United States or Kuwait ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Finally, two of them escorted him to a small Indian camp, about a mile distant, which was hidden from view by a sandy knoll, where, in some cottonwood brush, beside a small creek, they found half a dozen tepees, around which were squatted twenty or thirty disreputable-looking Indians, their ponies tethered in the brush near by.
The tepees were strung along the eastern bank of a stream of considerable size, and was the dwelling-place of Taggarak, the most famous of the Blackfoot war chiefs and the head of the other sachems, most of whom lived in different villages.
Steadily, week after week, the north had been emptying itself of its picturesque tide of life and voice, of muscle and brawn, of laughter and song and wealth. Through, long months of deep winter, in ten thousand shacks and tepees and cabins, the story of this June had been written as fate had written it each winter for a hundred years or more. A story of the triumph of the fittest.
But the Sioux would charge three times. So they scattered and crawled in again over a half circle. They found the wall of tepees solid; found that the white nation knew more of war than they had thought.
Instantly they recognized it as an Indian lover calling for his sweetheart to come out from the lodges to him. "Hold the ponies, Red Arrow. My medicine tells me to strike," and White Otter slid from his horse. He passed among the tepees at the end of the village, then quickly approached the direction of the noise of the flute.
The summer camp was being dismantled, and the tribe, bag and baggage, was preparing to go off to the fall hunting. White Fang watched it all with eager eyes, and when the tepees began to come down and the canoes were loading at the bank, he understood. Already the canoes were departing, and some had disappeared down the river. Quite deliberately he determined to stay behind.
There never was any peace between the Crees and the Black-feet; they were always bitter enemies. When the battle began, the leader of the Crees came right up to our tepee and slit it, and said: ‘You people are sleeping yet, and I came,’ I fired a gun and killed him. The Crees took their knives and slit the tepees of our village down the sides and then rushed in.
"Then let's drop down its edge and see if the new tepees are scattered everywhere through the town." The trip revealed an abundance of the temporary lodges and farther down they saw signs of an embankment freshly made. But this breastwork of earth did not extend far. Evidently it had been left incomplete. "What do you make of that, Henry?" asked Ross.
Often at night the boys heard the rolling of the Sioux war drums, and the medicine men made medicine incessantly inside their tepees. Dick chafed greatly. "Big things are afoot," he would say to Albert. "We know that the Sioux and our people are at war, but you and I, Al, don't know a single thing that has occurred. I wish we could get away from here.
When not allowed to burn down their tepees or houses, those poor souls who were in a dying condition would be carried out to the neighboring hillsides just before dissolution, and there abandoned to their sufferings, with little or no attention, unless the placing under their heads of a small stick of wood with possibly some laudable object, but doubtless great discomfort to their victim might be considered such.
Word Of The Day