172 HEALTH AND STRENGTH OF THE SAVAGE. [1859.

June 1.-Like Dombey and Son the Indiana boy proved 'a daughter after all!' She was dressed in male costume with a slouching hat which she wore at table to conceal her features. She talked little, but in walking from the tent to the coach her gait betrayed her. She is twenty years old; appears intelligent and well educated; professes to be returning to her parents in Indiana after spending three months in the mines; but gives no reason for her dangerous and unwomanly freak.

Dined at Station Sixteen, kept by a Vermont boy who has roamed over twenty-seven States of the Union. Near it was encamped a party of Arapahoes, with thirty or forty children playing upon the grass. Those under four or five years were entirely naked. The older boys wore breech-clouts of buffalo skin, and the girls were wrapped in robes or blankets. All were muscular and well developed. Old trappers assert that they never saw an Indian idiotic or naturally deformed. Only in the centers of civilization, the bee-hives of the human race, are the helpless little ones thus smitten. Herbert Spencer describes the British laws as 'those twenty thousand statutes which every Englishman is supposed to know and which no Englishman does know.' Relentless nature is like the State. She presumes every man to know her laws; she pardons none for his ignorance; she inflexibly punishes every disobedience. Nay, severer still, she visits the sins of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation.

Indian women, accustomed to hard labor in the open air, never compel a traveling party to stop more than three or four hours on the birth of a child. If left behind they overtake the expedition the same evening or the next day, with the little new-comer strapped on the maternal back. They ride astride like men.

The boys of this company were very expert with the bow, easily hitting a silver half-dollar at sixty or seventy yards. All were inveterate beggars, asking by signs for food and drink. Their camp consisted of twenty conical lodges twelve or fifteen feet high-buffalo robes with the fur inside, stretched around a circle of poles. These dwellings ten or twelve feet in diameter, with a hole at the top for the escape of smoke, are warm in winter and cool in summer. The Sibley tent used in our army is modeled upon them.

1839.]

OVERTURN OF THE COACH.

173

In front of each the shield and quiver of the brave rested upon a pole or tripod. The shields, worn upon the left arm, are covered with antelope skin or buffalo hide stuffed with hair, and will usually ward off any rifle ball which does not strike them perpendicularly. The bows have great force, sometimes throwing an arrow quite through the body of a buffalo.

Several squaws who were making moccasins fringed with beads offered me a pair for a cup of 'sooker,' (sugar.) Others were eating soup with their fingers from a kettle, while naked children on the ground were gnawing tough buffalo meat. A dozen muscular half-naked braves lying in the sun shook hands with me, declaring themselves 'Good Indians.' But only yesterday they threatened to kill and scalp a station-keeper unless he should leave their country.

Descending an abrupt hill, our mules, terrified by meeting three savages, broke a line, ran down a precipitous bank, upsetting the coach which was hurled upon the ground with a tremendous crash, and galloped away with the fore-wheels. I sprang out in time to escape being overturned. From a mass of cushions, carpet-sacks and blankets soon emerged my companion, his head rising above the side of the vehicle like that of an advertising boy from his frame of pasteboard. Blood was flowing profusely from cuts in his cheek, arm and leg; but his face was serene and benignant as a May morning. He was soon rescued from his cage, and taken to Station Seventeen, a few yards beyond, where the good woman dressed his galling wounds.

From their village near by many Cheyennes pressed around our baggage which was scattered upon the ground. They are instinctive thieves, and we watched them with drawn revolvers until it was carried to the station. There were three chiefs in the party: 'Little Bear,' 'Antelope,' and 'Black Wolf.' Two had cut-throat faces; their features, as often occurs among savages of every race, reminding one strongly of wild beasts. But Black Wolf looked good-humored and honest. Complacently joining me in a cigar he assured me by signs and the few English words in his vocabulary, that he was going to shoot 'heap of buffaloes.' Then pointing toward the west and digging in the ground with his fingers he ejaculated: 'Money! money!' to indicate his knowledge of the gold

174

A NIGHT IN A CHEYENNE VILLAGE. [1859

discoveries. An old brave of at least ninety now hobbled up, telling me in dumb show that he was aged, almost blind and

In the evening Black Wolf took me through his village. The warriors wore long hair dressed in cues, and lengthened by a strand of buffalo hair until it reached the ground. Ornaments of tin and silver jingled from their ears. The cheeks and foreheads of squaws were painted bright vermilion. At nightfall the women brought in the ponies. and picketed them among the lodges, that they might not be unprepared for a midnight alarm. In profoundest peace, the Indians maintain all the system and precaution of an army in time of war. As usual we sleep in the coach which, vibrating in the strong prairie wind, rocks like a cradle. Day's travel forty-nine miles.

1859.1

REPUBLICAN RIVER UNDER GROUND.

175

June 2.-Mr. Greeley awoke so stiff and sore that he could not move a muscle without suffering; but we continued on by the sandy valley of the Republican, destitute of tree and shrub and barren as Sahara. Spent the night at Station Nineteen. Day's travel sixty-four miles.

June 3.-Encountered several Indian villages moving; their ponies drawing the lodge-poles, beside carrying heavy loads upon their backs. The life of these Indians is simply a bivouac, never a settlement. The savages found on our Atlantic coast by pioneer settlers, lived in permanent villages, cultivated corn, were without horses, hunted on foot and seldom wandered far from home. But these prairie Bedouins all travel on horseback, taking their effects with them. At half an hour's notice they gather up their wives, children and all other earthly possessions and start on a journey of hundreds of miles. Reaching their destination, they are entirely domesticated in another half-hour. They do not till the ground, but live exclusively on fresh meat, which they eat in enormous quantities. This arid desert is one of the healthiest regions in the world, and its pure air a wonderful appetizer. The regular allowance of the American Fur Company for each employee was eight pounds of buffalo meat daily.

As usual passed hundreds of emigrants. The latest coach from Denver brings fine specimens of gold dust, and reports new rich discoveries, to the great elation of all the pilgrims. At Station Twenty-one where we spent the night, we first encountered fresh fish upon our table. Here the enormous cat-fish of Missouri and Kansas has dwindled to the little horned-pout of New England, lost its strong taste and regained its legitimate flavor. Day's travel fifty-nine miles.

June 4.-We still follow the Republican which at one point, sinks abruptly into the earth, running under ground for twenty miles and then gushing up again. We saw one thirsty emigrant digging in the dry bed for water. At the depth of four or five feet he found it; but it argues a lively imagination to speak of such a sand plain as a river. These subterranean passages are as common among the streams of our deserts as in the far Orient.

After riding twenty-five miles without seeing a drop of water, at Station Twenty-two we crossed the Smoky Hill route which

176

FIRST VIEW OF PIKE'S PEAK.

[1859.

from a point far south of ours, abruptly turns northward across the Republican to the Platte. Emigrants who have come by the

Smoky Hill tell us they have suffered intensely, one traveling seventy-five miles without water. Some burned their wagons, killed their famishing cattle and continued on foot.

We are still on the desert with its soil white with alkali, its stunted shrubs, withered grass, and brackish waters often poisonous to both cattle and men. Day's travel forty-eight miles.

June 5.-At daylight Pike's Peak more than a hundred miles away, appeared dim and hazy on the horizon and we began to feel the inspiring breath of the mountains. Most emigrants were encamping out of respect for the Sabbath, and the sore feet of their cattle, which they carefully bandaged.

At our dining station, Twenty-five, I met several old Kansas acquaintances, so dust-covered and sunburnt that for several minutes I did not know them. That would be a keen-eyed mother who could recognize her own son at a glance under the dirt and disguise of plains-travel. Toward evening, Pike's Peak loomed up grandly in the southwest, wrapt in its ghostly mantle of snow and streaked by deep-cut gorges shining in the rays of a blazing

sunset

'The seal of God

Upon the close of day.'

In the northwest Long's Peak was sharply defined against a mass