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I do not fear the medicine man, for the power of Unktahe is greater than his. But you must go far away and visit the Tetons; if you are here, they will accuse you of his death, and will kill you. But as I have promised to marry him, no one will think that I have murdered him. Go, now," she added, "say to your mother that you are going to visit your friends, and before the day comes be far away.
Hunt, and rendered him eager to press forward and leave a hostile tract behind him, so that it would be as perilous to return as to keep on, and no one would dare to desert. Accordingly, on the 15th of May he departed from the village of the Omahas, and set forward towards the country of the formidable Sioux Tetons.
The Tetons have always been counted among the most irresponsible villains of their race, treacherous by first impulse, murderous by strongest inclination, thievish according to opportunity, combining the effrontery of Italian beggars with the boldness begotten by their own sanguinary history. Yet this determined little band faced them in the heart of their own land, and overawed them.
Glad to know that their rear was to be covered, even in this imperfect manner, they hastily got their horses in motion, and soon disappeared on the required route. Some twenty or thirty minutes succeeded this movement before the Tetons on the opposite shore seemed inclined to enter on any new enterprise.
Better mounted and perhaps more ardent, the Pawnees had, however, reached the spot in sufficient numbers to force their enemies to retire. The victors pushed their success to the opposite shore, and gained the solid ground in the melee of the fight. Here they were met by all the unmounted Tetons, and, in their turn, they were forced to give way.
It would not do, however, for the daughter of a distinguished chief to be the wife of a captive slave, belonging, too, to a tribe toward which the Tetons entertained a hereditary hostility. It would be a flagrant violation of every rule of Indian etiquette.
The challenge was too taunting to be endured. The Tetons dashed into the stream in a body, and the river became dotted with the dark forms of beasts and riders. There was now a fearful struggle for the friendly bank.
At this precise moment a band of armed and mounted Pawnees turned a swell, and galloped to the margin of the stream, into which the plunge of the fugitive was distinctly heard. A few minutes sufficed for his vigorous arm to conquer the passage, and then the shout from the opposite shore told the humbled Tetons the whole extent of the triumph of their adversaries.
They had come from the distant Northwest, threaded with ice-cold rivers and where lakes, sunk between rocky bulwarks, mirrored the whitened peaks. There the three Tetons raised their giant heads and the hollows were spread with a grassy carpet that ran up the slopes like a stretched green cloth.
In another direction were to be seen some of the sources of the Oregon, or Columbia, flowing to the northwest, past those towering landmarks the Three Tetons, and pouring down into the great lava plain; while, almost at the captain's feet, the Green River, or Colorado of the West, set forth on its wandering pilgrimage to the Gulf of California; at first a mere mountain torrent, dashing northward over a crag and precipice, in a succession of cascades, and tumbling into the plain where, expanding into an ample river, it circled away to the south, and after alternately shining out and disappearing in the mazes of the vast landscape, was finally lost in a horizon of mountains.
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