her amazing progress in writing. In an incredibly short time she was able to scrawl a note to her lover. It was a queer little letter, written with painful exactness, in imitation of the copybooks:

I heard you words what you sent. They was good words. It made my heart glad that words Black Fox which he brought. I am wait all time for you. No one else is in my thoughts. This letter I am written me myself all lone—no one is help me. No one knows that I put it in puss-tofis. I send mogasuns.

Nistina.

With this letter all stamped and directed, and the packages of moccasins, she hurried with beating heart to the store in which the post-office occupied a corner. There she hovered like a mother partridge about its nest, coming and going, till a favorable moment offered. She knew just what to do. She had rehearsed it all in her mind a hundred times, and when she had slipped the letter into the slit she laid the package on the window, and flew away to watch and to wait for a word from the far-away land.

Weeks passed, and her heart grew sad and heavy. She dared not ask for a letter, but lingered at the store till the clerks grew jocose and at last familiar, and her heart was bitter toward all white men.

In her extremity she went to Macosa, who was now a matronly wife, mother of a sturdy son, and asked her to go to the post-office and inquire for a letter.

“A letter!” exclaimed she. “Who is going to write you a letter?”

After much persuasion she consented to go, but returned empty handed. She had only half regarded Nistina’s request, but as the tears came to her friend’s eyes, she believed, and all of the goodness of her heart arose, and she said:

“Don’t cry. I will go every day and ask, if you wish me to.”

It is hard to wait for a letter when the letter is the one thing in life worth waiting for, and Nistina was very silent and very sad all the time, and her mistress wondered at this; but her questions brought no reply from the girl, who kept at her writing diligently, steadily refusing to confuse her mind with other things. She did not seem to wish to talk—only to write at every spare moment, and each day her writing grew in beauty of line till it was almost as beautiful as the printed copy.

At last she composed another letter:

Hawk. My friend. I not hearing from you. If you are sick you don’t write. My heart is now very sad. May be you die by this time. Long time I am here waiting. Listening for your words I am standing each day. No one my loving but you. Come home you get away quick, for I all time waiting.

Nistina.

After she had mailed this Nistina suddenly lost all interest in her studies, and went back to the lodge of her father. In her heart she said: “If he does not answer me I will go out on the hill and cry till I die. I do not care to live if he is not coming to me.”

She took her place in her father’s lodge as before, giving no explanation of her going nor the reason for her return. The kindly old chief smoked and gazed upon her sadly, and at last said, gently:

“My daughter, you are sad and silent. Once you laughed and sang at your sewing. What has happened to you? My child has a dark face.”

“I am older. I am no longer a child,” she said, unsmilingly.

And at last, in the middle of the third winter, when the white people were giving presents to each other, a letter and a little package came for Nistina, and Macosa came running with them.

“Here is your talking leaf,” she said. “Now I think you will laugh once more. Read it, for I am very curious.”

But Nistina snatched the precious package and ran into her lodge, to be alone with her joy.

It was a marvelous thing. There was the letter—a blue one—with her name spelled on it in big letters, Nistina, but she opened the package first. It contained a shining pouch, and in the pouch was a necklace of wondrous beads such as she had never seen, and a picture of her lover in white man’s dress. How strange he looked with his hair cut short! She hardly knew him.

Her heart beat strong and loud as she opened the letter, and read the first words, “Nistina, I am loving you.” After that she was confused, for Hawk could not write as well as she, and she read with great trouble, but the end she understood—“I am coming home.”

She rose and walked to her father’s lodge, where Macosa sat. She entered proudly, the letter in her hand. Her head was lifted, her eyes shone with pride.

“My letter is from Hawk,” she said, quietly. “He is coming home.”

And at this message Macosa and Vetcora covered their mouths in sign of inexpressible astonishment.

Sunmaker smoked on with placid face till he began to understand it all; then he said: “My daughter, you warm my heart. Sit beside me and tell me of this wonderful thing.”

Then she spoke, and her story was to him a sweet relief from care. “It is good,” he said. “Surely the white people are wonder-working beings.”

THE IRON KHIVA

THE IRON KHIVA

I

For countless generations a gentle brown people had dwelt high on the top of a mesa—far in the desert. Their houses rose like native forms of sandstone ledges on the crest of the rocky hills—seemed indeed a part of the cliffs themselves.

To join the old women climbing the steep path laden with water bottles of goatskin, to mingle with the boys driving home the goats—and to hear the girls chattering on the roofs was to forget modern America. A sensitive nature facing such scenes shivered with a subtle transport such as travelers once felt in the presence of Egypt before the Anglo-Saxon globe trotter had vulgarized it. This pueblo was a thousand years old—and to reach it was an exploration. Therefore, while the great Mississippi Valley was being overrun these simple folk lived apart.

They were on the maps of Arizona, but of this they had no knowledge and no care. Some of them were not even curious to see the white man who covered the mysterious land beyond the desert. The men of mystery in the tribe, the priests and the soothsayers, deeply resented the prying curiosity and the noisy impertinence of the occasional cowboy who rode across the desert to see some of their solemn rites with snakes and owls.

The white men grew in power just beyond the horizon line, but they asked no favors of him. They planted their corn in the sand where the floods ran, they guarded their hardy melons, and gathered their gnarled and rusty peaches year by year as contentedly as any people—chanting devout prayers and songs of thanksgiving to the deities that preside over the clouds and the fruitful earth. They did not ask for the corrugated-iron roofs of the houses which an officious government built for them, nor for the little schoolhouse which the insistent missionary built at the foot of their mesa.

They were a gentle folk—small and round and brown of limb, peaceful and kindly. The men on their return from the fields at night habitually took their babes to their arms—and it was curious and beautiful to see them sitting thus on their housetops, waiting for supper—their crowing infants on their knees. Such action disturbed all preconceived notions of desert dwellers.

They had their own governors, their sages, their physicians. Births and deaths went on among them accompanied by the same joy and sorrow that visit other human beings in greener lands. They did not complain of their desert. They loved it, and when at dawn they looked down upon the sapphire mists which covered it like a sea, song sprang to their lips, and they rode forth to their toil, caroling like larks.

True, pestilences swept over them from time to time—and droughts afflicted them—but these they accepted as punishment for some devotional remission on their part and redoubled their zealous chants. They had no doubts, they knew their way of life was superior to that of their neighbors, the Tinné; and their traditions of the Spaniards who had visited them, centuries before, were not pleasant—they put a word of fervent thanks into their songs that “the men of iron” came no more.

But this new white man—this horseman who wore a wide hat—who sent pale-faced women into the desert to teach a new kind of song, and the worship of a new kind of deity—this restless keen-eyed, decisive Americano came in larger numbers year by year. He insisted that all Pueblan ways were wrong—only his were right.

Ultimately he built an Iron Khiva near the foot of the trail, and sent word among all the Pueblo peoples that they should come and view this house—and bring their children, and leave them to learn the white man’s ways.

“We do not care to learn the white man’s way,” replied the head men of the village. “We have our own ways, which are suited to us and to our desert, ways we have come to love. We are afraid to change. Always we have lived in this manner on this same rock, in the midst of this sand. Always we have worn this fashion of garments—we did not ask you to come—we do not ask you to stay nor to teach our children. We are glad to welcome you as visitors—we do not want you as our masters.”

“We have come to teach you a new religion,” said the missionary.

“We do not need a new religion. Why should we change? Our religion is good. We understand it. Our fathers gave it to us. Yours is well for you—we do not ask you to change to ours. We are willing you should go your way—why do you insist on our accepting yours?”

Then the brows of the men in black coats grew very stern, and they said:

“If you do not do as we say and send your children to our Iron House to learn our religion, we will bring blue-coated warriors here to make you do so!”

Then the little brown people retreated to their rock and said: “The iron men of the olden time have come again in a new guise,” and they were very sad, and deep in their cavelike temples in the rocks, they prayed and sang that this curse might pass by and leave them in peace once more.

Nevertheless, there were stout hearts among them, men who said: “Let us die in defense of our homes! If we depart from the ways of our fathers for fear of these fierce strangers—our gods will despise us.”

These bold ones pushed deep into the inner rooms of their khivas, and uncovered broken spears, and war clubs long unused—and restrung their rude bows and sharpened their arrows, while the sad old sages sang mournful songs in the sacred temples under ground—and children ceasing their laughter crept about in coveys like scared quail—dreading they knew not what.

Then the white men withdrew, and for a time the Pueblans rejoiced. The peaceful life of their ancestors came back upon them. The men again rode singing to the purple plain at sunrise. The old women, groaning and muttering together, went down to the spring for water. The deft potters resumed their art—the girls in chatting, merry groups, plastered the houses or braided mats. The sound of the grinding of corn was heard in every dwelling.

But there were those who had been away across the plain and who had seen whence these disturbing invaders came—they were still dubious—they waited, saying: “We fear they will come again! They are like the snows of winter, bitter and not to be turned aside with words.”

II

One day they came again—these fierce, implacable white men—preceded by warriors in blue, who rode big horses—horses ten times as large as a burro, and they were all agrin like wild cats, and they camped near the Iron Khiva, and the war chief sent word to all the men of the hill to assemble, for he intended to speak to them. “Your Little Father is here also, and wishes to see you.”

All night this imperious summons was debated by the fathers, and at last it was agreed that six old men should go down—six gray grandsires—and hear what this war chief had to say.

“We can but die a few days before our time,” they said. “If they carry us into the East to torture us—it will not be for long. Our old bones will soon fall apart.”

So while all the villagers sat on their housetops to watch in silence and dread, the aged ones wrinkled, gray, and half blind, made their sad way down toward the peace grove in which the white lodges of the warriors glittered. With unfaltering steps led by the chief priest of the Antelope Clan, they approached and stood in silence before the war chief of the bluecoats who came to meet them. Speaking through a Tinné interpreter, he said:

“The Great Father, my chief, has sent me to tell you this. You must do as this man says,” and he pointed at the man in black. “He is your teacher. He has come to gather your children into that Iron House and teach them the white man’s ways. If you don’t—if you make war—then I will go up against you with my warriors and my guns that go boom, boom, boom, a hundred times, and I will destroy you. These are the commands of my chief.”

When the old men returned with this direful message, despair seized upon the people. “Evil times are again upon us,” they cried. “Surely these are the iron men more terrible than before.”

They debated voluminously all night long, and at last decided to fight—but in the early morning a terrible noise was heard below on the plain, and when they rushed to see—behold the warriors in blue were rushing to and fro on their horses, shouting, firing off their appalling weapons. It was plain they were doing a war dance out of wanton strength, and so terrible did they seem that the hearts of the small people became as wax. “We can do nothing against such men; they are demons; they hold the thunder in the palms of their hands. Let us submit; perhaps they will grow weary of the heat and sand and go away. Perhaps they will long for their wives and children and leave us. We will wait.”

Others said: “Let us send our children—what will it matter? We can watch over them, they will be near us, and we can see that they do not forget our teachings. Our religion will not vanish out of their minds.”

So the old men went again to the war chief, and, with bowed heads and trembling voices, said: “We yield. You are mighty in necromancy and we are poor and weak. Our children shall go to the Iron Khiva.”

Then the war chief gave them his hand and smiled, and said: “I do not make war with pleasure. I am glad you have submitted to the commands of my great chief. Live in peace!”

III

For two years the children went almost daily to the Iron Khiva, and they came to love one of those who taught them—a white woman with a gentle face—but the man in the black coat who told the children that the religion of their fathers was wicked and foolish—him they hated and bitterly despised. He was sour-faced and fearful of voice. He shouted so loud the children were scared—they had no breath to make reply when he addressed them.

But to even this creature they became accustomed, and the life of the village was not greatly disturbed. True, the children began to speak in a strange tongue and fell into foolish songs which did little harm—they were, in fact, amusing, and, besides, when the cattlemen came by and wished to buy baskets and blankets, these skilled children could speak their barbarous tongue—and once young Kopeli took his son who had mastered this hissing language, and went afar to trade, and brought back many things of value. He had been to the home of the Little Father, and the fort.

In short the Pueblans were getting reconciled to the Iron Khiva and the white people, and several years went by so peacefully, with so little change in their life and thought, that only the most far-seeing expressed fear of coming trouble—but one night the children came home in a panic—breathless and storming with excitement.

A stranger had arrived at the Iron House, accompanied by a tall old man who claimed authority over them—the man who lived in the big white man’s town—and they had said to the teacher, “we want six children to take away with us into the East.”

This was incredible to the people of the cliff, and they answered: “You were mistaken, you did not understand. They would not come to tear our children from our arms.”

A Cow-puncher Visiting an Indian Village

Far in advance of settlers, in those early days when every man had to fight for his right of way, the American cow-puncher used to journey along the waste hundreds of miles of the then far Western country. Like a true soldier of fortune, he adventured with bold carelessness, ever ready for war, but not love; for in the Indian villages he visited there was no woman that such a man as he was could take to his heart.

An Apache Indian

In the ’eighties the habitat of the Apaches was in the Sierra Madre Mountains in Arizona. When pursued the Apaches always took to the mountains. They were hideously cruel. The settlers entertained a perfect dread of these marauding bands, whose onslaughts were so sudden that they were never seen. When they struck, all that would be seen was the flash of the rifle, resting with secure aim over a pile of stones or a bowlder, behind which was the red-handed murderer.

But the little ones were shivering with fear and would not go back to the plain. They moaned and wept all night—and at sunrise the old men went down to the Iron House, and said:

“Our little ones came home last night, crying. They said you had threatened to carry them away into the East; what does this mean?”

Then the strange men said, “This is true. We want six of your children to take away to school. We will not hurt them. They will live in a big house, they will have warm clothing, they will want for nothing. We are your friends. We want to teach your children the ways of the white man.”

Passionately the grandsires responded. “We do not want to hear of these things. Our children are happy here, their hearts will break if you take them away. We will not submit to this. We will fight and die together.”

Then the old white man who had been speaking became furious. His voice was sharp and fierce. “If you don’t give up the children I will take them. You are all fools—your religion is wicked, and you are not fit to teach your children. My religion, my God, is the only God that is true and righteous, and I will take your children in order that you may be taught the true path and become as white men.”

Then the old men withdrew hurriedly, their lips set in a grim line. Their return—their report, froze every heart. It was true then—these merciless men of the East were planning to carry their children into captivity. Swiftly the word passed, the goats were driven into their corrals, the water bags were filled, the storehouses were replenished. “We will not go down to the plain. Our children shall go no more to the Iron House. If they take them, it will be when all our warriors are dead.”

So it was that when the agent and the missionaries climbed the mesa path they came upon a barricade of rocks, and men with bows and war clubs grimly standing guard. They made little talk—they merely said, “Go your ways, white men, and leave us alone. Go look to your own sons and daughters, and we will take care of ours. The world is wide to the East, go back to it.”

The agent said, “If you do not send your children down to school I will call my warriors, and I will kill every man with a war club in his hand.”

To this young Kopeli, the war chief, said: “We will die in defense of our home and our children. We were willing that our children should go down to the Iron Khiva—till now—now when you threaten to steal them and carry them afar into captivity where we can never see them again, we rebel. We will fight! Of what value is life without our children? Your great war chief will not ask this hard thing of us. If he does then he has our answer.”

Then with dark faces the white men went away and sent a messenger across the desert, and three days later the sentinels of the highest roof saw the bluecoat warriors coming again. Raising a wild song, the war song of the clan, the cliff people hastily renewed their defenses. They pried great rocks from the ledges, and set them where they could be toppled on the heads of the invaders. They built the barricades higher. They burnished their arrows and ground their sickles. Every man and boy stood ready to fight and die in defense of their right to life, and liberty, and their rocky home.

IV

Once again the timid prevailed; they said: “See this terrible white man, his weapons are most murderous. He can sit where he is, in safety, and send his missiles against our unprotected babes. He is too great. Let us make our peace with him.”

So at last, for a third time, the elders went down to talk with the conquerors, and said, “What can we do to make our peace with you?”

Then the tall, old man said, “If you will give us two of your brightest sons to go away into the East we will ask no more, but your other children must return to the Iron House each day as before.”

The elders withdrew, and the news flew about the pueblo, and every mother looked at her handsomest son in sudden terror, and the men assembled in furious debate. The war party cried out with great bitterness of clamor, “Let us fight and die! We are tired of being chased like wolves.” But at last up rose old Hozro, and said, “I have a son—you know him. He is a good son, and he has quick feet and a ready tongue. He is not a brawler. He is beloved of his teachers. Now, in order that we may be left in peace, I will give my son.”

His short and passionate speech was received with expressions of astonishment as well as approval, for the boy Lelo was a model youth—and Hozro a proud father. “What will the mother say?” thought all the men who sat in the council.

Then gray old Supela, chief priest and sage, rose slowly, and said, “I have no son—but my son’s son I have. Him I will dedicate, though he is a part of my heart. I will cut him away because I love peace and hate war. Because if the white man rages against us he will slaughter everybody.”

While yet they were in discussion some listening boys crept away and scattered the word among the women and children. “Lelo and Sakoni are to be bound and cast among the white men.”

There was wailing in the houses as though a plague had smitten them again—and the mothers of the lads made passionate protestations against the sacrifice of their sons—all to no purpose. The war chief came to tell them to make ready. “In the morning we must take the lads to their captors.”

But when morning came they could not be found in their accustomed places, they had fled upon the desert to the West. Then, while the best trailers searched for their footprints, the fathers of the tribe went down and told the white chief. He said:

“I do not believe it, you are deceiving me.”

“Come and see,” said Hozro, and led the way round the mesa to the point where the trailers were slowly tracing the course of the fugitives.

“They are running,” said young Klee. “They are badly scared.”

“Perhaps they go to Oraibi,” said one of the priests.

“We have sent runners to all the villages. No, they are heading for the great desert.”

They followed them out beyond all hope of water—out into the desolate sand—where the sun flamed like a flood of fire and only the sparse skunk-weed grew—and at last sharp eyes detected two dark flecks on the side of a dune of yellow sand.

“There they are!” cried Klee, the trailer.

The stern old white man spurred his horse—the soldier chief did the same—but Klee outran them all. He topped the sand dune at a swift trot, but there halted and stood immovably gazing downward.

At last he came slowly down the slope and, meeting the white man, the agent, and the soldier, he said, with a sullen, accusing face, and with bitter scorn:

“There they are; go get them; my work is done!”

With wonder in their looks the pursuers rode to the top of the hill and stood for a moment looking; then the lean hand of old Hozro lifted and pointed to a little hollow. “There they lie—exhausted!”

But Klee turned and said, “They are not sleeping—they are dead! I feel it.”

With a sudden hoarse cry the father plunged down the hill and fell above the body of his son.

When the white men came to him they perceived that the bodies of the boys lay in the dark stain of their own blood as in a blanket. They were dead, slain by their own hands.

Then old Hozro rose and said, “White man, this is your work. Go back to your home. Is not your thirst slaked? Drink up the blood of my son and go back to the white wolves who sent you. Leave us with our dead!”

In silence, with faces ashamed and heads hanging, the war chief and stern old white man rode back to their camp, leaving the heroic father and grandsire alone in the desert.

That night the great mesa was a hill of song, a place of lamentation. Hozro and Supela were like men stunned by a sudden blow. The old grandsire wept till his cry became a moan, but Hozro, as the greatness of his loss came to him, grew violent.

Mounting his horse, he rode fiercely up and down the streets. “Now, will you fight, cowards, prairie dogs? Send word to all the villages—assemble our warriors—no more talk now; let us battle!”

But when the morning came, behold the tents of the white soldiers were taken down, and when the elders went forth to parley, the soldier chief said:

“You need not send your children away. If they come down here to the Iron House that is enough. I am a just man; I will not fight you to take your children away. I go to see the Great Father and to plead against this man and his ways.”

“And so our sons died not in vain,” said Supela to Hozro, as they met on the mesa top.

“Aye, but they are dead!” said Hozro, fiercely. “The going of the white man will not bring them back.”

And the stricken mothers sat with haggard faces and unseeing eyes; they took no comfort in the knowledge that the implacable white man had fled with the blue-coated warriors.

THE NEW MEDICINE HOUSE

THE NEW MEDICINE HOUSE

The spring had been cold and wet, and pneumonia was common throughout the reservation on the Rosebud, and yet the trained nurse whom the government had sent out to preside over the little school hospital had little to do.

She was a grimly conscientious person, but not lovable. Men had not considered her in their home plans, and a tragic melancholy darkened her thin, plain visage, and loneliness added something hard and repellent to her devotional nature. She considered herself a martyr, one carried to far countries for the love of the gentle Galilean. She never complained vocably, but her stooping walk, her downcast eyes, and her oft-bitten lips revealed her discontent with great clearness to the red people, who interpret such signs by instinct.

“Why does she come here?” asked reflective old Tah-You, the sage of the camp on the Rosebud.

“She comes to do you good, to give your children medicine when they are sick,” replied the subagent, speaking in signs.

“She is not happy. Send her away. We do not need her. I am medicine giver.”

“I can’t do that. Washington sent her. She must stay. She looks unhappy, but she is quite content. When your children are sick you should send them to her.”

To this Tah-You made slow answer. “For many generations we have taken care of our own sick in our own way,” said he. “I do not think Washington should require us to give up all our ways. You tell Washington that we are able to care for our sick.”

It was only later that the agent found that the little hospital, the pride of his eyes, had been tabooed among the tribe from the very start. On the surface this did not appear. The children marched over, two and two, each morning, and took their prevention medicine with laughter, for it had a sweet taste, and the daily march was a ceremony. Their teacher took occasion to show them the clean white walls and the wide soft beds, and told them to tell their parents that this beautiful little house was for any one who was sick.

To this they all listened with that patient docility which is their most marked characteristic, and some of the old men came and looked at the “medicine house” and spoke with the “medicine woman,” and while they did not show enthusiasm, they were not openly opposed.

All this gave way to a hidden, determined aversion after one of the employees had died in the place. The nurse, being sheathed in the boiler iron of her own superstitions, could not understand the change in the attitude of the red people. It was not her business to give way to or even to take into account their own feelings. If they were sick she insisted that the superintendent hale them forthwith to her rooms and bind them on her beds of painful neatness. The opposition of the old people she would put down with the bayonet if necessary.

A group of the old men came to the agent and said: “Friend, a white man has died in the medicine house. That is bad. Among us we do not let any one use the lodge in which one has died—we burn it and all that is connected with the dead one. There is something evil which comes from the clothing of one who is dead of a disease. We do not wish our children to enter this medicine house.”

“Furthermore,” said Tah-You, “there are many bottles standing about in the house, and they stink very strong—they make us sick even when we go in for a few moments. It is not good for our children to sleep there when they are ill.

“More than this,” continued Tah-You, prompted by another, “the medicine woman drinks whisky in the night, and our children ought not to see that their medicine woman is a drunkard.”

Slowly and painfully Mr. Williams explained that all the bed-clothes were purified and the room made clean after a person died in it. Also that the smell of the bottles was not harmful. As to the medicine woman and her drinking, they were mistaken. She was taking some drink for her cough.

“We do not believe in keeping a house for people to die in,” repeated Tah-You. “Spirits and things evil hover round such a place. They cry in the night and make a sick child worse. They are very lonely. It is better that they come back to the tepee when they are ill. The children are now frightened, and we want you to promise that when any of them fall sick you will not send them to this lonesome house which is death-tainted.”

The face of the agent hardened. To this end he knew the talk would come. “Listen, friends. Washington is educating your children. He is feeding them. He has sent also a medicine man and a medicine woman to take care of you when you are ill. I have built a nice clean house for you to be sick in. When your children are sick they must go there. I will not consent to their returning to the tepee.”

This was the usual and unavoidable end of every talk. Every wish of the red man was necessarily thwarted—for that is manifestly the way to civilize them. They rose silently, sadly, with the patient resignation to which they had schooled themselves, and passed out, leaving the agent with a sneaking, heart-burning sense of being woefully in the wrong.

In the weeks that followed, the smug little hospital stood empty, for no sick one from the camp would so much as look toward its glass-paneled door. The children no longer laughed as they lined up for their physic. The nurse sat and read by the window, with no duties but those of caring for her own bed. She had the professed sympathy of all those who have keen noses for the superstitions of other people, but none whatever for their own. She thought “the government should force these Indians to come in and be treated.”

And as for Tah-You, these people of a creed were agreed that he was the meanest Indian in the tribe, and it was his influence which stood in the way of the medicine woman’s curative courses, and interfered with the plan to convert them into Christian citizens. “The power of these medicine men must be broken,” said the Rev. Alonzo Jones.

Once in a while a child was made to stay overnight in the dread, sleek little rooms of the hospital, but each one escaped at the earliest moment. In one case, when the sick one chanced to be an orphan, she was made a shining decoy and coddled and fed on dainties fit for a daughter of millions, in order that her enthusiastic report of the currant jelly and chicken broth might soften the hearts of her companions toward the hard-glazed walls and echoing corridors of the little prison house. But it did not. She told of the smells, of the awful silence and loneliness, of the sour-faced nurse who did many most mysterious things in the deep of the night, and the other girls shuddered and laughed nervously and said, “When we are sick we will run away and go to camp.” The opposition deepened and widened.

The struggle came when Robert, the first sergeant of the school, the captain of the baseball team, fell sick. He was a handsome, steady, good-humored boy of twenty, of fine physical development, and a good scholar. He spoke English readily and colloquially, and was a cheering example of what a reservation school can turn out. The superintendent trusted him implicitly, and found him indispensable in the government of the school and the management of the farm and garden, and the agent often invited him to his house to meet visitors.

At an Apache Indian Agency

This incident occurred in the days of the so-called “Indian Ring,” when the Interior Department used to appoint as Indian agents men whose sole object was to enrich themselves by stealing the property of their savage wards. As a result of their reckless operations there was constant friction between these agents and the men of the army.

The Adventure of Old Sun’s Wife

When a mere maid, the chief of the Gros Ventres Indians kidnaped her and, binding her securely to himself, rode off for his own village. When within sight of their destination the girl stabbed him, killing him. This feat not only won her the right to wear three eagle feathers, but Old Sun, the rich and powerful chief of the North Blackfeet Indians of Canada, made her his wife.

Robert, after ploughing all one cold, rainy afternoon, took a griping chill and developed a cough which troubled him for some days. He said nothing about it, and kept on with his work when he should have been in bed, for he dreaded the hospital, and was careful to minimize all his bad symptoms, but one morning he found himself unable to rise, and the doctor pronounced him a very sick boy—“Another case of pneumonia,” said he.

Robert was silent as they moved him across the road into the men’s ward of the little hospital; but his eyes, bright with fever, seemed to plead for something, and when the agent bent down to ask him if he wanted anything, the boy whispered, “Stay with me.”

“All right, Robert, I’ll watch with you to-night. I must go now, but I’ll come back at noon.”

It was a long day for the sick boy, who watched and listened, giving little heed to the nurse who was tirelessly active in ministering to his needs. He knew just what was going on each minute. He listened for the assembly bell at seven o’clock. He could see the boys in their uniforms lining up in the halls. Now they were marching to chapel. They were singing the first song—he could hear them. Now they were listening to the little talk of the superintendent—and all was quiet.

At last they went whooping to their games in the play hour just before bedtime, and it seemed hard to lie there and hear them and be alone and forgotten. “The teachers will come to see me,” he thought, “and some of the boys.” But they did not come. It began to grow dark at last, and the taciturn nurse lit a smoking lamp and sat down to read. When she asked him a question it sounded like the snarl of a cat, but her hands were tender and deft. Oh, it was hard to be sick and lie still so long!

When the agent came in the boy said: “Major, tell my mother. Let her come. Tell her I’m very sick, Major!”

“All right, Robert. I’ll take the first opportunity to send her word. But she’s a long way off, you know. I hear she went to Tah-You’s old camp. But I will watch with you, my boy. Go to sleep and rest.”

The boy grew very much worse in the night, and in his temporary delirium he called piteously for his mother and in his native tongue, and the agent told one of the policemen to carry word to the mother, “Pawnee Woman,” that her son was sick. “Say to her that we are doing all we can for him, and that he is in no danger,” he added.

That day was a long day to Robert, a day that was filled with moments of delirium as a June day is filled with cloud shadows. Each hour carried him farther from the white man’s religion and the white man’s medicine—only his good agent comforted him; to him he clung with ever-weakening fingers. The agency doctor, earnest to the limits of his powers (you can’t buy great learning at eight hundred dollars per year), drew the agent aside and said: “The boy is in for a siege, Major. His temperature is rising in spite of everything. He must be watched closely to-night.”

“I’ll look out for that,” said Williams. Weary as he was, he watched again the second night, for the boy would not let him go, and his heart was very tender toward him.

The next morning as he sat in his little office he heard the swift soft thud of moccasined feet in the hall, and a timid knock. “Come!” he shouted, and before he could turn, a Cheyenne woman ran swiftly in. Her comely face was set in tragic lines of grief, and sobbing convulsively, while the tears flooded her cheeks. She laid one hand upon the agent’s shoulder, and with the other she signed: “Father, my son is going to die. Your work and your lodge have killed him. Have pity!” As she signed she wailed heart-brokenly, “He will die.”

“Dry your tears,” he replied, “He is not going to die. Two nights I have watched with him. I have myself given him strong medicine. He is better.”

She moaned as if all hope were gone. “No, no. He is very sick, father. He does not know me. His eyes are like those of a dead boy. Oh, have pity! Come with me. Come and aid him.”

To comfort her the weary man went back to the hospital, and as they entered, the mother made a wild gesture of repulsion, and said to the nurse: “Go away, dog woman! You are killing my son.”

In vain Williams tried to tell her how faithful the nurse had been. She would not listen.

“Father, let me take my son to the lodge. Then he will get well.”

He shook his head. “No, that would not do. He would die on the way. Let him stay here till he is better. You and I will watch over him here. No harm will come then. See how nice and clean his bed is, how sheltered his room is. It will be cold and windy in camp; he will be made worse. Let him remain till he is able to stand. Then it will be safe to take him away.”

By putting forth all his powers of persuasion he comforted and reassured the distracted mother, and she sat down in the hospital; but an understanding that she wanted to have Tah-You the medicine man visit the boy and breathe upon him and sing to him ran round the school and the agency, and the missionaries and the nurse were furious.

“The idea of that nasty old heathen coming into the hospital!” said the nurse to one of the teachers. “If he comes, I leave—that’s all!”

The doctor laughed. “The old cuss might do him good. Who knows?”

The Reverend Jones pleaded with Williams: “Don’t permit it. It will corrupt the whole school. Deep in their hearts they all believe in the old medicine man, and if you give in to them it will set them all back ten years. Don’t let them take Robert to camp on any plea. All they want to do is to smoke and make gibberish over him.”

To these impassioned appeals Williams could only say: “I can’t order them not to do so. They are free citizens under our present law, and I have no absolute control over them. If they insist on taking Robert to camp, I can’t stop them.”

Mr. Jones went away with a bitter determination to make some kind of complaint against somebody, to something—he couldn’t quite make up his mind to whom.

Then old Tah-You came, very grave and very gentle, and said: “Father, the Great Spirit in the beginning made both the white man and the red man. Once I thought we could not be friends and live on the same soil. I am old now and wise in things I once knew nothing of. I now see that the white man knows many good things—and I know also that the red man is mistaken about many other things. Therefore we should lay our medicines side by side, and when we have chosen the better, throw the worthless one away. I have come to put my curative charms and my lotions beside those of the white medicine man. I will learn of him, he will learn of me. This sick boy is my grandson. He is very ill. I ask you to let me go in to him, and look upon him, and smoke the sacred pipe, and breathe upon him, and heal him with strong decoction of roots.”

To this Williams replied: “Tah-You, what you ask I cannot grant. This medicine house was built for the white man’s doctor by people who do not believe as you do. Those who gave the money would be very angry at me if I let you enter the door.”

The old man’s face fell and his lips worked as he watched the signs made by the white chief.

“So be it,” he replied as he rose. “The white man’s heart is hard. His eyes are the eyes of a wolf. He gives only in his own way. He makes all men walk in his own road. He will kill my son and laugh.”

Williams rose also. “Do not harden your heart to me, friend. I know that much of your medicine is good. I do not say you shall not treat the boy. To-morrow, if he is no better, you can take him to camp. I cannot prevent that, but if you do and he dies I am not to blame.”

The old man’s face grew tender. “I see now that you are our friend. I am content.”

The Reverend Mr. Jones came down upon the agent again, and the nurse and the teachers (though they dared say nothing) looked bitter displeasure. It seemed that the props on which their sky rested, were tottering, but Williams calmly said: “To have the boy die in hospital would do us a great deal more harm than to have him treated by Tah-You. Were you ever young? Don’t you remember what it meant to have your old grandmother come and give you boneset tea and sit by your bed? Robert is like any other boy; he longs for his old grandfather, and would be quieted and rested by a return to the tepee. I will not sacrifice the boy for the sake of your mission. I won’t take any such responsibility.”

“It will kill him to be moved,” said the nurse.

“I’m not so sure of that. Anyhow and finally, these people, under the present ruling of the department, are citizens, and I have no authority to make them do this or that. I have given my consent to their plan—and that ends the matter.”

Early the next morning the father and mother, together with the grandmother, tenderly folded Robert in a blanket and took him away to camp, and all day the missionaries could hear the sound of the medicine man’s rattle, and his low chant as he strove to drive out the evil influences, and some of them were exceedingly bitter, and the chief of the big medicine house was very sad, for it seemed that his work was being undone.

Now it happened that Tah-You’s camp stood in the bend of the deep little river, and the tepees were based in sweet-smelling grasses, and when the sick boy opened his eyes after his swoon, he caught the flicker of leaf shadows on the yellowed conical walls of his mother’s lodge, and heard the mocking-bird’s song in the oaks. The kind, wrinkled face of his grandfather, the medicine man, bent over him, and the loving hands of his mother were on his neck. He was at home again! His heart gave a throb of joy, and then his eyes closed, a sweet langour crept over him, an utter content, and he fell asleep with the humming song of Tah-You carrying him ever farther from the world of the white man’s worry and unrest.

The following day, as Williams lifted the door-flap and entered, Tah-You sat contentedly smoking. The mother, who was sewing on a moccasin, looked up with a happy smile on her face and said, “He is almost well, my son.”

“I am glad,” said Williams.

Tah-You blew a whiff from his pipe and said, with a spark of deep-seated humor in his glance:

“The white men are very clever, but there are some things which they do not know. You—you are half red man; that accounts for your good heart. You see my medicine is very strong.”

Williams laughed and turned toward the boy who lay looking out at the dear world with big, unwavering eyes. “Robert, how are you?”

Slowly the boys lips shaped the whispered word, “Better.”

“There is no place like home and mother when you’re sick, Robert. Hurry up and get well. I need you.”

As Williams was going, the mother rose and took his hand and cried out, poignantly: “You are good. You let me have my son. You have saved him from the cruel-hearted medicine woman. Do not let her make evil medicine upon us.”

“I will not let any one hurt him. Be at peace.”

Then the mother’s face shone with a wonderful smile. She stood in silence with heaving breast as her white chieftain went out. “He is good,” she said. “He is our brother.”

To this, serene old Tah-You nodded: “He knows my medicine is very strong—for he is half red man.”

RISING WOLF—GHOST DANCER

RISING WOLF—GHOST DANCER

He sat in the shade of the lodge, smoking his pipe. His face was thin, keen, and very expressive. The clear brown of his skin was pleasant to see, and his hair, wavy from long confinement in braids, was glossy as a blackbird’s wing. Around his neck he wore a yellow kerchief—yellow was his “medicine” color—and he held a soiled white robe about his loins. He was about fifty years of age, but seemed less than forty.

He studied me quizzically as I communicated to him my wish to hear the story of his life, and laughingly muttered some jocose remark to his pretty young wife, who sat near him on a blanket, busy at some needlework. The humorous look passed out of his face as he mused, the shadows lengthened on the hot, dry grass, and on the smooth slopes of the buttes the sun grew yellow.

After a long pause, he lifted his head and began to speak in a low and pleasant voice. He used no gestures, and his glance was like that of one who sees a small thing on a distant hill.

“I am well brought up,” were his first words. “My father was chief medicine man[1] of his tribe, and one who knew all the stories of his people. I was his best-loved son, and he put me into the dances of the warriors when I was three years old. I carried one of his war-bonnet feathers in my hand, and was painted like the big warriors.

“When my father wished to give a horse to the Cut Throat or Burnt Thigh people who visited us and danced with us, he put into my hands the little stick which counted for a horse, and I walked across the circle by his side and handed the stick to our friend. Then my mother was proud of me, and I was glad to see her smile.

“My father made me the best bows, and my mother made pretty moccasins for me, covered with bright beads and the stained quills of the porcupine. I had ponies to ride, and a little tepee of my own in which to play I was chief.

“When I was a little older I loved well to sit near my father and the old men and hear them tell stories of the days that were gone. My father’s stories were to me the best of all, and the motions of his hands the most beautiful. I could sit all day to listen. Best of all I liked the stories of magic deeds.

“One day my father saw me holding my ear to the talk, and at night he said to me, ‘My son, I see you are to be a medicine man. You are not to be a warrior. When you are older, I will teach you the secrets of my walk, and you shall follow in my path.’

“Thereafter I watched everything the medicine men did. I crept near, and listened to their words. I followed them with my eyes when they went aside to pray. Where magic was being done—there was I. At the dance I saw my father fling live squirrels from his empty hand. I saw him breathe smoke upon the body of a dead bird, and it awoke and ran to a wounded man and tore out the rotting flesh and cured him. I saw a mouse come to life in the same way. I saw the magic bladder move when no one touched it; and I saw a man buried and covered with a big stone too great for four men to lift, and I saw him come forth as if the stone were a blanket.

“I saw there were many ways to become a medicine man. One man went away on a high mountain, and there stood and cried all the day and all the night, saying:

“‘O Great Spirit!

I am a poor man.

I want to be wise.

I want to be big medicine man.

Help me, Great Spirit!

I want to be honored among my people.

Help me get blankets, horses.

Help me raise my children.

Help me live long,

Honored of my people.’

“So he chanted many hours, without food or water, and it was cold also. At last he fell down in a sleep and dreamed. When he came home, he had medicine. A big bird had told him many secrets.

“Another went into a sweat house to purify himself. He stayed all night inside, crying to the Great Spirit. He, too, dreamed, but he did not tell his dreams.

“A third man went into his tepee on a hill near the camp, and there, with nothing to eat or drink, sat crying like the other two, and at last he slept, and in the night voices that were not of his mouth came in the tepee, and I, who listened unobserved, was afraid, and his women were afraid also. He soon became a great medicine man; and I went to my father, and I said:

“‘Make me a medicine man like Spotted Elk.’

“He looked upon me and said:

“‘My son, you are too young.’

“Nevertheless I insisted, and he promised that, when I became sixteen years of age, he would help me to become like Spotted Elk. This pleased me.

“As I grew older I put away in my memory all the stories my father knew of our people. I listened always when the old men talked. I watched the medicine men as they smoked to the Great Spirits of the world. I crept near, and heard them cry to the Great Spirit overhead and to the Dark One who lives below the earth. I listened all the time, and by listening I grew wise as an old man.

“I knew all the wonderful stories of the coyote and of the rattlesnake. I knew what the eagle said to his mate, and I knew the power of the great bear who sits erect like a man. I was a hunter, but I followed the game to learn its ways. In those days we were buffalo eaters. We did not eat fish, nor fowl, nor rabbits, nor the meat of bear. Our women pounded wild cherries and made cakes of them, and of that we ate sometimes, but always we lived upon buffalo meat, and we were well and strong, not as we are now.

“I learned to make my own bows and also to make moccasins, though that was women’s work, and I did not sew beads or paint porcupine quills. I wanted to know all things—to tan hides, to draw pictures—all things.

“By and by time came when I was to become a medicine man. My father took me to Spotted Elk, the greatest of all medicine men, he that could make birds from lumps of meat and mice from acorns.

“To him my father said: ‘My son wishes to be great medicine man. Because you are old and wise I bring him to you. Help me to give him wisdom.’

“Then they took me to a tepee on a hill far from the camp, and there they sat down with me and sang the old, old songs of our tribe. They took food, and offered it to the Great Spirits who lived in the six directions, beginning at the southeast. Then they smoked, always beginning at the southeast. This they taught me to do, and to chant a prayer to each. Then they closed the tepee, and left me alone.

“All night I cried to the Great Spirits:

“‘Hear me—oh, hear me!

You are close beside me.

You are here in the tepee.

Hear me, for I am poor and weak.

I wish to be great medicine man.

I need horses, blankets. I am a boy.

I wish to be great and rich.

Hear me—oh, hear me!’

“All night, all next day I cried. I grew hungry and cold by and by. I fell asleep; then came to me in my sleep a fox, and he opened his mouth, and talked to me. He told me to put weasel skin full of medicine, and wear fox skin on my head, and that would make me big medicine. Then he went away, and I woke up.

The Medicine Man’s Signal
Illustration from
THE SIOUX OUTBREAK IN SOUTH DAKOTA
by Frederic Remington
Originally published in
Harper’s Weekly, January 24, 1891

The Ghost Dance by the Ogallala Sioux at Pine Ridge Agency, Dakota, December, 1890
Illustration from
THE NEW INDIAN MESSIAH
by Lieutenant Marion P. Maus, U.S.A.
Originally published in
Harper’s Weekly, December 6, 1890

“I was very hungry, and I opened the tepee and came out, and it was sunrise. My father was sleeping on the ground, and when I touched him, he woke quickly and said:

“‘My son, I am glad to see you. I heard voices that were not yours calling in the tepee, and I was afraid.’

“‘All is well,’ I said. ‘Give me food.’

“When I was fed, I took my bow and arrow and went forth to kill a weasel. When I was alone, I sat down and prayed to the Great Spirits of the six world directions, and smoked, beginning at the southeast, and a voice came in my ear which said, ‘I will lead you.’ Soon I came upon a large, sleeping weasel; he was white all over as snow, though it was yet fall. Him I killed and skinned, and stretched the pelt on a flat stick to make a pouch. Then I sought the medicine to go in it. What that was I will not tell, but at last it was filled, and then I slew a big red fox, and out of his fur I made my cap.

“Each night I went into my tepee alone to smoke and chant, and each night strange birds and animals came to me and talked and taught me much wisdom. Then came voices of my ancestors, and taught me how to cure the sick and how to charm the buffalo and the elk. Then I began to help my father to heal the sick people, and I became honored among my companions; and when I caught a maid on her way to the spring, she did not struggle; she was glad to talk with me, for I had a fine tepee and six horses and many blankets.

“I grew skillful. I could do many things white people never see. I could be buried deep in the ground, while a mighty stone which six men alone could lift was rolled upon me. Then in the darkness, when I cried to the Great Spirits, they came swiftly and put their hands to the stone and threw it far away, and I rose and walked forth, and the people wondered. I cured many people by the healing of my hands, and by great magic like this: I had a dried mouse, and once when a man came to be stiff and cold with a hole in his side, I said, ‘Put him before me.’

“When they did as I bid, I took the mouse and put it before the man who was dead, and I blew smoke upon the mouse and said: ‘Great Spirits, help me to do this great magic.’ Then the mouse came to life, and ran to the dead man and put his beak in the hole, and pulled out the bad flesh, and the wound closed up and the man rose.

“These wonderful things I did, and I became rich. I had a fine, large tepee and many horses and skins and blankets. People said: ‘See, there goes Rising Wolf. He is young, but he has many horses.’ Therefore, I came to be called ‘Many Horses’; but I had only one wife, Sailing Hawk. I cared only for her.”

The chief’s handsome face had long since become grave and rapt. Now it suddenly grew grim. His little wife moved uneasily in her seat by his side, and he looked at her with a strange glance. Between them had crept the shadow of Sailing Hawk’s death.

“One day while I sat with Sailing Hawk in my tepee, a big, black cloud came flying from the west like an eagle, and out of it the red fire stabbed and killed my wife and set my tepee on fire. My heart was like ice when I rose and saw my Sailing Hawk dead. I seized my gun. I fired many times into the cloud. I screamed at it in rage. My eyes were hot. I was crazy.—At last I went away, but my wife was dead, and my heart empty and like ashes. I did not eat for many days, and I cared no more for the Great Spirits. I prayed no more. I could not smoke, but I sat all night by the place where my Sailing Hawk lay, and no man dared come to me. My heart was very angry toward everybody and all things. I could not see the end of my trail. All was black before me.

“My people at this time were living on their own lands. The big fight with ‘Long Hair’ had passed away, and we were living at peace once more; but the buffalo were passing also, and we feared and wondered.

“Then the white man came with his soldiers, and made a corral here in the hot, dry country, and drove us therein, and said, ‘If you go outside we will shoot you.’ Soon we became poor. We had then no buffalo at all. We were fed poor beef, and had to wear white men’s clothes which did not fit. We could not go to hunt in the mountains, and the land was waterless and very hot in summer, and we froze in winter. Then there were many sick, but the white men sent a doctor, and he laughed at me, and ordered me not to go near the sick ones. This made my heart black and sorrowful, for the white man gave strange white powders that were very bitter in the mouth, and the people died thereafter.

“But many times when he had gone I went in and made strong magic and cured the sick, and he thought it was his white powders. Nevertheless, more and more of my people came to believe in the white man, and so I grew very poor, and was forced to get rations like the rest. It was a black time for me.

“One night there came into our midst a Snake messenger with a big tale. ‘Away in the west,’ he said to us in sign talk, ‘a wonderful man has come. He speaks all languages, and he is the friend of all red men. He is white, but not like other white men. He has been nailed to a tree by the whites. I saw the holes in his hands. He teaches a new dance, which is to gather all the Indians together in council. He wants a few head men of all tribes to meet him where the big mountains are, in the place where the lake is surrounded by pictured rocks. There he will teach us how to make mighty magic and drive away the white man and bring back the buffalo.’

“All that he told us we pondered long, and I said: ‘It is well, I will go to see this man. I will learn his dance.’

“All this was unknown to the agent, and at last, when the time came, four of us set forth at night on our long journey. On the third day two Snake chiefs and four Burnt Thighs joined us, then four Cut Throat people, and we all journeyed in peace. At last we came to the lake by the pictured rocks where the three snow mountains are.

“There were many Indians there. The Big Bellies were there from the north; and the Blackfeet, and the Magpies, and the Weavers, and the People-of-the-south-who-run-round-the-rocks, and the Black-people-of-the-mountains all were there. We had council, and we talked in signs, and we all began to ask, ‘Where is the Great Helper?’ A day passed, and he did not come; but one night when we sat in council over his teachings, he suddenly stepped inside the circle. He was a dark man, but not so dark as we were. He had long hair on his chin, and long, brown head-hair, parted in the middle. I looked for the wounds on his wrists; I could not see any. He moved like a big chief, tall and swift. He could speak all tongues. He spoke Dakota, and many understood. I could understand the language of the Cut Throat people, and this is what he said:

“‘My people, before the white man came you were happy. You had many buffalo to eat and tall grass for your ponies. You could come and go like the wind. When it was cold, you could go into the valleys to the south, where the healing springs are; and when it grew warm, you could return to the mountains in the north. The white man came. He dug the bones of our mother, the earth. He tore her bosom with steel. He built big trails and put iron horses on them. He fought you and beat you, and put you in barren places where a horned toad would die. He said you must stay there; you must not hunt in the mountains.

“‘Then he breathed his poison upon the buffalo, and they disappeared. They vanished into the earth. One day they covered the hills, the next nothing but their bones remained. Would you remove the white man? Would you have the buffalo come back? Listen, and I will tell you how to make great magic. I will teach you a mystic dance, and then let everybody go home and dance. When the grass is green, the change will come. Let everybody dance four days in succession, and on the fourth day the white man will disappear and the buffalo come back; our dead will return with the buffalo.

“‘The earth is old. It will be renewed. The new and happy world will slide above the old as the right hand covers the left.

“‘You have forgotten the ways of the fathers; therefore great distress is upon you. You must throw away all that the white man has brought you. Return to the dress of the fathers. You must use the sacred colors, red and white, and the sacred grass, and in the spring, when the willows are green, the change will come.

“‘Do no harm to any one. Do not fight each other. Live in peace. Do not tell lies. When your loved ones die, do not weep, nor burn their tepees, nor cut your arms, nor kill horses, for you will see the dead again.’

“His words made my heart glad and warm in my breast. I thought of the bright days when I was a boy and the white man was far away, when the buffalo were like sagebrush on the plains—there were so many. I rose up. I went toward him. I bowed my head, and I said:

“‘Oh, father, teach us the dance!’ and all the people sitting round said, ‘Good! teach us the dance!’

“Then he taught us the song and the dance which white people call ‘the ghost dance,’ and we danced all together, and while we danced near him he sat with bowed head. No one dared to speak to him. The firelight shone on him. Suddenly he disappeared. No one saw him go. Then we were sorrowful, for we wished him to remain with us. It came into my heart to make a talk; so I rose, and said:

“‘Friends, let us now go home. Our father has given us the mighty magic dance. Let us go home and teach all our people, and dance the four days, so that the white man may go and the buffalo come back. All our fathers will come back. The old men will be made young. The blind will see again. We will all be happy once more.’

“This seemed good to them, and we all smoked the pipe and shook hands and took our separate trails. The Blackfeet went north, the People-that-click-with-their-tongues went west, and the Magpies, the Cut Throats, and the Snakes started together to the east. The Burnt Thighs kept on, while the Magpies and the Cut Throats turned to the northeast.

“At last we reached home, and I called a big dance, and at the dance I told the people what I had seen, and they were very glad. ‘Teach us the dance,’ they cried to me.

“‘Be patient,’ I said. ‘Wait till all the other people get home. When the grass is green and the moon is round, then we will dance, and all the red people will dance at the same time; then will the white man surely fade away, and the buffalo come up out of the earth where he is hid and roam the sod once more.’

“Then they did as I bid, and when the moon was round as a shield, we beat the drum and called the people to dance.

“Then the white man became much excited. He called for more soldiers everywhere to stop the dance, so I heard afterward. But the people paid no attention, for was not the white man poor and weak by the magic of the dance?

“Then we built five fires, one to each world direction and one in the center. We put on our best dress. We painted our faces and bodies in memory of our forefathers, who were mighty warriors and hunters. We carried bows and arrows and tomahawk and war clubs in memory of the days before the white man’s weapons. Our best singers knelt around the drum, and the women sat near to help them sing. When the drum began to beat, our hearts were very glad. There were Magpies and Cut Throats among us, but we were all friends. We danced between the fires, and as we danced the drummers sang the mystic song:

“Father, have pity on us.

We are crying for thirst—

All is gone!

We have nothing to eat,

Our Father, we are poor—

We are very poor.

The buffalo are gone,

They are all gone.

Take pity on us, O Father!

We are dancing as you wish,

Because you commanded us.

We dance hard—

We dance long.

Have pity!

“The agent came to see us dance, but we did not care. He was a good man, and we felt sorry for him, for he must also vanish with the other white people. He listened to our crying, and looked long, and his interpreter told him we prayed to the Great Spirits to destroy the white man and bring back the buffalo. Then he called me with his hand, and because he was a good man I went to him. He asked me what the dance meant, and I told him, and he said, ‘It must stop.’ ‘I cannot stop it,’ I said. ‘The Great Spirits have said it. It must go on.’

“He smiled, and went away, and we danced. He came again on the third day, and always he laughed. He said: ‘Go on. You are big fools. You will see the buffalo will never come back, and the white man is too strong to be swept away. Dance till the fourth day, dance hard, but I shall watch you.’

“On the fourth night, while we danced, soldiers came riding down the hills, and their chiefs, in shining white hats, came to watch us. All night we prayed and danced. We prayed in our songs.

“Great Spirit, help us.

You are close by in the dark.

Hear us and help us.

Take away the white man.

Send back the buffalo.

We are poor and weak.

We can do nothing alone.

Help us to be as we once were,

Happy hunters of buffalo.

“But the agent smiled, and the soldiers of the white chiefs sat not far off, their guns in their hands, and the moon passed by, and the east grew light, and we were very weary, and my heart was heavy. I looked to see the red come in the east. ‘When the sun looks over the hills, then it will be,’ I said to my friends. ‘The white man will become as smoke. The wind will sweep him away.’

“As the sun came near we all danced hard. My voice was almost gone. My feet were numb, my legs were weak, but my heart was big.

“‘Oh, help us, Great Spirits,’ we cried in despair.

“‘Father, the morning star,

Father, the morning star,

Look on us!

Look on us, for we have danced till dawn;

Look on us, for we have danced until daylight.

Take pity on us,

O Father, the morning star!

Show us the road—

Our eyes are dark.

Show us our dead ones.

We cry and hold fast to you,

O morning star.

We hold out our hands to you and cry.

Help us, O Father!

We have sung till morning

The resounding song.’

“But the sun came up, the soldiers fired a big gun, and the soldier chiefs laughed. Then the agent called to me,

“‘Your Great Spirit can do nothing. Your Messiah lied.’

“Then I covered my head with my blanket and ran far away, and I fell down on the top of the high hill. I lay there a long time, thinking of the white man’s laugh. The wind whistled a sad song in the grass. My heart burned, and my breath came hard.

“‘Maybe he was right. Maybe the messenger was two-tongued and deceived us that the white man might laugh at us.’

“All day I lay there with my head covered. I did not want to see the light of the sun. I heard the drum stop and the singing die away. Night came, and then on the hills I heard the wailing of my people. Their hearts were gone. Their bones were weary.

“When I rose, it was morning. I flung off my blanket, and looked down on the valley where the tepees of the white soldiers stood. I heard their drums and their music. I had made up my mind. The white man’s trail was wide and dusty by reason of many feet passing thereon, but it was long. The trail of my people was ended.

“I said, ‘I will follow the white man’s trail. I will make him my friend, but I will not bend my neck to his burdens. I will be cunning as the coyote. I will ask him to help me to understand his ways, and then I will prepare the way for my children. Maybe they will outrun the white man in his own shoes. Anyhow, there are but two ways. One leads to hunger and death, the other leads where the poor white man lives. Beyond is the happy hunting ground, where the white man cannot go.’”

THE RIVER’S WARNING

THE RIVER’S WARNING

We were visiting the camp of Big Elk on the Washeetay and were lounging in the tepee of the chief himself as the sun went down. All about us could be heard the laughter of the children and the low hum of women talking over their work. Dogs and babies struggled together on the sod, groups of old men were telling stories and the savory smell of new-baked bread was in the air.

The Indian is a social being and naturally dependent upon his fellows. He has no newspapers, no posters, no handbills. His news comes by word of mouth, therefore the “taciturn red man” does not exist. They are often superb talkers, dramatic, fluent, humorous. Laughter abounds in a camp. The men joke, tell stories with the point against themselves, ridicule those who boast and pass easily from the humorous to the very grave and mysterious in their faith. It is this loquacity, so necessary to the tribe, which makes it so hard for a red man to keep a secret.

In short, a camp of Indians is not so very unlike a country village where nothing but the local paper is read and where gossip is the surest way of finding out how the world is wagging. There are in both villages the same group of old men with stories of the past, of the war time, to whom the young men listen with ill-concealed impatience. When a stranger comes to town all the story tellers rejoice and gird up their loins afresh. It is always therefore in the character of the eager listener that I visit a camp of red people.

Big Elk was not an old man, not yet sixty, but he was a story teller to whom everybody listened, for he had been an adventurous youth, impulsive and reckless, yet generous and kindly. He was a handsome old fellow natively, but he wore his cheap trousers so slouchily and his hat was so broken that at a distance in the daytime he resembled a tramp. That night as he sat bareheaded in his tepee with his blanket drawn around his loins, he was admirable. His head was large, and not unlike the pictures of Ben Franklin.

“You see, in those days,” he explained, “in the war time with the game robbers, every boy was brought up to hate the white man who came into our land to kill off our buffalo. We heard that these men killed for money like the soldiers who came to fight us, and that made our fathers despise them. I have heard that the white boys were taught to hate us in the same way, and so when we met we fought. The white man considered us a new kind of big game to hunt and we considered him a wolf paid to rob and kill us. Those were dark days.

“I was about twenty-two, it may be, when the old man agent first came to the east bank of the Canadian, and there sat down. My father went to see him, I remember, and came back laughing. He said, ‘He is a thin old man and can take his teeth out in pieces and put them back,’ and this amused us all very much. To this day, as you know, that is the sign for an agent among us—to take out the upper teeth.

“We did not care for the agent at that time for we had plenty of buffalo meat and skins. Some of the camp went over and drew rations, it is true, but others did not go. I pretended to be very indifferent, but I was crazy to go, for I had never seen a white man’s house and had never stood close to any white man. I heard the others tell of a great many wonderful things over there—and they said there were white women and children also.

“I was ambitious to do a great deed in those days and had made myself the leader of some fourteen reckless young warriors like myself. I sat around and smoked in tepee, and one night I said, ‘Brothers, let us go to the agency and steal the horses.’

“This made each one of them spring to his feet. ‘Good! Good!’ they said. ‘Lead us. We will follow. That is worth doing.’

“‘The white men are few and cowardly,’ I said. ‘We can dash in and run off the horses, and then I think the old men will no longer call us boys. They will sing of us in their songs. We shall be counted in the council thereafter.’

“They were all eager to go and that night we slipped out of camp and saddled and rode away across the prairie, which was fetlock deep in grass. Just the time for a raid. I felt like a big chief as I led my band in silence through the night. My bosom swelled with pride like a turkey cock and my heart was fierce.

“We came in sight of the white man’s village next day about noon, and veering a little to the north, I led my band into camp some miles above the agency. Here I made a talk to my band and said: ‘Now you remain here and I will go alone and spy out the enemy and count his warriors and make plans for the battle. You can rest and grow strong while I am gone.’”

Big Elk’s eyes twinkled as he resumed. “I thought I was a brave lad to do this thing and I rode away trying to look unconcerned. I was very curious to see the agency. I was like a coyote who comes into the camp to spy out the meat racks.” This remark caused a ripple of laughter, which Big Elk ignored. “As I forded the river I glanced right and left, counting the wooden tepees” (he made a sign of the roof), “and I found them not so many as I had heard. As I rode up the bank I passed near a white woman and I looked at her with sharp eyes. I had heard that all white women looked white and sicklike. This I found was true. This woman had yellow hair and was thin and pale. She was not afraid of me—she did not seem to notice me and that surprised me.

“Then I passed by a big wooden tepee which was very dirty and smoky. I could see a man, all over black, who was pounding at something. He made a sound, clank, clank, clunk-clank. I stood at the door and looked in. It was all very wonderful. There were horses in there and this black man was putting iron moccasins on the horses’ feet.

“An Arapahoe stood there and I said in signs, ‘What do they do that for?’

“He replied, ‘So that the horses can go over rocks without wearing off their hoofs.’

“That seemed to me a fine thing to do and I wanted my pony fixed that way. I asked where the agent was, and he pointed toward a tall pole on which fluttered a piece of red and white and blue cloth. I rode that way. There were some Cheyennes at the door, who asked me who I was and where I came from. I told them any old kind of story and said, ‘Where is the agent?’

“They showed me a door and I went in. I had never been in a white man’s tepee before and I noticed that the walls were strong and the door had iron on it. ‘Ho!’ I said, ‘This looks like a trap. Easy to go in, hard to get out. I guess I will be very peaceful while I am in here.’

“The agent was a little old man—I could have broken his back with a club as he sat with his back toward me. He paid no attention till a half-breed came up to me and said, ‘What do you want?’

“‘I want to see the agent.’

“‘There he is; look at him,’ and he laughed.

“The agent turned around and held out his hand. ‘How, how!’ he said. ‘What is your name?’

“His face was very kind, and I went to him and took his hand. His tongue I could not understand, but the half-breed helped me. We talked. I made up a story. ‘I have heard you give away things to the Cheyennes,’ I said; ‘therefore I have come for my share.’

“‘We give to good red people,’ he said. Then he talked sweetly to me. ‘My people are Quakers,’ he said. ‘We have visions like the red people—but we never go to war. Therefore has the Great Soldier, the Great Father at Washington, put me here. He does not want his children to fight. You are all brothers with different ways of life. I am here to help your people,’ he said, ‘and you must not go to war any more.’

“All that he said to me was good—it took all the fire and bitterness out of my heart and I shook hands and went away with my head bowed in thought. He was as kind as my own father.

“I had never seen such white people before; they were all kind. They fed me; they talked friendly with me. Not one was making a weapon. All were preparing to till the soil. They were kind to the beasts, and all the old Cheyennes I met said, ‘We must do as this good old man says.’

“I rode home very slowly. I strutted no more. The stuffing was gone out of my chest. I dreaded to come back into my camp where my warriors were waiting for me. I spread my blanket and sat down without speaking, and though they were all curious to hear, they waited, for I smoked a pipe in sign of thought. At last I struck the ashes from my pipe and rose and said: ‘Listen, brothers I shall not go to war against the agency.’

“They were all astonishment at this and some were instantly angry. ‘Why not? What has changed your plan so suddenly?’

“‘I have seen the agent; he is a good old man. Every one was pleasant to me. I have never seen this kind of white man. No one was thinking of war. They are all waiting to help the Cheyennes. Therefore my heart is changed—I will not go out against them.’

“My band was in a turmoil. One by one they cried out: ‘You are a girl, a coyote with the heart of a sparrow.’ Crow Kill made a long speech: ‘This is strange business. You talk us into making you chief; you lead us a long hard ride and now we are without meat, while you, having your belly full of sweet food and a few presents in your hand, want to quit and run home crying like a papoose.’”

The old story teller was pitilessly dramatic in reciting the flood of ridicule and abuse poured out upon his head.

“Well, at last I said: ‘Be silent! Perhaps you are right. Perhaps they deceived me. I will go again to-morrow and I will search closely into hidden things. Be patient until I have studied the ground once more.’

“As I thought of it all that night I came to feel again a great rage—I began to say: ‘You are a fool. You have been blinded.’ I slept uneasily that night, but I was awake early and rode away to the agency. I remained all day among them. I talked with all the Cheyennes and in signs I conversed with the Arapahoe—all said the same thing—‘The agent does not lie. He is a good man.’ Nevertheless, I looked the ground all over and at night I rode slowly back to the camp.

“Again I said, ‘I will not go to war against these people,’ and again my warriors cried out against me. They were angrier than before. They called me a coward. ‘We will go on without you. You are fitted only to carry a papoose and stir the meat in a pot,’ they said.

“This filled me with wrath and I rose and said: ‘You call me a woman! Who of you can show more skill in the trail? Who of you can draw a stronger bow or bring down bigger buffalo bulls? It is time for you to be silent. You know me—you know what I have done. Now listen: I am chief. To-morrow when the east gets light we will cross the river and attack the agency! I have spoken!’

“This pleased them very much and they listened and looked eagerly while I drew on the sand lines to show where the horse corral was and where the storehouse was. I detailed five men to go to the big fence and break the chain on the gate, while I led the rest of the band to break into the storehouse. Then I said: ‘Do not kill any one unless they come out against you with arms in their hands. Some of them gave me food; I shall be sorry if they are hurt.’

“That night I could not sleep at all, for my heart was swollen big in my bosom. I knew I was doing wrong, but I could not stand the reproach of my followers.

“When morning came, the river was very high, and we looked at it in astonishment, for no clouds were to be seen. The banks were steep and the current swift, and there was no use attempting to carry out our plan that day.

On an Indian Reservation

At Fort Reno in 1890, in the then Oklahoma Territory, there was an agency for the Cheyennes and Arapahoes. In those days one might see the Indians in their fantastic mixture of colors and beads and red flannel and feathers—so theatrical in appearance that the visitor expected to see even the army officers look back over their shoulders when one of these braves rode by.

In a Stiff Current
Illustration from
TALKING MUSQUASH
by Julian Ralph
Originally published in
Harper’s Magazine, March, 1892

“‘We must wait,’ I said, and with black looks and aching bellies we waited all that day. ‘The river will go down to-morrow,’ I said, to comfort them.

“We had only a little dried beef to eat and the river water to drink, and my warriors were very hungry.

“That second morning I was awake before dawn, watching to see what the river had done during the night. Behold, it was an arrow’s length higher than before! Then I said: ‘Friends, I am no liar. I started on this plan with a heart to carry it out, but now I am deeply troubled. I did not sleep last night, for a pain in my breast kept me awake. I will not deceive you. I am glad the water is deeper this morning. I believe it is a sign from the Great Spirit that we are to turn back and leave these white people in peace.’

“But to this Crow Kill and most of the others would not listen. ‘If we go back now,’ said he, ‘everybody will laugh at us.’

“Quickly I turned upon him and cried out: ‘Are you the boaster who has prattled of our plans? The camp will know nothing of our designs if you have not let your long tongue rattle on the outside of your mouth.’ At this he fell silent and I went on. ‘Now I will wait one more day. If the river is high to-morrow—the third day—then it will surely be a sign, and we must all bow to the will of the Great One who is above us.’

“To this they all agreed, for the sky was still clear and blue and the river was never known to rise on three successive days. They put their weapons in order, and I recounted my words of instruction as to the battle.

“I went aside a little from the camp that night, and took my watch on a little mound. The moon rose big in the east and made a shining trail over the water. When a boy I used to think, may be that trail led to the land of the spirits—and my heart was full of peaceful thoughts that night. I had no hate of anybody.” The old man’s voice was now deep and grave and no one laughed. “I prayed to the Great Spirit to send the water so that I could go back without shame. All night I heard the water whisper, whisper in the grass. It grew broader and broader and the moon passed over my head. I slept a little, and then I woke, for something cold had touched my heel. I looked down and in the grass at my feet lay the shining edge of the river.

“I leaped up and ran and touched the others. ‘See,’ I called out, ‘the water has come to speak to you!’ and I scooped water from the river’s edge and flung it over them. ‘The Great Spirit has spoken. All night I heard it whisper in the grass. It said: “Peace, peace! You must go to war no more.” Come. We will ride away with clean hands and glad hearts.’”

As he finished his story Big Elk put away his pipe abstractedly, as though his mind yet dwelt on the past. His hearers were silent and very serious. He had touched the deepest chord in the red man’s soul—the chord which vibrates when the Great Spirit speaks to him in dreams.

LONE WOLF’S OLD GUARD

LONE WOLF’S OLD GUARD

Now it happened that Lone Wolf’s camp was on the line between the land of the Cheyennes and the home of his own people, the Kiowas, but he did not know this. He had lived there long, and the white man’s maps were as unimportant to him as they had been to the Cheyennes. When he moved there he considered it to be his—a gift direct from the Creator—with no prior rights to be overstepped.

But the Consolidated Cattle Company, having secured the right to enclose a vast pasture, cared nothing for any red man’s claim, provided they stood in with the government. A surveying party was sent out to run lines for fences.

Lone Wolf heard of these invaders while they were at work north of him, and learned in some mysterious way that they were to come down the Elk and cut through his camp. To his friend John, the interpreter, he sent these words:

“The white man must not try to build a fence across my land. I will fight if he does. Washington is not behind this thing. He would not build a fence through my lines without talking with me. I have sent to the agent of the Kiowas, he knows nothing about it—it is all a plan of the cattlemen to steal my lands. Tell them that we have smoked over this news—we have decided. This fence will not be built.”

When “Johnny Smoker” brought this stern message to the camp of the surveyors some of them promptly threw up their hands. Jim Bellows, scout and interpreter, was among these, and his opinion had weight, for he wore his hair long and posed as an Indian fighter of large experience.

“Boys,” he began, impressively, “we got to get out o’ here as soon as darkness covers us. We’re sixty miles from the fort, and only fifteen all told, and not half-armed. Old Lone Wolf holds over us, and we might as well quit and get help.”

This verdict carried the camp, and the party precipitately returned to Darlington to confer with the managers of the company.

Pierce, the chief man, had reasons for not calling on the military authorities. His lease was as yet merely a semi-private arrangement between the Secretary of the Interior and himself, and he feared the consequences of a fight with Lone Wolf—publicity, friction, might cause the withdrawal of his lease; therefore he called in John Seger, and said:

“Jack, can you put that line through?”

“I could, but I don’t want to. Lone Wolf is a good friend of mine, and I don’t want to be mixed up in a mean job.”

“Oh, come now—you mustn’t show the white flag. I need you. I want you to pick out five or six men of grit and go along and see that this line is run. I can’t be fooling around here all summer. Here’s my lease, signed by the Secretary, as you see. It’s all straight, and this old fool of an Indian must move.”

Jack reluctantly consented, and set to work to hire a half dozen men of whose courage he had personal knowledge. Among these was a man by the name of Tom Speed, a border man of great hardihood and experience. To him he said:

“Tom, I don’t like to go into this thing; but I’m hard up, and Pierce has given me the contract to build the fence if we run the line, and it looks like we got to do it. Now I wish you’d saddle up and help me stave off trouble. How does it strike you?”

“It’s nasty business, Jack; but I reckon we might better do it than let some tenderfoot go in and start a killin’. I’m busted flat, and if the pay is good, I jest about feel obliged to take it.”

So it happened that two avowed friends of the red man led this second expedition against Lone Wolf’s camp. Pierce sent his brother as boss, and with him went the son of one of the principal owners, a Boston man, by the name of Ross. Speed always called him “the Dude,” though he dressed quite simply, as dress goes in Roxbury. He wore a light suit of gray wool, “low-quartered shoes,” and a “grape box hat.” He was armed with a pistol, which wouldn’t kill a turtledove at fifteen feet. Henry Pierce, on the contrary, was a reckless and determined man.

Moving swiftly across the Divide, they took up the line on Elk Creek, and started directly toward Lone Wolf’s camp. As they were nearing the bend in the river where Lone Wolf was camped, a couple of young warriors came riding leisurely up from the south. They were very cordial in their greeting, and after shaking hands all around pleasantly inquired:

“What are you doing here?”

“Running a line to mark out the land which the cattlemen have leased of the Cheyennes.”

“We will go along and see where you are going,” they replied.

A couple of hours later, while they were still with the camp, two others came riding quietly in from the east. They said, “We are looking for horses,” and after shaking hands and asking Seger what the white men were doing, rode forward to join their companions, who seemed deeply interested in the surveyors and their instruments. Turning to Pierce, Jack said,

“You noticed that these four men were armed, I reckon?”

“Oh, yes, but they are all right. Didn’t you see how they shook hands all round? They’re just out hunting up ponies.”

“Yes, I saw that; but I noticed they had plenty of ammunition and that their guns were bright. Indians don’t hunt horses in squads, Mr. Pierce.”

Pierce smiled, giving Seger a sidewise glance. “Are you getting nervous? If you are, you can drop to the rear.”

Now Seger had lived for the larger part of his life among the red people, and knew their ways. He answered, quietly:

“There are only four of them now; you’ll see more of them soon,” and he pointed away to the north, where the heads of three mounted men were rising into sight over a ridge. These also proved to be young Kiowas, thoroughly armed, who asked the same question of the manager, and in conclusion pleasantly said,

“We’ll just go along and see how you do it.”

As they rode forward Seger uttered a more pointed warning.

“Mr. Pierce, I reckon you’d better make some better disposition of your men. They are all strung out here, with their guns on their backs, in no kind of shape to make a defense.”

Pierce was a little impressed by the scout’s earnestness, and took trouble to point out the discrepancy between “a bunch of seven cowardly Indians” and his own band of twenty brave and experienced men.

“That’s all right,” replied Seger; “but these seven men are only spies, sent out to see what we are going to do. We’ll have to buckle up with Lone Wolf’s whole band very soon.”

A few minutes later the seven young men rode quietly by and took a stand on a ridge a little in front of the surveyors. As he approached them, Seger perceived a very great change in their demeanor. They no longer smiled; they seemed grim, resolute, and much older. From a careless, laughing group of young men they had become soldiers—determined, disciplined, and dignified. Their leader, riding forth, held up his hand, and said,

“Stop; you must wait here till Lone Wolf comes.”

Meanwhile, in the little city of tents, a brave drama was being enacted. Lone Wolf, a powerful man of middle age, was sitting in council with his people. The long-expected had happened—the cattlemen had begun to mark off the red man’s land as their own, and the time had come either to submit or to repel the invaders. To submit was hard, to fight hopeless. Their world was still narrow, but they had a benumbing conception of the power and the remorseless greed of the white man.

A Modern Comanche Indian

In the ’nineties the Comanche of the Fort Sill region was considered a good type of the Indian of that day. Not only was he the most expert horse-stealer on the plains—a title of honor rather than reproach among Indians—but he was particularly noteworthy for knowing more about a horse and horse-breeding than any other Indian.

A Band of Piegan Indians in the Mountains

Having made out the camp of the Crow Indians in the plain many miles below, the Piegans are making their way slowly through the mountains on foot, their object being to raid the Crow camp and steal their war ponies.

“We can kill those who come,” said Lone Wolf. “They are few, but behind them are the soldiers and men who plough.”

At last old White Buffalo rose—he had been a great leader in his day, and was still much respected, though he had laid aside his chieftainship. He was bent and gray and wrinkled, but his voice was still strong, and his eyes keen.

“My friends, listen to me! During seventy years of my life I lived without touching the hand of a white man. I have always opposed warfare, except when it was necessary; but now the time has come to fight. Let me tell you what to do. I see here some thirty old men, who, like me, are nearing the grave. This thing we will do—we old men—we will go out to war against these cattlemen. We will go forth and die in defense of our lands. Big Wolf, come—and you, my brother, Standing Bear.”

As he called the roll of the gray old defenders, the old women broke into heart-piercing wailing, intermingled with exultant cries as some brave wife or sister caught the force of the heroic responses, which leaped from the lips of their fathers and husbands. A feeling of awe fell over the young men as they watched the fires flame once more in the dim eyes of their grandsires, and when all had spoken, Lone Wolf rose and stepped forth, and said,

“Very well; then I will lead you.”

“Whosoever leads us goes to certain death,” said White Buffalo. “It is the custom of the white men to kill the leader. You will fall at the first fire. I will lead.”

Lone Wolf’s face grew stern. “Am I not your war chief? Whose place is it to lead? If I die, I fall in combat for my land, and you, my children, will preserve my name in song. We do not know how this will end, but it is better to end in battle than to have our lands cut in half beneath our feet.”

The bustle and preparation began at once. When all was ready the thirty gray and withered old men, beginning a low humming song, swept through the camp and started on their desperate charge, Lone Wolf leading them. “Some of those who go will return, but if the white men fight, I will not return,” he sang, as they began to climb the hill on whose top the white man could be seen awaiting their coming.

Halfway up the hill they met some of the young warriors. “Go bring all the white men to the council,” said Lone Wolf.

As the white men watched the band leaving the village and beginning to ascend the hill, Speed turned and said: “Well, Jack, what do you think of it? Here comes a war party—painted and armed.”

“I think it’s about an even chance whether we ever cross the Washita again or not. Now, you are a married man with children, and I wouldn’t blame you if you pulled out right this minute.”

“I feel meaner about this than anything I ever did,” replied Speed, “but I am going to stay with the expedition.”

As Lone Wolf and his heroic old guard drew near, Seger thrilled with the significance of this strange and solemn company of old men in full war-paint, armed with all kinds of old-fashioned guns, and bows and arrows. As he looked into their wrinkled faces, the scout perceived that these grandsires had come resolved to die. He divined what had taken place in camp. Their exalted heroism was written in the somber droop of their lips. “We can die, but we will not retreat!” In such wise our grandsires fought.

Lone Wolf led his Spartan host steadily on till near enough to be heard without effort. He then halted, took off his war-bonnet and hung it on the pommel of his saddle. Lifting both palms to the sky, he spoke, and his voice had a solemn boom in it: “The Great Father is looking down on us. He sees us. He knows I speak the truth. He gave us this land. We are the first to inhabit it. No one else has any claim to it. It is ours, and I will go under the sod before any cattlemen shall divide it and take it away from us. I have said it.”

When this was interpreted to him, Pierce with a look of inquiry turned to Speed. “Tell the old fool this line is going to be run, and no old scarecrows like these can stop us.”

Seger, lifting his hand, signed: “Lone Wolf, you know me. I am your friend. I do not come to do you harm. I come to tell you you are wrong. All the land on my left hand the Great Father says is Cheyenne land. All on my right is Kiowa land. The Cheyennes have sold the right to their land to the white man, and we are here to mark out the line. We take only Cheyenne land.”

“I do not believe it,” replied the chief. “My agent knows nothing of it. Washington has not written anything to me about it. This is the work of robbers. Cattlemen will do anything for money. They are wolves. They shall not go on.”

“What does he say?” asked Pierce.

“He says we must not go on.”

“You tell him that he can’t run any such bluff on me with his old scarecrow warriors. This lines goes through.”

Lone Wolf, tense and eager, asked, “What says the white chief?”

“He says we must run the line.”

Lone Wolf turned to his guard. “You may as well get ready,” he said, quietly.

The old men drew closer together with a mutter of low words, and each pair of dim eyes selected their man. The clicking of their guns was ominous, and Pierce turned white.

Speed drew his revolver-holster round to the front. “They’re going to fight,” he said. “Every man get ready!”

But Seger, eager to avoid the appalling contest, cried out to Pierce:

“Don’t do that! It’s suicide to go on. These old men have come out to fight till death.” To Lone Wolf he signed: “Don’t shoot, my friend!—let us consider this matter. Put up your guns.”

Into the hot mist of Pierce’s wrath came a realization that these old men were in mighty earnest. He hesitated.

Lone Wolf saw his hesitation, and said: “If you are here by right, why do you not get the soldier chief to come and tell me? If the Great Father has ordered this—then I am like a man with his hands tied. The soldiers do not lie. Bring them!”

Seger grasped eagerly at this declaration. “There is your chance, Pierce. The chief says he will submit if the soldiers come to make the survey. Let me tell him that you will bring an officer from the fort to prove that the government is behind you.”

Pierce, now fully aware of the desperate bravery of the old men, was looking for a knothole of escape. “All right, fix it up with him,” he said.

Seger turned to Lone Wolf. “The chief of the surveyors says: ‘Let us be friends. I will not run the line.’”

“Ho, ho!” cried the old warriors, and their faces, grim and wrinkled, broke up into smiles. They laughed, they shook hands, while tears of joy filled their eyes. They were like men delivered from sentence of death. The desperate courage of their approach was now revealed even to Pierce. They were joyous as children over their sudden release from slaughter.

Lone Wolf, approaching Seger, dismounted, and laid his arm over his friend’s shoulder. “My friend,” he said, with grave tenderness, “I wondered why you were with these men, and my heart was heavy; but now I see that you were here to turn aside the guns of the cattlemen. My heart is big with friendship for you. Once more you have proved my good counselor.” And tears dimmed the fierceness of his eyes.

A week later, a slim, smooth-cheeked second lieutenant, by virtue of his cap and the crossed arms which decorated his collar, ran the line, and Lone Wolf made no resistance. “I have no fight with the soldiers of the Great Father,” he said: “they do not come to gain my land. I now see that Washington has decreed that this fence shall be built.” Nevertheless, his heart was very heavy, and in his camp his heroic old guard sat waiting, waiting!

BIG MOGGASEN

BIG MOGGASEN

Far in the Navajoe Country there are mountains almost unknown to the white man. Beginning on the dry penon spotted land they rise to pine clad hills where many springs are. Deep cañons with wondrous cliffs of painted stone cut athwart the ranges and in crevices of these walls, so it is said, are the stone houses of most ancient peoples. It is not safe for white men to go there—especially with pick and shovel, for Big Moggasen the Chief is keenly alive to the danger of permitting miners to peer about the rocks and break them up with hammers.

Because these mountains are unknown they are alluring and men often came to the agency for permission to enter the unknown land. To them the agent said, “No, I don’t want a hellabaloo raised about your death in the first place, and in the second place this reservation belongs to the Navajoes—you’d better prospect in some other country.”

Big Moggasen lived far away from the agency and was never seen even by the native police. He lived quite independent of the white man’s bounty. He drew no rations and his people paid no taxes. His young men tended the sheep, the old men worked in silver and his women wove blankets which they sold to the traders for coffee and flour. In such wise he lived from the time that his father’s death made him a chief.

In winter his people retreated to the valleys where they were sheltered from the wind—where warm hogans of logs and dirt protected them from the cold, and in the spring when the snow began to melt they drove their flocks of black and white sheep, mixed with goats, higher in the hills. In midsummer when the valleys were baking hot, the young herders urged their herd far up among the pines where good grass grew and springs of water gushed from every cañon.

Their joys equaled their sorrows. True the old were always perishing and birth was a pain, and the sheep sometimes starved because the snow covered the grass, and the children died of throat sickness, but of such is human life in all lands. For the most part they had plenty of meat to roast, and berries and pinon nuts to make it savory, and the young men always had hearts for dancing and the young girls pulled at their robes and every one laughed in the light of the dance-fire.

But at last the people began to complain. Women chattered their discontentment as they wove their blankets under the cedars and the old men gossiped in twos and threes before their camp fires. The children cried for coffee and cakes of flour, and at last Big Moggasen was forced to consider the discontent of his people. His brow was black as he rose in council to say: “What is the matter that you all grumble and whine like lame coyotes? Of old it was not so, you took what that sun spirits sent and were brave, now you have the hearts of foxes. What is it you want?”

Then Black Bear, a young chief man arose and said: “We will tell you, father. The Tinné to the south have a better time than we do. They have better clothing and coffee each day and wagons in which to ride or carry heavy loads. They have shovels with which to build hogans and to dig wells for their sheep. They have hats also which keep off the sun in summer and snow in winter. Why do we not have some of these good things also? We need wells and have nothing to dig them with. We go about bareheaded and the sun is hot on our hair. We grow tired of meat without drink. We think therefore that we should go down and see the white man and get some of these needed things.”

To this applauded speech old Big Moggasen sharply replied: “I have heard of these things for a long time, but a bear does not present me with his ears for love of me. Why does the white man give these things? I have trapped deer by such sly actions. It is for some reason that our cousins are fed on sweet things by the white man. They wish to make captives of us. They will steal our children and our wives. I have known of the ways of white men for many years. I am old and my face is wrinkled with thinking about him. I am not to be instructed of boys in such a matter.”

All the night long the talk raged. Big Moggasen stood like a rock in the wash of the current. He repeated again and again his arguments. “The white man does not give his coat to the Tinné without hope of pay. It is all a trick.”

At last he gave way and consented to go with two of his head men and see the Little Father and find out for himself the whole truth. He went reluctantly and with drawn brows for he was not at all sure of returning again. All the old people shared his feeling but Brown Bear and Four Fingers who had traveled much laughed openly and said: “See, they go like sick men. Their heads hang down toward their feet like sick ponies. They need some of the white man’s hot drink.”

They traveled hard to the south for three days coming into a hot dry climate, which they did not like. There was little grass and the sheep were running to and fro searching for food somewhere, even eating sagebrush. The women were everywhere making blankets, and each night when they stopped the men of the north had coffee to drink and the people told many strange things of the whites. The old men had heard these things before but they had not really believed them. Some of the women said, “My children are away at the white man’s big house. They wear the white man’s clothes and eat three times each day from white dishes. They are learning the ways of the white man.”

“I like it not,” said Big Moggasen, “it is their plan to steal them and make them work for the white man. Why do they do these things?”

One woman held up a big round silver piece, “You see this? My man digs for the white man far in the south where the big iron horse runs and he gets one of these every day. Therefore we have coffee and flour often—and shoes and warm clothing.”

Big Moggasen shook his head and went on to the south. He came at last to the place where the soldiers used to be in the olden time and behold there were some big new red houses and many boys and girls and ten white people, and all about stood square hogans in which Tinné also lived. At the door of one of these hogans stood a white-haired man and he said:

“Friend, I do not know you but you are welcome. Come in and eat.”

The old man entered and in due time Big Moggasen told his name and his errand and his fears.

To this White-hairs replied: “It is natural for you to feel so. Once I felt the same but the white man has not harmed me yet. My children have learned to speak his tongue and to write. They are happier than they were and that makes me happy. I do not understand the white people. They are strange. Their thoughts are not our thoughts but they are wonder-workers. I am in awe of them. They are wiser than the spirits. They do things which it is impossible for us to do, therefore I make friends with them. They have done me no harm. My children are fond of them and so I am content.”

All the evening the old men from the northern mountains sat arguing, questioning, shaking their heads. At last they said, “Very well, in the morning we will go to the Little Father and hear what he has to say. To us it now seems that these strange people have thrown dust in your eyes and that they are scheming to make pack-ponies of you.”

In the morning they drank again of the white man’s coffee with sweet in it and ate of the white man’s bread and it was all very seductive to the tongue. Then old White-hairs led them to the Little Father’s room.

The Little Father was a small man who wore bits of glass before his eyes. He was short-spoken and his voice was high and shrill but calm.

“What is it?” he said to White-hairs in the Tinné tongue.

“These are they from the mountains,” replied White-hairs. “This is Big Moggasen.”

The Little Father rose and held out his hand, “How is your health?”

Big Moggasen took his hand but coldly.

“This is Tall-man and this Silver Arrow.”

After they had shaken hands the Little Father said: “Sit down and we will smoke.” He gave them some tobacco and when they had rolled it into little leaves of paper he said: “Well now, what can I do for you?”

After a long pause Big Mogassen began abruptly: “We live in the mountains, three days’ journey from here. We are poor. We have no wagons or shovels like the people who live here. We are of one blood with them. We do not see why we should not have these things. We have come for them. My people want wagons to carry logs in and shovels to dig wells and harnesses to put on our ponies.”

To this the Little Father replied: “Yes, we have these good things and I give them to your people. They are for those who are good and who walk in the white man’s trail. We wish to help you also. Did you bring any children with you?”

“No.”

“You must do that. We wish to educate your children. If you bring twenty children to school I will see what I can do for you.”

Big Moggasen harshly replied: “I did not come to talk about school.”

The answer was quick and stern: “But I did. You will get nothing until you send your children to me to be schooled.”

Big Moggasen’s veins swelled with the rush of his hot blood. He leaped to his feet tense and rigid. “No. My children shall not come. I do not believe in the white man or his ways. I do not like the white man’s ways. I am old and I have seen many things. The white man makes our young men drunk. He steals away our daughters. He takes away their hearts with sweet drinks and clothes. He is a wolf.”

The Little Father remained calm. “It is true there are bad white men, but there are those who are good.”

“Those I do not see,” growled the chief. “All my life I have thrust the white men away because they came to steal our land. I do not want my children to learn their ways.”

“Then you can’t have any of the great fellow’s presents.”

“Then I will go home as I came, hungry and cold,” replied the old man, wrapping his blanket around him.

“To show that I am not angry,” said the Little Father. “I will give you something to eat on your way home.”

The old man grew stern and set. “I did not come to beg of the white man. I did not come to ask anything for myself. I came because my people in council decided to send me. I have come. I am old and I have not departed from the ways of my fathers. I have lived thus far without the white man’s help, I will die as I have lived. I have spoken.”

Turning abruptly he went out, followed by his companions and old White-hairs, whose face was very sad.

THE STORM-CHILD

THE STORM-CHILD

There was tranquillity in the warm lodge of Waumdisapa, chief of the Tetons. It was always peaceful there for it is the duty of a head man to render his people harmonious and happy—but it was doubly tranquil on this midwinter day, for a mighty tumult had arisen in the tops of the tall willows, and across the grass of the bleak plain an icy dust was wildly sliding. Nearly all the men of the band were in camp, so fierce was the blast.

Waumdisapa listened tranquilly to the streams of snow lashing his tepee’s cap and felt it on his palm as it occasionally sifted down through the smoke-vent, and said, “The demons may howl and the white sands slide—my people are safe here behind the hills. With food and plenty of blankets we can wait.”

Hour by hour he smoked, or gravely meditated, his mind filled with the pursuits and dangers of the past. Now and again as an aged wrinkled warrior lifted the door-flap he was invited to enter to partake of tobacco and to talk of the gathering spirits of winter.

In a neighboring lodge the chief’s wife was at work beside her kettle singing a low song as she minded her fire, and through the roaring, whistling, moaning riot of the air-sprites other women could be heard cheerfully beating their way from fire to fire. A few hunters were still abroad, but no one was alarmed about them. The tempest was a subject of jest and comparison with other days. No one feared its grim power. Was it not a part of nature, an enemy always to be met!

Suddenly the sound of a moaning cry broke in upon the chief’s meditation. The tent-door was violently thrown up and with a hoarse wail, Oma, a young widow, entered the lodge, and threw herself before the feet of Waumdisapa. “My baby! My little boy is lost in the snow. O father, pity me—help me!”

Quickly the chief questioned her. “Where?”

“Out there!” she motioned with her hand—a wild gesture toward the bleak remorseless north. “I was with my brothers hunting the buffalo—the storm came on—my baby wandered away from the camp. We could not find him. They came away—taking me, too. They would not let me stay. Send hunters—find him. Take pity on me, my father!”

The chief turned to her brothers (who had followed her and were looking on with sad faces) and said, “Is this true?”

“It is!” they said. “We were in temporary camp. We were resting. The tempest leaped upon us. All was in confusion. The baby wandered away—the snow must have covered him quickly. We could not find him though we searched hard and long. The storm grew. Some of us came on to bring the women and children to camp. Three of us, my brothers and I, remained to look for the boy. We could not find him. He is buried deep in the snow.”

The chief, touched by the woman’s agony, rose in reproof. “Go back!” he said, sternly. “Take other of the young men. Cover every foot of ground near your camp.”

“The night is coming.”

“No matter—search!” commanded the chief.

A party of braves was soon made up. As they rode away into the blast Oma wished to go with them, but the chief prevented her.

All the afternoon she remained in the chief’s lodge crowding close to his feet—listening, moaning, waiting. She was weak with hunger, and shivering with cold, but she would not eat, would not go to her silent and lonely fireplace.

“No, no, father, I will stay with you,” she said.

Swiftly the darkness fell upon the camp. The cold intensified. The tempest increased in violence, howling above the willows like an army of flying demons. The snows beat upon the stout skins of the lodges and fell in heaps which grew ever higher, but the mothers of the camp came one by one, young and old, to comfort the stricken one, speaking words of cheer.

“They will bring him.”

“The brave hunters will find your boy.”

“They know no fear.”

“They have sharp eyes.”

“Their hearts are warm.”

“They will rescue him.”

Nevertheless, two by two the hardy trailers returned, cold, weary, covered with ice, their faces sad, their eyes downcast. “Blackness is on the plain,” they reported. “Nothing moves but the snow. We have searched hard. We have called, we have listened close, no voice replies. Nothing is to be seen, or heard.”

With each returning unsuccessful scout the mother’s grief and despair deepened. Heartbroken, she lay prone on the ground, her face in the dust, while the sorrowful songs of the women went on around her. Truly hers was a piteous plight.

“To lose one’s only child is sad. She has no man. She is alone.”

“The sun-god has forsaken her,” said one old woman. “He is angry. She has neglected some sacrifice.”

At last Hacone, the bravest, most persistent scout of all, one who loved Oma, came silently in and dropped exhausted beside the chieftain’s fire.

“Night, black stranger, has come,” he said, “I can search no longer. Twice I lost my way, twice my horse fell. Blinding was the wind. My breath was taken. Long I looked for the camp. The signal fires guided me. Dead is the child.”

With a whimper of anguish the poor mother fell back upon the floor and lay as one dead, hearing no sound. All night long her low moans went on—and the women who lifted and bore her away sang songs of grief with intent to teach her that sorrow was the lot of all women and that happiness was but a brief spot of sunlight in a world of shadow.

II

The morning broke at last, still, cold, clear, and serene. The tall trees stood motionless to the tips as though congealed into iron, and the smoke of each fire rose slow as though afraid to leave the tepee’s mouth. Here and there an old woman scurried about bearing fuel. The dogs slunk through the camp whining with cold—holding up their half-frozen feet. The horses uneasily circled, brushing close against each other for warmth. Indeed it was a morning of merciless cruelty—the plain was a measureless realm of frost.

In Oma’s tent physical agony was added to grief, or so it seemed, but in truth the mother knew only sorrow. She was too deeply schooled by the terrors of the plains not to know how surely the work of the winter demon had been done. Somewhere out there her sweet little babe was lying stiff and stark in his icy bed—somewhere on the savage and relentless upland his small limbs were at the mercy of the cold.

One by one her friends reassembled to help her bear her loss—eager to offer food, quick to rebuild her fire—but she would not listen, could not face the cheerful flame. Meat and the glow of embers were of no avail to revive her frozen, hopeless heart.

The chief himself came at last to see her—to inquire again minutely of her loss. “We will seek further,” he said. “We will find the boy. We will bring him to you. Be patient.”

Suddenly a shout arose. “A white man! a white man!” and the warning cry carried forward from lip to lip announced the news to Waumdisapa.

“A white man comes—riding a pony and bearing something in his arms. He is within the camp circle!”

Footprints in the Snow

To an old hunter, footprints in the snow are as an open book, and it was by these “signs” on the trail that the buffalo hunters knew the Sioux had crawled in upon the dispatch-bearer as he rested in a timbered bottom and poured in the bullets that put an end to his career. To the trooper, the plains white with snow had seemed lonely indeed, but, as he well knew, one could not, in those days, trust the plains to be as lonely as they looked, what with the possibility of Mr. Sitting Bull or Mr. Crazy Horse, with a band of his braves, popping out of some coulee, intent upon taking the scalp of any chance wayfarer.

Geronimo and His Band Returning from a Raid in Mexico

Leaving their reservation under such leaders as Geronimo, the Apache Indians, in the period 1882-86, used to take refuge in the Sierra Madre Mountains, and from this stronghold raid the settlements in Mexico and Arizona.

“Bring him to me!” commanded Waumdisapa. “I will know his errand.”

To all this Oma paid little heed. What to her was any living creatures now that she was utterly bereaved?

But the wail of a child pierced her heart and she sprang up, listened intently, just as a smiling young white man, carrying a bundle in his arms, entered the door and nodding carelessly to the chief, said in Sioux, “Here’s a little chap I found in the snow last night. I reckon it belongs here.”

The frenzied mother leaped toward him and snatched the babe from his arms. Her cry of joy was sweet to hear, and as she cuddled the baby close, the hunter’s brown face grew very tender—though he laughed.

“I reckon that youngster’s gone to the right spot, chief. I thought he belonged to your band.”

Then Waumdisapa shook him by the hand and commanded him to sit. “Go shelter the white man’s horse,” he said, to his people, “and let a feast be cried, for the lost child is found. This warm-hearted stranger has brought the dead to life, and we are all glad.”

The hunter laughed in some dismay, and put away the food which the women began to press upon him. “I must go, chief. My people wait. I do not deserve this fuss.”

“I will send a messenger to say you are here. They shall also come to our feast.”

“They may kill your messenger for we are at war.”

The chief considered. “Write large on a piece of paper. Say that we are at war no more. This deed has made us friends. You are one of us—we will honor you. We cannot let you go. See the mother’s joy? She wishes to thank you!”

It was true. Oma, holding her child in her arms, was kneeling before the young hunter, her face upturned in gratitude. She caught his hand and kissed it, pressing it to her cheek.

“You are a good man. You have a brave warm heart. You have restored my child. I love you. I will love all white people hereafter. Stay and feast with us for I am very happy.”

Flushed with embarrassment the young man shrank away. “Don’t do that! I have done very little. Any white man would have acted the same.”

But the people of the snow would not have it so. Smilingly they laid hands upon him and would not let him go. “No, you must remain and dance with us. We will send for your companions—we will write a new treaty of peace. Our gratitude shall make us brothers.”

Like a flower that springs up in the wet grass after a rain the mother’s head lifted and her face shone with joy. The child was untouched of frost, not even a toe had been pinched, and he fell asleep again as soon as he was fed. Then Oma laid him down and came to flutter about his rescuer with gestures of timid worship. She smiled with such radiance that the young man wondered at the change in her, and her ecstasy awoke his pity. Then the chief said:

“See! Oma is a widow. She already loves you. Stay with us and take her to wife.”

Then the youth grew more uneasy than ever and with hesitation said: “No, chief, I can’t do that—far away among the white villagers is a girl who is to be my wife. I cannot marry anyone else. I have made a vow.”

The gentle old chief did not persist, but the women perceived how Oma’s gratitude grew and one of them took the hunter by the sleeve and while Oma stood before him in confusion said: “See! You have made her very happy. She desires to show you how much she owes to you—stay and be happy.”

He shook them off, but in no unkindly way. “No,” he repeated. “I must go,” and stepped toward the door of the lodge, strangely moved by the passion of this primitive scene. These grateful women moved him but he looked not back.

Waumdisapa followed him. “Friend, tell me your name.”

“Your people call me ‘Blazing Hand,’” returned the young man.

“Hah!” shouted the chief in surprise. “Blazing Hand! you are much admired among my men. You are swift to shoot.”

Blazing Hand! The name ran from lip to lip, for they had all heard of this reckless and remorseless young outlaw. More eagerly than ever they crowded to see him—but the chief after a moment regained his calm dignity of manner. “Blazing Hand, you have befriended my people before. Now we are doubly anxious to have you remain with us....”

The young man lifted the door-flap. “Addios,” he said, fixing his eyes on Oma.

She plucked her child from its bed and ran toward him. “I have heard your name. It shall remain in my ears while I live and I will teach my child that he may say it after I am dead.”

Waumdisapa called to his scouts: “See that this man is guided safely to his fellows. And let no one molest him. Henceforth we are brothers. He and his may hunt and trap where they choose on Teton land.”

The light was gray on the face of Oma as the stranger rode away—but the voice of her babe comforted her. Her smile came back and she said: “Perhaps the kind hunter will return. The face of Blazing Hand will live forever in my heart.”

THE BLOOD LUST

THE BLOOD LUST

John Seger, having been detailed to run a mail route across the country from Fort Reno to Camp Supply, selected his friend Little Robe to be his guide. Little Robe was Cheyenne, a tall, grave and rather taciturn man, much respected in his tribe. Just as they were about to start he said to his employer, with gentle decision:

“I don’t know you—you don’t know me. I am Cheyenne, you are white man. It is best that we take no weapons along. Each of us may carry a knife, to use about the camp, but no guns.”

This struck Seger as a bit risky, but, realizing that his life was in the red man’s hands anyway, he decided to accept. “Very well,” said he. “If you don’t need a gun, I don’t.”

Driving a span of horses and carrying a meager camping outfit Seger set forth hopefully. It was in the days of the Star Routers, and this was a bogus line, but neither he nor Robe knew it. They were indeed very much in earnest.

The weather was beautiful, and the prairies glorious. Larks were whistling, plovers crying. “I never enjoyed a ride more in my life,” said Seger, and, as for Little Robe, he proved a capital companion. His talk was most instructive. He never once became coarse or commonplace, and after the second day Seger trusted him perfectly—though he went to his blanket the first night with some apprehension.

He soon saw why Robe had been recommended to him. His knowledge of the whole country was minute. Every stream suggested a story, every hill discovered a memory. As he came to like his white companion, he talked more and more freely of his life as a warrior, telling tales quite as Seger would have done had he been able to speak of his part in the Vicksburg campaign. To the chief, every enterprise of his career was honorable. It’s all in the point of view.

He knew the heavens, too, and could lay his course almost as well by night as by day, and Seger soon came to have a genuine admiration as well as a feeling of affection for him. He was handy as a woman around the camp kettle, and never betrayed weariness or anger or doubt.

One night as they rode down to camp in the valley of a small stream Robe looked about him with more than usual care, and a perceptible shadow fell over his face. “I know this place,” he said, and Seger could see that he was saddened by some recollection connected with it.

He said no more till after they had eaten their supper, and were sitting beside the smouldering fire; then he began slowly to utter his mind.

“Aye, friend, I know this place. It is filled with sad thoughts. I camped here many years ago. I was a young warrior then and reckless, but my wife was with me, and my little daughter.” His lips took on a sweetness almost feminine as he paused. “She was very lovely, my child. She had lived five years and she could swim like an otter. She used to paddle about in this little pool. Several days I camped here debating whether to go on into the south country or not. You see, friend, I was in need of horses and in those days it was the custom for the young warriors of my tribe to make raids among the peaked hats, whom you call Mexicans, in order to drive off their horses. This was considered brave and honorable, and I was eager to go and enrich myself.

“My wife did not wish me to take this journey. She wept when I told her my plan. ‘Do not go,’ she said, ‘stay with me!’ Then I began to consider taking her and my little daughter with me—for I did not like to be separated from them even for a day. My child was so pretty, her cheeks were so round and her eyes so bright. She had little dimpled hands, and when she put her arms about my neck my heart was like wax.”

The old warrior’s voice trembled as he reached this point in his story, and for a long time he could not go on. At last he regained composure. “It was foolish to make the raid—it was very wrong to take my little girl, but I could not leave her behind. Therefore one day with my wife and daughter and my three brothers, I set out into the southwest, resolute to win some ponies.

“After the first two days we traveled at night and camped in a concealed place during the day. Slowly we stole forward, until at last we came near a small village of The Peaked Hats, where some fine horses and mules were reported to be had by advancing with boldness and skill.

“My own ponies were poor and weak and as I saw the horses about this village I became very eager to own some of them. Especially did I desire a fine sorrel mare. It was not easy to get her, for these people had been many times raided by the Comanches and were very careful to round up their best animals at night and put them into a high corral. Nevertheless, I told my brothers to be ready and that I myself would adventure to the gate, open it, and drive forth our prizes.

“My wife begged me to give up my plan. She wept and clung to my arm. ‘It will lead to evil, I feel it,’ she said. ‘You will be killed.’ But I had given my word. I could not fail of it. ‘Take my wife,’ I said sternly to my younger brother. ‘Take her and the little one and ride northward toward that black butte. I will meet you there at daybreak,’ I said.

“My wife took our little daughter in her arms, and my brother led them away. I could hear my wife moaning as she rode into the dark night——”

Again the deep voice faltered, as the memory of this parting wail came back to him, but he soon resumed quietly: “Slowly I crept forward. I reached the corral, but could not find the gate. It was on the side nearest the village and as I crept round feeling of the poles, the dogs began to bark. I kept on, however, and at last found and tore down the bars. Entering the corral, I began to lash the horses with my lariat. As the sorrel was about to pass me I caught her and leaped upon her back. In a few moments I was driving the whole herd like a whirlwind across the plain.

“My brother joined me and we tried to turn the herd northward, but the leaders gave me great trouble. At last some of them escaped and returned to the village. We heard shouting, we were pursued. Roping and tying some of the best of the ponies we could overtake, we drove them before us toward the butte, well pleased with our capture.

“We traveled hard, overtaking my brother and my wife and baby girl, but thereafter we were unable to make speed on account of the child and its mother, and on account of the horses, two of which were fine but very stubborn. I could not consent to set them loose though I knew I was endangering my dear ones by delay. It was very foolish and I was made to suffer for my folly.

“The Mexicans must have had other horses hidden and ready saddled, for they came swiftly on our trail and before long they began to shoot. Almost the first shot they fired struck my wife in the back, and passing entirely through her body wounded my little daughter. I turned then and began to shoot in return and my pursuers fell back. We abandoned all the horses but two and when my wife told me of her hurt I took my little girl in my arms and rode fast for a place of concealment. My wife was badly crippled and got upon another horse, and followed me closely.

“That day we spent in swiftest flight—using every precaution to conceal our trail. I did not know how sadly mangled my child was, but she moaned with pain and that nearly broke my heart, and yet I dared not stop. I realized how crazy I had been to bring her into this land, but my repentance came too late. At every stream I gave her water to drink and bathed her wound, but it was of no avail—she died in my arms—”

The warrior stopped abruptly. His lips quivered and his eyes were dim with memories too sad for speech. For some minutes he sat in silence, the tears rolling down his browned and wrinkled cheeks. At last he brokenly resumed.

“Friend, we buried her there in that lonely land and kept on our way. But thereafter I could not sleep. When I closed my eyes I could see my baby’s little round face and feel her soft arms about my neck, and my heart was full of bitterness. I longed for revenge. My blood cried out for the death of the man whose bullet had taken her life. Each night in our homeward way my heart burned hot in my bosom, flaming with hate. It was like a live ember in my flesh.

“My woman who knew what was in my mind begged me not to return to the south—but I shut my ears to her pleading. I assembled my clan round me. I called upon those who wished to help me revenge the death of my daughter to join me. Many stepped forth and at last with a band of brave young men I swept back and fell like a whirlwind on that town.

“When I left it, only a heap of ashes could be seen. Of all who inhabited that village not one escaped me—not one.” Then with a face of bronze and with biblical brevity of phrase he concluded: “After that I slept.”

THE REMORSE OF WAUMDISAPA

THE REMORSE OF WAUMDISAPA[2]

There was dissension in the camp of Waumdisapa. Mattowan, his cousin, jealous of his chief’s great fame, was conspiring to degrade and destroy him.

Waumdisapa, called “King of the Plains” by those border men who knew him best, was famed throughout the valley of the Platte. Grave, dignified, serious of face and commanding of figure, he rose intellectually above all his people as his splendid body towered in the dance, a natural leader of men. His people were still living their own life, happy in their own lands, free to come and go, sweeping from north to south as the bison moved, needing nothing of the white man but his buffalo guns and his ammunition. It was in these days that women emptied the flour of their rations upon the grass in order to use the cloth of the sack, careless of the food of the paleface which was considered enervating and destructive to warriors and hunters.

Yet even in those days Waumdisapa was friendly with the traders, and like the famous Sitting Bull of the north, was only anxious to keep his people from corrupting contact with the whites, jealous to hold his lands and resolute to maintain his tribal traditions. His was the true chief’s heart—all his great influence was used to maintain peace and order. He carried no weapon—save the knife with which he shaved his tobacco and cut his meat, and on his arm dangled the beaded bag in which the sacred pipe of friendship and meditation lay, and wherever he walked turmoil ceased.

For these reasons he was greatly beloved by his people. No one feared him—not even the children of the captive Ute woman who served Iapa—and yet he had gained his preëminence by virtue of great deeds as well as by strong and peaceful thoughts. He was a moving orator also—polished and graceful of utterance, conciliatory and placating at all times. Often he turned aside the venomous hand of revenge and cooled the hot heart of war. In tribal policies he was always on the side of justice.

Mattowan was a brave warrior, too, a man respected for his horsemanship, his skill with death-dealing weapons, and distinguished, too, for his tempestuous eloquence—but he was also feared. His hand was quick against even his brothers in council. He could not tolerate restraint. Checked now and again by Waumdisapa, he had darkened with anger, and in his heart a desire for revenge was smoldering like a hidden fire in the hollow of a great tree.

He was ambitious. “Why should Waumdisapa be chief? Am I not of equal stature, of equal fame as a warrior?” So he argued among his friends, spreading disaffection. “Waumdisapa is growing old,” he sneered. “He talks for peace, for submission to the white man. His heart is no longer that of a warrior. He sits much in his tepee. It is time that he were put away.”

When the chief heard these words he was very sad and very angry. He called a council at once to consider what should be done with the traitor and the whole tribe trembled with excitement and awe. What did it mean when the two most valiant men of the tribe stood face to face like angry panthers?

When the head men were assembled Waumdisapa, courteous, grave and self-contained, placed Mattowan at his left and old Mato, the hereditary chief, upon his right, and took his seat with serene countenance. Outside the council tepee the women sat upon the ground—silent, attentive, drawn closer to the speakers than they were accustomed to approach. The children, even the girl babies, crouched beside their mothers—their desire for play swallowed up in a dim sense of some impending disaster. No feast was being prepared, smiles were few and furtive. No one knew what was about to take place, but a foreboding of trouble chilled them.

The chief lighted his pipe and passed it to Mato who put it to his lips, drew a deep whiff and passed it to his neighbor. So it went slowly from man to man while Waumdisapa sat, in silence, with downcast eyes, awaiting its return.

As the pipe came to Mattowan he, the traitor, passed it by with a gesture of contempt.

The chief received it again with a steady hand, but from his lowered eye-lids a sudden flame shot. Handing the pipe to Mato he rose, and looking benignantly, yet sadly, round the circle, began very quietly:

“Brothers, the Lakotans are a great people, just and generous to their foes, faithful to the laws of their tribe. I am your chief. You all know how I became so. Some of you knew my father—he was a great warrior——”

“Aye, so he was,” said Mato.

“He was a wise and good man also,” continued Waumdisapa.

“Aye, aye,” chorused several of the old men.

“He brought me up in the good way. He taught me to respect my elders and to honor my chief. He told me the stories of our tribe. He taught me to pray—and to shoot. He taught me to dance, to sing the ancient songs, and when I was old enough he led me to battle. My skill with the spear and the arrow I drew from him, he gave me courage and taught me forbearance. When he died you made me leader in his place and carefully have I followed his footsteps. I have kept the peace among my people. I have given of my abundance to the poor. I have not boasted or spoken enviously because my father would be ashamed of me if I did so. Now the time has come to speak plainly. I hear that my brother who sits beside me—Mattowan, the son of my mother’s sister—is envious. I hear that he wishes to see me put aside as one no longer fit to rule.”

He paused here and the tension was very great in all the assembly, but Mattowan sullenly looked out over the heads of the women—his big mouth close set.

The chief gently said: “This shall be as you say. If you, my brothers, head men of the Lakotans, say I am old and foolish, then Waumdisapa will put aside his chief’s robes and go forth to sit outside the council circle.” His voice trembled as he uttered this resolution—but drawing himself to proud height he concluded in a firm voice: “Brothers, I have spoken.”

As he took his seat a low mournful sound passed among the women, and the mother of Mattowan began to sing a bitter song of reproach—but some one checked her, as old Mato rose. He was small, with the face of a fox, keen, shrewd, humorous. After the usual orator’s preamble, he said: “Brothers, this is very foolish. Who desires to have Mattowan chief? Only a few boys and grumblers. What has he done to be chief? Nothing that others have not done. He is a crazy man. His heart is bad. Would he bring dissension among us? Let us rebuke this braggart. For me I am old—I sit here only by courtesy of Waumdisapa, but for me I want no change. I do not wish to make a wolf the war chief of my people. I have spoken.”

As the pipe went round and one by one the head men rose to praise and defend their chieftain, Mattowan became furious. He trembled and his face grew ferocious with his almost ungovernable hate and disappointment—plainly the day was going against him.

At last he sprang up, forgetting all form—all respect. “You are all squaws,” he roared. “You are dogs licking the bones this whining coward throws to you——”

He spoke no more. With the leap of a panther his chief fell upon him and with one terrible blow sunk his knife to the hilt in his heart. Smitten with instant palsy Mattowan staggered a moment amid the moans of the women, and the hoarse shouts of the men, and fell forward, face down in the very center of the council circle.

An Indian Brave
Illustration from
A BUNCH OF BUCKSKINS
by Frederic Remington
Originally published by
R. H. Russell, 1901

For a minute Waumdisapa, tense and terrible in his anger, stood looking down upon his fallen calumniator—rigid, menacing, ready to strike again—then his vast muscles relaxed, his eyes misted with tears and with a moan of remorse and anguish he lifted his blanket till his quivering lips were covered—crying hoarsely, “I have killed my brother. I am no longer fit to be your chief.”

Thereupon dropping his embroidered pipe-bag and his ceremonial fan upon the ground he turned and walked slowly away with staggering, shaking limbs, onward through the camp, out upon the plain and there, throwing himself down upon the ground, began to chant a wild song of uncontrollable grief.

All night long he lay thus, mourning like a wounded lion, and his awed people dared not approach. Over and over, with anguished voice, he cried: “Father pity me. My hand is red with my brother’s blood. I have broken the bond of the council circle. My heart is black with despair!—Pity me!—My brother!”

In the morning he returned to his tepee, moving like an old man, bent and nerveless, avoiding all eyes, ignoring all greetings—and when next the council met, Waumdisapa, clad in rags, with dust upon his head, silently took his place outside the council circle—self-accused and self-deposed.

The sight of their chief moving so humbly to a seat among the obscure, deeply affected the women, and a wailing song ran among them like an autumn wind—but Waumdisapa’s head was bowed to hide his quivering lips.

A DECREE OF COUNCIL

A DECREE OF COUNCIL

Big Nose was an inveterate gambler. Like all the plains tribes the Shi-an-nay are a social people. They love companionship and the interchange of jest and story. At evening, when the day’s hunt is over, they come together to tell stories and joke and discuss each other’s affairs precisely as the peasants of a French village do. And when amusement is desired they dance or play games.

It is this feeling on their part which makes it so difficult for the Government to carry out its theories of allotment. It is difficult to uproot a habit of life which has been thousands of years forming. It is next to impossible to get one of these people to leave the village group and go into his lonely little cabin a mile or two from a neighbor. And the need of amusement is intensified by the sad changes in the life of these people. Games of chance appeal to them precisely as they do to the negro and to large classes of white people. They play with the same abandon with which the negro enters into a game of craps.

One evening Big Nose was in company with three or four others in the midst of Charcoal’s camp playing The Hand game. He had been doing some work for the Post and had brought with him to the camp a little heap of silver dollars. He was therefore in excellent temper for a brisk game. But luck was against him. His little store of money melted away and then he began taking his ponies, his gun, and finally his blankets and his tepee; all went into the yawning gulf of his bad luck. Before midnight came he had staked everything but the clothing on his back and had reached a condition of mind bordering on frenzy.

Nothing was too small for his opponents to accept and nothing was too valuable for him to stake. He began putting his moccasins up on the chance and ended by tearing off his Gee string which represented his absolute impoverishment. A reasonable being would have ended the game here but with a desperation hitherto unknown to the gamblers of his tribe, he sat naked on the ground and gambled both his wives away.

When he realized what had happened to him, that he was absolutely without home or substance in the world, naked to the cold and having no claim upon a human being, his frenzy left him and he sank into pitiful dejection. Walking naked through the camp, he began to cry his need, “Take pity on me, my friends. I have nothing. The wind is cold. I have no blanket. I am hungry. I have no tepee.”

For a long time no one paid any heed to him, for they were disgusted with his foolishness and they would not allow his wives to clothe him or give him shelter. However, at last, his brother came out and gave him a blanket and took him into his tepee. “Let this be a lesson to you,” he said. “You are a fool. Yet I pity you.”

Next day a council was called to consider his case, which was the most remarkable that had ever happened in the tribe. There were many who were in favor of letting him take care of himself, but in the end it was decreed that he should be clothed and that he should have a tepee and the absolute necessities of life.

The question of restoring him to his wives was a much more serious one, the general opinion being that a man who would gamble his wives away in this way had no further claim upon a woman.

In an Indian Camp

The two men standing are in argument about the squaw seated between them, for the possession of whom they had gambled, the brave in the breech-clout, although the loser, refusing, in Indian parlance, “to put the woman on the blanket.”

Crow Indians Firing into the Agency

This incident occurred in 1887 on the Crow Reservation in Northern Montana. A score or so of young Crow braves having captured sixty horses in a raid they made on a Piegan camp, were wildly celebrating the victory when the agent sought to arrest them with his force of Indian police. Upon this the raiders assumed a hostile attitude and as a defiance they began firing into the agency buildings.

At last, old Charcoal arose to speak. He was a waggish old fellow whose eye twinkled with humor as he said, “Big Nose has two wives as you know. One of them is young. She is industrious. She is very quiet, saying little and speaking in a gentle voice. The other is old and has a sharp tongue. Her tongue is like a whip. It makes her husband smart. Now let us restore him to his old wife. She will be good discipline for him. She will not let him forget what he has done.”

This suggestion made every one laugh and it was agreed with. And the news was carried to Big Nose. “I don’t want my old wife,” he said. “I want my young wife.”

“The council has decreed,” was the stern answer, “and there is no appeal.”

Big Nose accepted the ruling of the tribe and resolutely turned his face in the right direction. He gave up gambling and became one of the most progressive men of the tribe. By hard work he acquired a team and a wagon and worked well, freighting for the Agency and for the Post traders.

His old wife, however, grew more and more unsatisfactory as the years went by. For some inscrutable reason, she did not care to make a home, but was always moving about from camp to camp, full of gossip and unwelcome criticism. All this Big Nose patiently endured for four years. But one day he came to Seger, the superintendent of the school near him, and said:

“My friend, you know I am walking the white man’s road. You see that I want to do right. I have a team. I work hard. I want a home where I can live quietly. But my old wife is trifling. She is good for nothing. She wants to gad about all the time and never stay home and look after the chickens. I want to put her away and take another and better wife.”

Seger was very cautious. “What do the old chiefs say about it?”

Big Nose looked a little discouraged, but he answered defiantly, “Oh, I am walking the white man’s road these days. I don’t care what they say. I am listening to what you say.”

“I’ll consider the matter,” he replied evasively, for he wished to consult the head men. When he had stated the matter to White Shield, he said, “Now, of course, whatever you think best in this matter will be acceptable. I don’t know anything about the circumstances, but if this old woman is as bad as Big Nose says, she is of no account.”

White Shield, very quietly, replied, “Big Nose can never marry again.”

“Why not?” inquired Seger, being interested in White Shield’s brevity and decision of utterance.

White Shield replied, “Haven’t you heard how Big Nose gambled his wives away? That thing he did. Gambled away his tepees, his clothing, and walked naked through the camp. We gave him clothes. We gave back one wife, but we marked out a road and he must walk in it. He cannot marry again.”

And from this decree there was no appeal.

DRIFTING CRANE

DRIFTING CRANE

The people of Boomtown invariably spoke of Henry Wilson as the oldest settler in the Jim Valley, as he was of Buster County, but the Eastern man, with his ideas of an “old settler,” was surprised as he met the short, silent, middle-aged man, who was very loath to tell anything about himself, and about whom many strange and thrilling stories were told.

Between his ranch and the settlements in Eastern Dakota there was the wedge-shaped reservation known as the Sisseton Indian Reserve, on which were stationed the customary agency and company of soldiers. The valley was unsurveyed for the most part, and the Indians naturally felt a sort of proprietorship in it, and when Wilson drove his cattle down into the valley and squatted, the chief, Drifting Crane, welcomed him, as a host might, to an abundant feast whose hospitality was presumed upon, but who felt the need of sustaining his reputation for generosity, and submitted graciously.

The Indians during the first summer got to know Wilson, and liked him for his silence, his courage, his simplicity; but the older men pondered upon the matter a great deal and watched with grave faces to see him ploughing up the sod for his garden. There was something strange in this solitary man thus deserting his kindred, coming here to live alone with his cattle; they could not understand it. What they said in those pathetic, dimly lighted lodges will never be known; but when winter came, and the newcomer did not drive his cattle back over the hills as they thought he would, then the old chieftains took long counsel upon it. Night after night they smoked upon it, and at last Drifting Crane said to two of his young men: “Go ask this cattleman why he remains in the cold and snow with his cattle. Ask him why he does not drive his cattle home.”

This was in March, and one evening a couple of days later, as Wilson was about re-entering his shanty at the close of his day’s work, he was confronted by two stalwart Indians, who greeted him pleasantly.

“How d’e do?” he said in reply. “Come in.”

The Indians entered and sat silently while he put some food on the table. They hardly spoke till after they had eaten. The Indian is always hungry, for the reason that his food supply is insufficient and his clothing poor. When they sat on the cracker-boxes and soap-boxes which served as seats, they spoke. They told him of the chieftain’s message. They said they had come to assist him in driving his cattle back across the hills; that he must go.

To all this talk in the Indian’s epigrammatic way, and in the dialect which has never been written, the rancher replied almost as briefly: “You go back and tell Drifting Crane that I like this place; that I’m here to stay; that I don’t want any help to drive my cattle. I’m on the lands of the Great Father at Washington, and Drifting Crane ain’t got any say about it. Now that sizes the whole thing up. I ain’t got anything against you nor against him, but I’m a settler; that’s my constitution; and now I’m settled I’m going to stay.”

While the Indians discussed his words between themselves he made a bed of blankets on the floor, and said: “I never turn anybody out. A white man is just as good as an Indian as long as he behaves himself as well. You can bunk here.”

In the morning he gave them as good a breakfast as he had,—bacon and potatoes, with coffee and crackers. Then he shook hands, saying: “Come again. I ain’t got anything against you; you’ve done y’r duty. Now go back and tell your chief what I’ve said. I’m at home every day. Good day.”

The Indians smiled kindly, and drawing their blankets over their arms, went away toward the east.

During April and May two or three reconnoitering parties of land-hunters drifted over the hills and found him out. He was glad to see them, for, to tell the truth, the solitude of his life was telling on him. The winter had been severe, and he had hardly caught a glimpse of a white face during the three midwinter months, and his provisions were scanty.

These parties brought great news. One of them was the advance surveying party for a great Northern railroad, and they said a line of road was to be surveyed during the summer if their report was favorable.

“Well, what d’ye think of it?” Wilson asked, with a smile.

“Think! It’s immense!” said a small man in the party, whom the rest called Judge Balser. “Why, they’ll be a town of four thousand inhabitants in this valley before snow flies. We’ll send the surveyors right over the divide next month.”

They sent some papers to Wilson a few weeks later, which he devoured as a hungry dog might devour a plate of bacon. The papers were full of the wonderful resources of the Jim Valley. It spoke of the nutritious grasses for stock. It spoke of the successful venture of the lonely settler Wilson, how his stock fattened upon the winter grasses without shelter, what vegetables he grew, etc.

Wilson was reading this paper for the sixth time one evening in May. He felt something touch him on the shoulder, and looked up to see a tall Indian gazing down upon him with a look of strange pride and gravity. Wilson sprang to his feet and held out his hand.

“Drifting Crane, how d’e do?”

The Indian bowed, but did not take the settler’s hand. Drifting Crane would have been called old if he had been a white man, and there was a look of age in the fixed lines of his powerful, strongly modeled face, but no suspicion of weakness in the splendid poise of his broad, muscular body. There was a smileless gravity about his lips and eyes which was very impressive.

“I’m glad to see you. Come in and get something to eat,” said Wilson, after a moment’s pause.

The chief entered the cabin and took a seat near the door. He took a cup of milk and some meat and bread silently, and ate while listening to the talk of the settler.

“I don’t brag on my biscuits, chief, but they eat, if a man is hungry. An’ the milk’s all right. I suppose you’ve come to see why I ain’t moseying back over the divide?”

The chief, after a long pause, began to speak in a low, slow voice, as if choosing his words. He spoke in broken English, of course, but his speech was very direct and plain and had none of these absurd figures of rhetoric which romancers invariably put into the mouths of Indians. His voice was almost lionlike in its depth, and yet was not unpleasant.

“Cattleman, my young men brought me bad message from you. They brought your words to me, saying, he will not go away.”

“That’s about the way the thing stands,” replied Wilson, in response to the question that was in the old chief’s steady eyes. “I’m here to stay. This ain’t your land; this is Uncle Sam’s land, and part of it’ll be mine as soon as the surveyors come to measure it off.”

“Who gave it away?” asked the chief. “My people were cheated out of it; they didn’t know what they were doing.”

“I can’t help that; that’s for Congress to say. That’s the business of the Great Father at Washington.”

There was a look of deep sorrow in the old man’s face. At last he spoke again: “The cattleman is welcome; but he must go, because whenever one white man goes and calls it good, the others come. Drifting Crane has seen it far in the east twice. The white men come thick as the grass. They tear up the sod. They build houses. They scare the buffalo away. They spoil my young men with whisky. Already they begin to climb the eastern hills. Soon they will fill the valley, and Drifting Crane and his people will be surrounded. The sod will all be black.”

“I hope you’re right,” was the rancher’s grim reply.

“But they will not come if the cattleman go back to say the water is not good, there is no grass, and the Indians own the land.”

Wilson smiled at the childish faith of the chief. “Won’t do, chief—won’t do. That won’t do any good. I might as well stay.”

The chief rose. He was touched by the settler’s laugh; his eyes flashed; his voice took on a sterner note. “The white man must go!”

Wilson rose also. He was not a large man, but he was a very resolute one. “I shan’t go,” he said through his clenched teeth.

It was a thrilling, a significant scene. It was in absolute truth the meeting of the modern vidette of civilization with one of the rear guard of retreating barbarism. Each man was a type; each was wrong, and each was right. The Indian as true and noble from the barbaric point of view as the white man. He was a warrior and hunter; made so by circumstances over which he had no control.

The settler represented the unflagging energy and fearless heart of the American pioneer. Narrow-minded, partly brutalized by hard labor and a lonely life, yet an admirable figure for all that. As he looked into the Indian’s face he seemed to grow in height. He felt behind him all the weight of the millions of westward-moving settlers; he stood the representative of an unborn state. He took down a rifle from the wall, the magazine rifle, most modern of guns; he patted the stock, pulled the crank, throwing a shell into view.

“You know this thing, chief?”

The Indian nodded slightly.

“Well, I’ll go when—this—is—empty.”

“But my young men are many.”

“So are the white men—my brothers.”

The chief’s head dropped forward. Wilson, ashamed of his boasting, put the rifle back on the wall.

“I’m not here to fight. You can kill me any time. You could ’a’ killed me to-night, but it wouldn’t do any good. It’ud only make it worse for you. Why, they’ll be a town in here bigger’n all your tribe before two grass from now. It ain’t no use, Drifting Crane; it’s got to be. You an’ I can’t help n’r hinder it.”

Drifting Crane turned his head and gazed out on the western sky, still red with the light of the fallen sun. His face was rigid as bronze, but there was a dreaming, prophetic look in his eyes. A lump came into the settler’s throat; for the first time in his life he got a glimpse of the infinite despair of the Indian. He forgot that Drifting Crane was the representative of a “vagabond race”; he saw in him, or rather felt in him, something almost magnetic. He was a man; and a man of sorrows. The settler’s voice was husky when he spoke again, and his lips trembled.

“Chief, I’d go to-morrow if it’ud do any good, but it won’t—not a particle. You know that when you stop to think a minute. What good did it do to massacree all them settlers at New Ulm? What good will it do to murder me and a hundred others? Not a bit. A thousand others would take our places. So I might just as well stay, and we might just as well keep good friends. Killin’ is out o’ fashion; don’t do any good.”

There was a twitching about the stern mouth of the Indian chief. He understood all too well the irresistible logic of the pioneer. He kept his martial attitude, but his broad chest heaved painfully, and his eyes grew dim. At last he said, “Good-by. Cattleman right; Drifting Crane wrong. Shake hands. Good-by.” He turned and strode away.

“This is all wrong,” muttered the settler. “There’s land enough for us all, or ought to be. I don’t understand—Well, I’ll leave it to Uncle Sam, anyway.” He ended with a sigh.

THE STORY OF HOWLING WOLF

THE STORY OF HOWLING WOLF

Within two weeks after Captain Cook took charge of the Snake River Agency his native policemen reported that fifteen of his people had crossed the reservation line on their way to the Wind River Country.

“Where have they gone?”

“They gone to see it—their Ghost Dance Saviour,” explained Claude, the agency interpreter.

“Who have gone?”

Claude rapidly ran over the names, and ended with “Howling Wolf.”

“Howling Wolf? Who is he? He isn’t on the rolls. I don’t know anything about him.”

“He head man of Lizard Creek Camp.”

“Why isn’t he on the rolls?”

“He don’t get it—no rations.”

“Why not?”

“He is angry.”

“Angry? What about?”

Out of a good deal of talk the agent secured this story. Seven years before, a brother of Howling Wolf, a peaceful old man, was sitting on a hilltop (near the road) wrapped in evening meditation. His back was toward a white man’s cabin not far away and he was looking at the sunset. His robe was drawn closely round him, and his heart was at peace with all the world, for he was thinking that the way is short between him and the Shadow Land.

A couple of cowboys came out of the door of the cabin and one pointed at the meditating man with derisive gestures. The other drew his revolver and said, “See me knock the hat off the old fool.”

As he fired the old man sprang to his feet with a convulsive leap, the blood streaming over his face. Numbed by the shock and blinded with his own blood, he ran frenziedly and without design toward the miscreant who shot him, and so on over the hill toward Howling Wolf’s camp.

Springing to their horses the two ruffians galloped away with desperate haste.

It was well they did so, for an hour later nothing remained of the ranch but a heap of smoking embers. A hundred angry red men had swept back over the hill—swift to avenge the madness of old Medicine Crow.

The old man was not killed, he lived for more than a year after the wound, but he was never quite himself and when he died Howling Wolf made a solemn declaration of war against the white cattlemen and could not be convinced that the cowboys meant merely to frighten and not to kill his brother. He lived in the hope of some time meeting those men. No one had seen them but David Big Nose, who had been to the white settlement that day, had met the fugitives, and was able to describe them very well and every word of his description burned itself into Howling Wolf’s memory. Thereafter on all his excursions among the whites his eyes were ever seeking, his ears ever listening. He never for an instant lost hope of revenge.

He withdrew from all friendly association with the whites. He was sullen, difficult to deal with and in the end became a powerful influence in checking the progress of the Shi-an-nay along the white man’s road. The agent took little pains to help him clear away his doubts and hates, and so it was that Claude, the interpreter, ended by saying, “and so Howling Wolf no send children to school—no take it rations, and never comes to agency—never.”

Captain Cook sat down and wrote a telegram to the agent of the Sho-sho-nee, saying, “Fifteen of my people are gone without leave to visit the Messiah. If they come into your reservation arrest them and send them back at once.”

Some days later the Wind River agent replied: “Eleven of your Indians came in here—I’ve sent them home. Four went round me to the west. Probably they have gone into the Twin Lake Country, where the Messiah is said to be.”

Some weeks later Big Bear, the policeman, came in with the second announcement, “Howling Wolf come.”

“You tell Howling Wolf I want to see him,” said Cook. “Tell him I want to talk with him, say to him I am his friend and that I want to talk things over.”

Two days later, as he sat at his desk in his inner office, the captain heard the door open and close, and when he looked up, a tall, handsome but very sullen red man was looking down upon him.

“How!” called Cook, pleasantly, extending his hand.

The visitor remained as motionless as a bronze statue of hate, his arms folded, his figure menacing. His eyes seemed to search the soul of the man before him.

“How—how!” called Cook again. “Are you deaf? What’s the matter with you? How!”

At this the chief seized the agent’s hand and began shaking it violently, viciously. It was his crippled arm and Cook was soon tired of this horseplay.

“That’ll do, stop it! Stop it, I say. Stop it or by the Lord I’ll smash your face,” he cried, seizing a heavy glass inkstand. He was about to strike his tormentor, when the red man dropped his hand.

Angry and short of breath the agent stepped to the door.

“Claude, come in here. Who is this man? What’s the matter with him?”

“That Howling Wolf,” replied the interpreter, with evident fear.

Cook was enlightened. He turned with a beaming smile. “Howling Wolf, how de do? I’m glad to see you.” And then to Claude: “You tell him my arm is sick and he mustn’t be so hearty with his greetings. Tell him I want to have a long talk with him right off—but I’ve got some papers to sign and I can’t do it now. Tell him to come to-morrow morning.”

They shook hands again, ceremoniously this time, and Howling Wolf withdrew in dignified reserve.

After he went away Cook informed himself thoroughly concerning the former agent’s treatment of Howling Wolf and was ready next morning for a conference.

As he walked into the yard about nine o’clock the agent found fifteen or twenty young men of Howling Wolf’s faction lounging about the door of the office. They were come to see that their leader was not abused—at least such was Cook’s inference.

He was irritated but did not show it. “Go out of the yard!” he said quietly. “I don’t want you here. Claude will tell you all you want to know.” He insisted and, though they scowled sullenly, they obeyed, for he laid his open palm on the breast of the tallest of them and pushed him to the gate. “Come, go out—you’ve no business here.”

Claude was shaking with fear, but regained composure as the young men withdrew.

As they faced Howling Wolf in the inner office, Cook said, “Well now, Wolf, I want you tell me just what is the matter? I am your friend and the friend of all your people. I am a soldier and a soldier does his duty. My duty is to see that you get your rations and that no one harms you. Now what is the trouble?”

Howling Wolf mused a while and then began to recount his grievances one by one. His story was almost exactly as it had been reported by others.

An Indian Trapper

This Indian trapper depicted by Remington may be a Cree, or perhaps a Blackfoot, whom one was apt to run across in the Selkirk Mountains, or elsewhere on the plains of the British Territory, or well up north in the Rockies, toward the outbreak of the Civil War.

A Questionable Companionship

In frontier days when the white man and the Indian met on a lonely trail it was natural for them to watch each other with suspicion as they rode side by side. To both the companionship seemed questionable, until finally some words of the red man convinced the white man that his companion was trustworthy. After that there were a sharing of food or water or tobacco and an admixture of comfort to the companionship.

The other agent had sworn at him and once had kicked at him—“for which I will kill him”—he added with quiet menace. “He has tried to steal away my children to teach them white man’s ways. I don’t want them to learn white man’s ways. White man lie, and steal and quarrel. Then the agent cut off my rations which are a part of our treaty and I was hungry. For all this I am angry at white men.”

When he had finished the agent said, “You’re all wrong, Howling Wolf. Some white men are bad, but many are good and want to do the Indian good. I am one of those who are set aside by the Great Father to see that your rights are secured. You may depend on me. Go ask Red Beard, Wolf Voice, or White Calf, they will tell you the kind of man I am. I’m going to be your friend whether you are my friend or not. I want you to come and see me. I want you to draw your rations and be friends with me. Will you do it? I want you to think about this to-night and come and see me again.”

For fully five minutes Howling Wolf sat thinking deeply with his eyes on the floor. His lips twitched occasionally and his broad breast heaved with profound emotion. It was hard to trust the white man even when he smiled, for his tongue had ever been forked like the rattlesnake and his hand exceedingly cunning. His deeds also were mysterious. Out of the east he came and monstrous things followed him—canoes that belched flame and thunder, iron horses that drew huge wagons, with a noise like a whirlwind. They brought plows that tore the sod, machines that swept away the grass. Their skill was diabolical. They all said, “dam Injun,” and in those words displayed their hearts. They desolated, uprooted and transformed. They made the red men seem like children and weak women by their necromancy. Was there no end to their coming? Was there no clear sky behind this storm? What mighty power pushed them forward?

And yet they brought good things. They brought sugar and flour and strange fruits. They knew how to make pleasant drinks and to raise many grains. They were not all bad. They were like a rainstorm which does much harm and great good also. Besides, here was this smiling man, his agent, waiting to hear what he had to say.

At last he was able to look up, and though he did not smile, his face was no longer sullen. He rose and extended his hand. “I will do as you say. I will go home and think. I will come to see you again and I will tell you all my mind.”

When he came two days later he met the agent with a smile. “How! My friend—How!” he said pleasantly.

The agent took him to his inner office where none might hear and made the sign “Be seated.”

Howling Wolf sat down and began by saying, “I could not come yesterday, for I had not yet finished thinking over your words. When night came I did as you said. I lay alone in my tepee looking up at a star just above and my thoughts were deep and calm. You are right, Howling Wolf is wrong. Nobody ever explained these things to me before. All white men said, ‘Go here,’ ‘Do that,’ ‘Don’t go there,’ ‘Don’t do that,’—they never explained and I did not understand their reasons for doing so. No white man ever shook hands with me like a friend. They all said, ‘Dam Injun’—all Shi-an-nay know those words. You are not so. You are a just man—everybody tells me so. I am glad of this. It makes my heart warm and well. I have taken on hope for my people once more. I had a heart of hate toward all the white race—now all that is gone. It is buried deep under the ground. I want to be friends with all the world and I want you to make me a paper—will you do it?”

“Certainly,” replied the agent. “What shall it be?”