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Bird Woman (Sacajawea) the Guide of Lewis and Clark: Her Own Story Now First Given to the World
By James Willard Schultz
Table of Contents
Title Page
Bird Woman (Sacajawea) the Guide of Lewis and Clark
Dedication
I: Earth Woman and Hugh Monroe
II: Hugh Monroe and the Snake Chief
III: Monroe Starts on his Mission and Meets Sacajewea
IV: Bird Woman’s Story of Her Capture
V: The Escape of Her Companions
VI: Charboneau Win a Wife by Gambling
VII: Earth Woman Begins Her Story
VIII: Bird Woman Meets Lewis and Clark
IX: Up the Big River
X: With Her Own People Again
XI: To the Everywhere-Salt-Water
XII: The Rest of Her Story
Further Reading: Three Years Among the Comanches
Bird Woman (Sacajawea) the Guide of Lewis and Clark: Her Own Story Now First Given to the World by James Willard Schultz. First published in 1918. This edition published 2017 by Enhanced Media. All rights reserved.
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ISBN: 978-1-387-01283-1.
Dedication
I DEDICATE this book to my son, Hart Merriam Schultz, or Ni-tah'-mah-kwi-i (Lone Wolf), as his mother's people name him. Born near the close of the buffalo days he was, and ever since with his baby hands he began to model statuettes of horses and buffalo and deer and other animals with clay from the river-banks, his one object in life has been to make a name for himself in the world of art. And now, at last, he has furnished the drawings for one of my books, this book. His own grandfather, Black Eagle, was a mighty warrior against the Snakes. What would the old man say, I wonder, if he were alive and could see his grandson so sympathetically picturing incidents in the life of Bird Woman, a daughter of the Snakes?
James Willard Schultz
(Ap-i-kun-i)
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
March 1, 1918.
I: Earth Woman and Hugh Monroe
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AWAY back in the 1870's, fired with boyish zeal for great adventure, I went from New York to Fort Benton, Montana, to see something of life on the buffalo plains. It was my good fortune to fall in at once with the late Joseph Kipp, the most noted Indian trader of the Northwest, and his mother, a full-blood Mandan, and widow of Captain James Kipp, American Fur Company Factor in the Mandan village in 1821, and later. I lived with my new-found friends for many years, and a nomadic life it was. Wherever the buffalo were most plentiful, there we were; some winters living and trading in the lodges of the Blackfeet, and other winters in hastily built but comfortable log trading-posts which we put up here and there. In my way of thinking, it was an ideal life that we led. Wherever we roamed, from Canada south to the Yellowstone, and from the Rockies far eastward upon the plains, we felt that, in common with our Blackfeet people, the country was ours, all ours! No part of it had as yet been ploughed, nor fenced, and Fort Benton, at the head of navigation on the Missouri, was the only settlement upon it. During the busy season, from October until spring, I helped in our trade with the Blackfeet tribes for their buffalo robes and furs. At other times I hunted with my Indian friends, and even, on several occasions, went to war with them against other tribes. It was all great fun, life on the buffalo plains!
The evenings were as full of quiet enjoyment as the days were of exciting adventure. With the setting of the sun came story-telling time, and around the lodge fires, or before the mud-daubed fireplaces in our rude posts, the people gathered to smoke, and eat broiled buffalo tongues, and in turn relate weird tales of the gods, tales of war, and hunting, and of far trails, all the various happenings which made up the history of the past. Were the narrator Mandan or Arickaree, Blackfeet or white man, the conversation was always in the Blackfeet tongue. I soon mastered it, and was then always called upon to contribute my share to the evening entertainments. And thus it was that I got from my almost-mother, Mrs. Kipp, and her equally aged companion, Crow Woman, and from Hugh Monroe, and Black Horn, an old Gros Ventre warrior, some interesting tales about Sacajawea, the heroine — yes, the savior — of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and other tales about the two great leaders and some of their men. But before relating them, I must say a few words about the narrators themselves.
Mrs. James Kipp, Sak'-wi-ah-ki, Earth Woman, was the daughter of Ma-to-to'-pa, Four Bears, one of the Mandan chiefs who welcomed Lewis and Clark to the Mandan villages in 1804, and of whom, in 1832, Catlin wrote so highly. She was born in 1803, and before her marriage to Captain Kipp, in 1821, and afterward, often heard Sacajawea relate tales of her adventure on the long trail to the Western sea, and back. And from her father and mother, and others, she got the story of the coming of the first Long Knives, Lewis and Clark and their men, to the Mandan country, and of their experiences there.
Is-sap-ah'-ki, Crow Woman, was an Arickaree, and was born in the village of that tribe, located on the Missouri, some distance below the Mandan villages. The two tribes were at times united in defense against their enemies, the Sioux, Assiniboines. Crows, and others, and so, from earliest childhood, Is-sap-ah'-ki and Sak'-wi-ah-ki were playmates and firm friends.
Soon after she was married Crow Woman went out on the plains with her man and a small party, on a buffalo hunt. They were attacked by a war party of Crows and all killed, excepting Crow Woman, who was captured by the leader of the Crows and became one of his wives, his slave wife. The Crow never treated her unkindly, but in the many years that followed, her one desire was to return to her own people. When, at last, the opportunity came, she escaped from the Crow camp, only to fall into the hands of a war party of the Kai'-na, a tribe of the Blackfeet, and its leader, Lone Otter, made her his third wife. More years passed, and then, one spring, when the Kai'-na came to Fort Benton to trade. Crow Woman heard Mrs. Kipp speak to her son in the Mandan language, and ran to her, stared at her, and cried in that, to her, almost forgotten tongue: "Oh, who are you? Are you not Ma-to-to'-pa's daughter?''
"Yes! Yes! And you — who are you that speaks to me in my own language?"
"I? Why, I am Crow Woman! Your Arickaree friend in the long ago," she cried. And at that the two embraced and wept tears of joy.
A little later, when Crow Woman had told her her story, Mrs. Kipp asked her if she was contented with her lot.
"I have no children of my own," she replied, "but I love my almost-daughter, the daughter of a dead wife of Lone Otter. I have raised the child. I love her as though she were my very own. But for her, I would long ago have again tried to escape and return to my people."
"Your relatives, and mine too, are all dead. But you shall be free. Before the setting of this sun you shall be free, and you shall remain with me so long as we live!" Mrs. Kipp cried. And she went at once to Lone Otter, and bargained with him, and paid him a fabulous price, thirty horses, a gun, ten blankets, and much tobacco, for Crow Woman and his daughter that she loved.
Would that I could have been present at the meeting of those long-parted friends! Their life together, and their love for their adopted daughter were simply ideal. After the buffalo were exterminated, and we settled down at Fort Conrad, the old women and the girl planted a garden by the river each season, and laboriously watered the hills of corn, beans, and squash with buckets which they carried up the steep bank. Beside the garden they built a shelter of boughs to protect them from the sun, and from which to watch their growing crops, and thither I went on hot afternoons, to sit with them and listen to their tales of the long ago. And while they talked they did wonderfully beautiful colored porcupine quill embroidery work on buffalo leather and buffalo robes that remained to us after our trade had vanished. One piece of work that they undertook required two summers to complete it! It was a huge sun, embroidered in all the colors of the rainbow on the flesh side of a fine head and tail buffalo cow robe!
Here, to this garden shelter by the river, also came Hugh Monroe, or Mah-kwi'-i-pwo-ahts, Rising Wolf, to exchange reminiscences with his old-time women friends. And as I sat and listened to them I thanked my stars that I was there, and that I understood the Blackfeet language as well as they did. Monroe could not speak Mandan nor Arickaree; they could not understand English. The Blackfeet was the language common to us all.
Hugh Monroe, or Rising Wolf, as he was best known, was the son of Captain Hugh Monroe, of the English army, and Amélie Monroe, a daughter of the De la Roche family, French émigrés in Canada. He was born in Three Rivers, Province of Quebec, July 9, 1798, and on May 3, 1814, was apprenticed to the Hudson's Bay Company. In the following spring he arrived at the Company's post, Mountain Fort, on Bow River, the main fork of the South Saskatchewan River. He was immediately detailed to live with the Pi-kun'-i, the so-called Piegan tribe of the Blackfeet confederacy, and a few days later went south with it for the winter. He was the first white man to see the great plains and mountains that lie between the upper reaches of the Saskatchewan and the Missouri rivers. He soon married a daughter of Lone Walker, head chief of the tribe, by whom he had a fine family of stalwart sons and daughters. Not long after his marriage he severed his connections with the Hudson's Bay Company, became a "free trapper," and lived for the most of the time with his chosen people, the Pi-kun'-i, to the time of his death, in 1896. He was a man of high character, and was loved by all who knew him.
Earth Woman, Crow Woman, and Rising Wolf, what wonderful changes they witnessed as they grew from youth to old age! They saw the very beginning of the great fur trade in the Northwest, and its end with the extinction of the buffalo, and the near-extermination of the beaver! They saw the keel boats and the batteaux of the early traders give way to powerful "fire boats" on the Saskatchewan and the Missouri, and these in turn superseded by railways that brought hordes of settlers to the broad plains!
Perhaps the crowning event of their long lives was a trip by rail to Great Falls after it had become a city. I there talked with them over the telephone, and they marveled! In the evening I gave them a ride on the electric cars, and finally took them to the power house; there they saw red-blue-green flashes of electricity playing about the dynamos, and were completely overcome with astonishment!
"I am sick, heartsick!" Earth Woman exclaimed after we had gone out. "All my life I have prayed to the gods, as my father and mother taught me to do. And now, this night, I have seen with my own eyes that white men, and not Thunder Bird, are makers of the lightning. Perhaps there is no Thunder Bird! Perhaps there are no gods! The sun himself, maybe he is nothing but a ball of fire, by white men set rolling across the sky to make the days!"
"Hush! sister, hush!" Crow Woman told her.
"Doubt not! What if the white men do make lightning? That has nothing to do with us —with our beliefs! Our ancient ones saw Thunder Bird! — heard him thunder as he arose in flight, saw his lightning flashes. Thunder Bird lives! So do all our gods! Take courage! Keep strong your faith in them!"
The next morning Earth Woman was herself again: she had prayed to the gods, made sacrifices to them, and her doubts and fears had vanished. After breakfast we all stood upon an upper piazza of the hotel and looked down upon the city and the near-by river. Crow Woman pointed across it to the mouth of Sun River and said: "Just above the place where the two rivers join, just a little way up the smaller stream, is where the Kai'-na captured me!"
"Ai! And here, just about where this sleeping and eating house stands, I onced saved Jim Bridger and his band of trappers from being attacked and killed by a war party of five hundred North Blackfeet! I often ran buffalo where are now all these houses!" said Rising Wolf.
"Right out there, to the still water just above the falls, came Sacajawea with the first Long Knives," said Earth Woman. "For days and days, so she told me, they rolled their boats on log wheels up the long trail from below the lower falls to this point, and launching them, went on up the river. I know just how the Snake woman felt; how anxious she was to go on, hoping that, at the head of the river or on the other slope of the mountains, she would meet her people. Day and night she prayed the gods, made sacrifices to them, to guide her to them!"
"Ai! And she did meet them! And induced them to be friends with the Long Knives!" Rising Wolf exclaimed. "But for her there would have been a gathering of the Snake tribes to kill off the white men, and they would have been killed, every one of them. I know! But I have told you the story of it, as the Snake chief told it to me in the long ago."
Well, they are gone. Rising Wolf, Earth Woman, Crow Woman, and a host of other friends in the old buffalo days! Did they find the Shadow Land, I wonder, and their shadow people, living in shadow lodges, and on shadow horses running shadow buffalo?
Glad I am that I knew them, gentle, honest, generous friends that they were! And glad I am that through them I am able to add something to our knowledge of Sacajawea and Lewis and Clark and their men.
And now, to turn on the light, let us begin with Rising Wolf’s story of Bird Woman.
II: Hugh Monroe and the Snake Chief
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IN the summer of 1816, my second year on the plains, I again went south from Mountain Fort with the Pi-kun'-i. We moved leisurely from stream to stream along the foot of the Rockies, trapping beavers, and winter struck us when camped on Sun River.
After about a foot of snow had fallen, and there was little danger of war parties being abroad, my almost-brother, Red Crow, and I obtained permission from his father, Chief Lone Walker, to go south to Deep Creek on a trapping expedition. One of the chief’s wives, Rattle Woman, and his daughter, Mink Woman, a girl of about fourteen winters, went with us to keep our lodge in shape and to flesh and dry the skins of the beavers that we should catch. We made camp on the creek, at the foot of the mountains, and were there surprised by a number of Snake Indians suddenly entering our lodge. They came, they said, from the camp of their people, on the next stream to the west. They had seen us make camp, knew that we were Blackfeet, and their chief, Black Lance, begged us to take pity upon him and his children. They were all very poor, very hungry. Would we not aid them in making peace with the Blackfeet, and in obtaining permission for them to remain on the Blackfeet plains during the winter and kill what Blackfeet buffalo they needed?
We agreed to do what they asked, and the next day Red Crow went with the peace messengers to his father, a council was held, and peace was made between the two tribes, it being agreed that the Snakes should camp beside the Pi-kun'-i, and kill all the game that they needed. They were not, however, to trap beavers or other fur animals.
Peace being declared, I became quite friendly with Black Lance, the Snake chief. I was very anxious to learn if there were any opposition traders in his country; so, on the first evening that I visited him, the evening following the departure of his peace messengers, with Red Crow, for the camp on Sun River, I signed to him: "You say that you are friendly to white men. Tell me about those that you know, and where they camp?" I must explain that all our talk was in the sign language.
"We know but few," he answered. "Far to the south, we have met a few white men that are not white. They are almost as red-skinned as we are, and their hair is black. They have many horses and mules; plenty of guns; plenty of long, sharp-pointed lances. They wear shirts of woven iron which no arrows nor lances will pierce. They will not sell us guns, and so we raid their herds and take their guns whenever that is possible. But we are very poor. In our whole tribe there are only twenty guns, and they are useless, as we have no food for them.
"We know a few real white men: Two chiefs, Long Knife and Red Hair, and their thirty followers, one of whom is a black white man. I do not lie to you. Truly, his skin is as black as a coal, and his short hair is black and curls tightly to his head! Strange are the ways of the gods! They caused one of our women, a woman we had given up for dead, to bring these white men to us. I must tell you all about it."
Here the chief made the sign for a name: the fingers of the right hand tightly closed, thumb extended, and placed against the forehead, the hand then raised upward and outward with a graceful sweep. He then made the sign for grass: right hand held out, palm up, fingers and thumb separated and turned up, and then the hand moved from left to right in front of the body. Next, he made the sign for woman: fingers of both hands touching on top of the head, and then the hands parting and moving downward on each side of the head, meaning parted hair. What he signed, then, was, "Name, Grass Woman." And as he made the signs he said, orally, three times, "Bo-i'-naiv! Bo-i'-naiv! Bo-i'-naiv!" And then signed on — "Did you ever hear of her?"
"No! I know nothing about her," I answered. But right then I knew that the white men were Lewis and Clark and their men. And I was to learn all about them, and how a Snake woman, named Grass Woman, had brought them to her people. I was more than impatient for him to begin the story. He expressed great surprise that I had never heard of her, and then went on: —
"Yes, that was her name, Grass Woman. Later we called her Lost Woman, and still later, after the great happening, we named her Water-White-Men Woman." He paused, thought intently for a moment or two, and continued:" I will both make the signs for the three names, and speak them. Repeat them after me."
In signs: "Grass Woman." Orally: "Bo-i'-naiv."
In signs: "Lost Woman.'' Orally: "Wad-zi-wip'."
In signs: "Water-White-Men Woman." Orally: "Bah-rai'-bo!"
Over and over I repeated the words after him: "Bo-i'-naiv! Wad-zi-wip'! Bah-rai'-bo!" And then again signed: "No, I have never heard of her!"
"You shall know all!" he signed.
"It was twenty winters back. We were camped in our own country, on the other side of the mountains. Elk and deer became very few, and we began to starve; we grew very thin. Summer came and still we starved; so our chiefs decided that we must go out upon the buffalo plains of the Blackfeet or die where we were from hunger. We should probably, they said, be killed off by the Blackfeet, but it was better to die with a full belly, and quickly, than to die slowly from want of food.
"We packed up and crossed the summit of the great mountains, descended the North Fork of the Big-River-of-the-Plains1, and made camp just
1.The Jefferson, northernmost of the three forks of the Missouri.
above its junction with the two other forks of the stream. There we came upon some buffalo, killed a number of them, and feasted. Three mornings later, when most of our men were scattered out on the hunt, a large war party was discovered coming up the valley, and the women and children, and what few men there were in camp, fled before it. Many of them scattered out in the brush and hid themselves and were not discovered. Others, crazed with fear, ran on and on up the trail in the valley, and the enemy, pursuing them, killed four men, four women, and seven youths, and captured four boys and five girls. Then, rounding up a large herd of our horses, they rode off down the valley. In time all the boys and all but three of the girls escaped from their captors, and then we learned that the enemy had not been Blackfeet, as we thought, but had come from one of the villages of the Earth House people. They live far down in the valley of the Big-River-of-the-Plains, at the eastern edge of the country of the Blackfeet.
"Our people mourned a long time for their dead. The mother of Grass Woman, one of the girls who were captured and did not return, lost also her man in the fight. There remained to her two sons and one daughter, but the mother grieved for her lost man and daughter, and soon died from mourning for them.
"The summers came and went. War parties of Blackfeet and of the Earth House people often came into our country, fought us, and ran off herds of our horses. We were always hungry in our country; often we starved there. When we could, when winters came and we were not likely to be discovered, we would come out here, where we are now, and hunt buffalo, and live well. It was eleven summers back that the sky gods became angry and allowed no rain to fall upon our country, not even one little rain. We prayed to them, made sacrifices to them, but still they withheld the rain. So it was that the berry bushes were barren that summer, and the dry earth produced but a few small roots. There was no grass for our horses except in a few damp places. Game winter again, and what few deer and elk there were, left our country. We could not tell what way they went; we moved south, found a few bands of them, and during the winter killed them all. When summer came again we were very weak, and some of the weakest were dying from starvation.
"With the first sprouting of the new grass we moved slowly northward, and then to the pass at the head of the North Fork of the Big-River-of-the-Plains. We found no buffalo there, only a few elk and deer, and they were very wild. With only bows and arrows we could kill but few of them. We lived mostly upon roots, and kept looking out toward the plains, well knowing that they were covered with buffalo, but, because of the Black-feet, we were afraid to venture out there. We remained where we were, hoping that in time the buffalo would come up the North Fork.
"Day after day, while we camped there, we kept a man on the trail in the valley of the North Fork, watching for the enemy, and for the hoped-for coming of the buffalo. One morning this watcher discovered three men on foot approaching him. They were strangely dressed. From their appearance he believed them to be white men. From tribes to the west of us we had learned that there were white-skinned men. They had come in big boats on the Everywhere-Salt-Water, to the mouth of our Big River, and had there traded goods, even a few guns, to the tribes who go about in log canoes and who live upon fish.
"The watcher saw that one white man was on the trail, and that away off to each side of him three others skulked along in the brush. The one on the trail waved to him, made peace signs, and he sat on his horse and allowed him to come quite near, near enough for him to see that he really was a white man. But all the time the others were sneaking on through the brush, as though with intent to capture him. Fear overcame him; he turned his horse and fled up the valley, called his family together, and led them off up a branch stream, there to hide until the white men should have disappeared. He did not come over the pass to us, as he should have done.
"Two days later, down on our side of the pass, one of our men and his women, out digging roots, discovered the four white men and hurried to our camp with the news. The white men kept on down the trail, and suddenly came upon two women and a girl who were digging roots. The young woman fled from them. The two others could not run; they just sat where they were, expecting to be struck on the head and killed. But no! The lead white man came up to them, took the old woman by the hands, raised her to her feet, and signed to her that he was of white skin and meant her no harm. He at once gave her presents; wonderful presents, the like of which had never been seen by our people. Most wonderful of all was a flat, smooth square of ice-rock in which she could see her face. She looked into it, saw her old, wrinkled cheeks, her sunken eyes, the worn-down teeth in her jaws, and sank to the ground in horror of herself. But again the white man raised her up, gave her other presents, beads, awls, and paint, and she forgot her fears, and called to the young woman to return. When she came the white man gave her presents, too, and then painted the cheeks of the women and the little girl with red paint,, very bright red paint. One of the men with this chief was half white, half Indian, and a good sign-talker. He signed to the women, and asked them to lead the way to their camp. They signed back that they would do so and started off down the trail.
"Now, when the man digging roots with his women discovered the four strangers, he rode as fast as he could down to our camp and cried out that enemies were coming. We at once mounted our horses, and following our chief, Black Bow, hurried up the trail to meet them and kill them off. But what was our surprise, as we neared them, to see that they were different from our enemies of the plains. They wore different clothing; one of them carried a beautiful red, white, and blue peace-waver tied to a long stick. We rode still closer to them and saw that their skins were white! Our women with them cried out that they were good men, and held up before us the presents they had received. We all dismounted, and, after our chief, in turn embraced the white men. We then gathered in a circle, took off our moccasins, and smoked, and talked with the newcomers in the sign language, and they explained that they had come from far east; that their great white chief had sent them to find a trail through the mountains to the shore of the Everywhere-Salt-Water, and to make peace with all the tribes along the way, and to get them to make peace with one another.
"After three pipes were smoked, the white chief, he whom we afterward called Red Hair, gave us presents, handing Black Bow also the peace-waver, and said that, as the day was hot, and there was no water where we were, he would like us to take him and his men to our camp. We at once sent some young men ahead to fix up for them the one real lodge that we had, and then took the trail with the strangers. We arrived in camp some time before sunset, and Black Bow took the strangers to the lodge and told them that it was their lodge. After they had rested for a time, we held another council with them, and they then told us that more of their kind were coming up the Big-River-of-the-Plains in boats, and that with them was a woman of our tribe who had long ago been captured by our enemy, the Earth House people. They asked that we take plenty of horses and go to meet the party and pack their property to our camp.
"'It is a forked tongue that this white chief has,' said one of our old warriors. 'I doubt not that there are white men in boats across there on the river, but something tells me that there are with them a multitude of our plains enemies. If we do as we are asked, we go straight to our death!'
"At once there was much talk in that council lodge. Some of the warriors agreed with the old man, that the white men were trying to draw them into a trap. Said another warrior: If all is just as these white men say, then they are, after all, but a small party. They are rich in the things that we most need, guns and powder and ball, with which to defend ourselves from the attacks of our plains enemies. I propose that we at once send messengers to the other tribes of our Snake Nation, and to our friends, the Flatheads, and ask them to come and help us wipe out these white men, and take their property.'
"'Yes! Yes! That is what we should do! Let us send the messengers at once!' cried one man after another, until nearly all had spoken. Then said our chief, Black Bow: 'You speak wisely. If we can take all the white men's guns, with the great quantity of powder and ball that they surely have, we can go out on the plains, hold our own against our enemies, and get all the buffalo that we want. Let the messengers go at once for help. And, to hasten matters, let us do what the white men ask: we will take horses and bring their men and their property up here. We shall then have them right here in our camp, where we can take them unaware, and easily kill them off. Now, who will furnish horses and go with the white men and me tomorrow?'
"Many of the warriors answered that they would take extra horses and go with him, but, during the night, a great fear came upon most of them, fear that they were to be led into a trap, that back of the whites were hundreds of their plains enemies, either Blackfeet or Earth House people, or both. In the morning, when the time came to leave, but eight men started out with our chief and the white men, and I was one of the eight. We had not traveled far, however, when we were overtaken by many of the afraid ones, some of them accompanied by their women. After we left the camp, Black Bow's woman had grieved for him, and then, crying out that she was not a coward, that she was braver than the men, had caught a horse and made ready to follow our trail. And because she shamed them the best of the men and women hurried to catch up their horses and take the trail with her.
"On that first day out we crossed over the pass in the mountains and made camp by some springs high up on the east slope of the mountains. On the next morning, as soon as we were ready to go on, the white man chief sent two of his men ahead, saying that they were to hunt, and asking us to keep with him, so that the game would not become alarmed. This alarmed us; we thought that the two men were being sent to tell the enemy to be ready to spring upon us. Many of our people turned back right there, and we who went on sent several of our men forward on each side of the valley to keep watch of the two white hunters. They really were hunters; during the day they killed some deer and gave us most of the meat. When evening came we were thinking that, perhaps, the white men meant us no harm; that everything was just as they had said.
"On the next morning we arose very early, and the white chief at once sent one of his men, and one of us with him, to look for the white men who were coming up the river in boats. I went off by myself, keeping close to the river, and soon saw the white men, all of them working hard to drag and push their boats up the swift water. I ran back to camp, crying out that I had seen the whites, and then we all hurried on to meet them. By that time they had come quite close to our camp. Two of the whites were on the shore, away ahead of the boats, and with them was a woman. One of our women ran forward, other women followed her, and when we saw them embrace the lone woman, we knew that it was as the white chief had told us, that there was one of our women in his party. Right there we lost all of our fears: had there been plains enemies with the whites, this woman would have so signed to us as soon as we came in sight. The two white men came on. One of them was the other chief of the party, he whom we named Long Knife. Our chief, Black Bow, embraced him, and so did the rest of us, and then we led the white chiefs to one of our brush shelters for a council. We took off our moccasins, the pipe was lighted, and then Red Hair told one of his men to bring the Snake woman to interpret for us.
"She came, this young woman, with her little child in her arms, came with downcast eyes, with hesitating steps, and timidly sat just without our half-circle. I looked at her, so did the others, and none of us recognized her. Black Bow at once opened the council: 'Woman,' said he, 'interpret these my words: White men chiefs, we are glad that you are coming to our country!'
"As he said that, the woman for the first time looked up at him, and then, leaving her child, she sprang across the circle and embraced him. Laughing and crying, at the same time trembling as though from cold, she arose and placed her blanket across his shoulders, then again knelt beside him, and cried: 'Oh, brother! Do you not know me? I am your sister, Grass Woman!'
"'So you are! So you are!' Black Bow exclaimed, and in turn embraced her. And some of us cried out: 'She is Grass Woman! Our Lost Woman! She has returned to us!'
"Then, still trembling, and trying to dry her eyes, she asked her brother to give her news of her relatives, and he answered: 'Our father was killed by the enemies that took you from us.'
"'Yes, I know,' Grass Woman said. 'As the enemy bore me away, I saw his body lying beside the trail!'
"'Grieving for our father, and for you, our mother soon died. Then our sister died, then our brother, Middle Sim. Of all our family there remain only our brother, Little Otter, whom I have sent with a message to our Snake peoples, and our little nephew, son of our sister. Deer Robe!'
"Now, when Grass Woman heard that, she broke out crying again. Sitting there with her arms on her brother's shoulder, she wept bitterly. But suddenly one of the white men spoke to her angrily. 'It is my man. He orders me back to my place to interpret. Badly as I feel, I must obey him,' she told Black Bow, and returned to her child. But, try as she would, she could not stop crying, so the council was put off until later in the day.
"Came now the rest of the white men, with their boats, and made camp, and we watched them, and near went crazy with wonder at them and the strange and useful things that they had! One of those white men was black. We could not believe that his skin was not covered with a shining black paint, until one of us washed his forearm, scrubbing and scrubbing it without result. We were struck with the number of different shaped kettles and other utensils in which the white men cooked their food. We marveled at the number of fine long guns they carried; and, oh, how we wanted to see what was in the many bundles that they carried from the boats to their camp! They had sharp, heavy, wood-handled pieces of shiny hard rock with which they cut wood; with but a few blows of one of them, they cut down good-sized trees. That was great medicine!
"Now, while the white men fixed up their camp, Black Bow talked with his sister, and we sat by them and listened. She told about her life with our enemies and of her marriage to the white man. But what most interested us was what she said about the riches of her captors and the ease in which they lived. Their homes were large earth-covered lodges which the severest cold of winter could not penetrate. Near their lodges they raised each summer great quantities of good food plants, which they dried for winter use. Their plains were always covered with buffalo and antelope. The timbered valley of their Big River was full of elk and deer. They knew not what it was to hunger or suffer from cold.
"'Neither should we suffer from hunger and cold nor fear our enemies if we had guns!' the chief cried out. 'Well, we shall have guns! Little sister, when our brother and the other messengers return, bringing with them the warriors of our Snake tribes to help us, we shall kill these white men and take their guns and their great store of powder and ball, and then go out and live on the buffalo plains!'
"Grass Woman gave a cry of distress and shrank away from him: 'You are crazy even to think of doing that,' she told him. 'What if you do take them unaware while they sleep and kill them off? Of what use would the guns be that you would get, thirty or forty of them, against the two hundred and more guns of the Earth House people? Brother, you must do all that you can for these white men, for they are men of great heart and your true friends. Have they not told you why they have come into this country, that they are here to get all tribes to make peace with one another? Have they not told you that they come to make a trail for white traders to follow, so that you may all have guns and traps and other things that you need to make yourselves rich and comfortable?'
"'Yes, they said all that to us, but we did not believe them,' Black Bow answered.
"'Then believe it now! I, your true sister, tell you that it is so!'
"'Truly, my mind is all in a whirl. I must think about this!' the chief exclaimed.
"By this time the white men had set up their camp, and they now invited us to it to counsel with them. We were seated under a shelter of cloth and willows, where we took off our moccasins and smoked by turns one pipe. The white chief named Long Knife then spoke to us. Grass Woman's man telling her what he said, and she in turn interpreting the words to us. He told us that his great white chief had sent him and his men to make friends with all tribes all the way to the Everywhere-Salt-Water, and to get them to make peace with one another. He hoped that we would make peace with the tribes with whom we were at war, for that would please the great white chief, and he would send men with guns, traps, and all kinds of goods to trade to us, and ever afterward we should have plenty of everything, food, clothing, warm lodges, tobacco, and we could roam where we pleased without fear of attack. And now he asked us to help him: he wanted horses, plenty of our horses for riding and packing on his way westward from our country, and he would pay us well for them.
"Then said Black Bow to Grass Woman: 'Sister, had you not told me that these men are of straight tongue and good heart, I should not have believed anything that they told us. I now do believe. I am sure it is all as you say, that they mean only good for us. You may tell them that we will furnish them horses, that we shall do all that we can for them, and that we hope their traders will soon come to us with plenty of guns, traps, and goods of all kinds.'
"'Brother, you really mean that — is it straight from your heart?' Grass Woman asked.
"'It is!' he answered.
"'Then send other messengers at once to our Snake people and the Flatheads, to tell them to remain where they are, for the white men are their friends, and that they are to travel safely through our country,' she demanded.
"'They shall start this day,' he agreed. And at that she embraced him, and, through her man, told the whites that the chief said that all should be as they wished, and that he hoped traders would come to them as soon as possible. Thereupon the council ended, and the white chiefs gave us valuable and beautiful presents. Black Bow was given a beautiful suit of white chief clothes and a medal, and we all received shirts, leggins, knives, tobacco, medals, looking-glasses, and awls. And last we were feasted with big dishes of a boiled plant that our Grass Woman told us had been raised by her Earth House people captors. Next to good meat, it was the best food we had ever eaten.
"There were not enough horses with us to move all the property of the white men, so we took Red Hair and some of his men and Grass Woman across the pass to our main camp, and then sent some of our young men with plenty of horses to bring over the rest of the party and all their property.
"Now, before Grass Woman was captured by our plains enemies, she had been given by her father and mother to a man of our tribe named Little Mountain. She was to become his wife when she grew up. Retuning now to the camp, after a long visit to one of our tribes, he heard that she was there and ran about until he found her. 'Ha! There you are. Grass Woman, Lost Woman!' he cried. 'You have grown up, I see. You look strong and you are handsome. Well, I am glad of it because I need you. Get whatever things you have and come over with me to my shelter.'
"'I shall not go with you! You are nothing to me!' Grass Woman told him.
"'You are my woman! You shall go with me! I gave your father three horses, and he promised that I should have you as soon as you became a woman,' he insisted.
"'I will prove to you that I am not your woman,' she told him, and, throwing open her blanket, she held up to his view her little child: 'See. That is my boy, and that white man there is my man and its father!'
"'Ha! That makes it different! I do not want you!' Little Mountain told her, and turned and went his way.
"As Black Bow had promised his sister we should do, that we did for the Long Knives. We furnished them the horses that they needed and a man to guide them through our country, and they went on their way toward the Everywhere-Salt-Water. We heard afterward that they had great difficulty in passing through the mountains; that they could find no game, and would have starved to death had they not killed and eaten some of the horses that we gave them. Well, they made their way to the shore of the Great Water, and there wintered, and in the following summer returned and went on eastward, and we have not even heard of them again. Summer after summer we have looked for the white traders that they promised to send to us with plenty of guns for us to buy, but the summers pass and they do not come. Tell me, white youth, do you think that they ever will come?''
"I cannot answer that," I told him. "I have no knowledge of the Long Knife traders. Myself, I am a Red Coat trader. At our post in the North we have plenty of guns, traps, all kinds of things to trade to you if you will go there with your furs."
The chief made a gesture of despair. "That we can never do," he signed. "The Blackfeet tribes will never permit us to do that! If they now allow us to camp out here until green grass time and kill a few of their buffalo, it will be more than we ever expected of them. Summer will soon come again, and back we must go across the mountains, there in hunger to hide from the war parties of Blackfeet, Earth House people, Assiniboines, Crees, who come to kill us and take our horses. White youth, we Snakes are a poor and most unhappy people!"
Well, what answer could I make to that, except to sign to him that he must take courage? My heart went out to him and his harried people, but I could do nothing. I knew, even better than he did, that the Blackfeet never would give the Snakes an opportunity to trade for guns if they could prevent it.
III: Monroe Starts on his Mission and Meets Sacajewea
––––––––
NOW, upon leaving the North with the Pi-kun'-i, our factor, Terrible Tongue, as the Blackfeet called Hardesty, had charged me to do everything in my power to bring about peace between the Pi-kun'-i and the Cheyennes, and to induce the latter to come north with us in the spring and trade at Mountain Fort. This was no small task that had been imposed upon me. The Blackfeet tribes had ever been at war with the Cheyennes, who were themselves a powerful plains people, great trappers and tanners of robes, and owners of large herds of horses. Indeed, the Blackfeet name for them was Spotted Horses people, on account of the strain of pinto horses that they particularly bred, and which the Blackfeet raided at every opportunity. Naturally, the Blackfeet, and particularly the Pi-kun'-i, southernmost of the tribes, did not wish to make peace with a people from whom they took the beautiful pinto animals. They were foes worth keeping as foes.
To begin with, I had but four helpers, my almost-brother, Red Crow, my almost-sister, Mink Woman, and Bird Woman, son, daughter, and head wife, respectively, of the great chief, Lone Walker, in whose charge I was and in one of whose lodges I lived. Lone Walker was a great chief. He had nineteen wives, living in two lodges, and many children and hundreds of horses. He had, of course, a council of under chiefs, but they always agreed to whatever he decided was best to be done. My other helper was a noted medicine man, brother to Bird Woman, named Red Eagle. These four agreed to do all that they could to bring about peace with the Cheyennes.
As I expected, when I mentioned the matter to Lone Walker, he told me at once that there could be no thought of peace with the Cheyennes. This much I knew about them: they roamed the plains south and east of the Yellowstone, and traded their furs and robes to the Earth House tribes, who lived in fortified villages on the Missouri, below the mouth of the Yellowstone. With these tribes the Blackfeet had ever been upon friendly terms, and Lone Walker had some especially close friends in the chiefs of the Grouse people, or, as the whites called them, the Mandans. As a possible way of getting in touch with the Cheyennes, Red Crow and I began importuning Lone Walker to allow us to visit the Mandans. At first he merely laughed at our request, but we kept at him about it, and he finally agreed that we might go if we could find some of his proved warriors to accompany us, and that we could take with us some presents for his friends. The camp crier was accordingly told to make the round of the lodges and call for volunteers to go with us, but we got no response to the call and were in despair, when, several evenings later, a man named Heavy Robe, and nicknamed Never Talks, came into our lodge and told Lone Walker that he would go with us to the Earth House tribes. Red Crow and I could hardly believe our ears. That Heavy Robe, of all men, should propose to take us on the long trail was almost too good for belief.
"I am very glad that you will go with my boys," Lone Walker told him. "I wanted three or four men, but you are as good as four. When will you be ready to start?"
"Whenever you give the word."
"Then, leave day after tomorrow morning," the chief decided.
Heavy Robe arose, wrapped his robe about him, said, shortly, "I shall be ready at that time," and went out with never a word to Red Crow and me.
A strange, a very strange man was Heavy Robe. He was about thirty-five years of age, tall, well-built, even handsome, but he had never married and lived with his widowed mother. He was not a member of any band of the All Friends Society; he never visited about, never joined in the camp dances, and had no close friend. However, he had the respect of every man, woman, and child in the great camp. He always went alone to war, and always returned with horses and property — and scalps of the enemy. And he was a great hunter. When not off on a raid, he hunted all the time; hardly a day passed but his old mother was to be seen carrying meat, or a hide of some kind, to one or another of the lodges of the sick or the widowed and fatherless. Very kind-hearted was Heavy Robe, quite the opposite of what, from his quiet, taciturn manner, his shunning of people, one would have expected him to be.
Now, you may think that this has nothing to do with Sacajawea. But wait!
We got an early start on the appointed morning, and made quite a cavalcade as we set out, for we each took an extra saddle horse, and with them four fine horses and a pack-load of goods, which Lone Walker and his under chiefs were sending, with many messages of peace and good-will, to the chiefs of the tribes we were to visit.
It was a long, long way that we had to go, to the villages below the mouth of the Yellowstone. We struck the Musselshell River, followed it down to the Missouri, and then followed the windings of its deep and timbered valley, for the snow was too deep for traveling upon the plains, and below the mouth of the Musselshell it became so deep that we could not travel at all except in the winding, hard-beaten trails of the buffalo and other game. Day after day we went on and on, ever in sight of countless herds of game, but finding no enemies to bar our way. Every evening, near sundown, we made a comfortable camp, and cut quantities of Cottonwood browse for our horses. Then, after our hearty meal of broiled meat. Heavy Robe would get out his medicine pipe, which had, when in use, success in our journey, and for the long life, good health, and happiness of all the Blackfeet people. His own medicine — his vision, his secret helper — was ancient raven. He made especial appeals to it to ask the gods of the sky, the earth, and the deep waters, to favor us in all our undertakings. As the snow was too deep for us to find a buffalo skull for a pipe-rest at every camp we made, we packed one in our outfit for that purpose. We said nothing to our leader about our desire to meet the Cheyennes, and to induce them to make peace with our people; the time had not come for that, nor did we have the slightest idea how we could meet them. "Just trust in the gods; they will show us the way!" Red Crow kept telling me.
All went well with us until one evening, several days after we had passed the mouth of the Yellowstone, we were about to make camp when a bitterly cold, suddenly rising, north wind brought to us the strong odor of cottonwood smoke. "Ha! We must be near the Earth House people!'' I said.
Heavy Robe looked back at me and motioned me to be silent. Then, after looking ahead for some time, he said to us: "If this smoke were coming from a village, we should hear the sounds of it; people talking, children shouting, — anyhow, the barking of dogs. The odor of the smoke is very strong; it is coming from a fire in this grove of timber; either enemies are close ahead of us or a party of hunters from the Earth House villages!"
"What shall we do?" Red Crow asked.
"There is but one thing to do," our leader answered. "We will go on. It may be that we can circle around the camp without being seen. We will try to do so. Look to the priming of your guns! Be watchful!" And with that he led on, branching out from trail to trail away from the river. The wind, with its odor of smoke, came to us in eddying swirls, sometimes in our faces, sometimes on our right or left; we could not determine from it just where the fire was, but we believed it to be in the lower part of the grove and near the river.
On this day I was in the rear of the line, with four horses between me and Red Crow, who was driving the rest of the loose stock close after Heavy Robe. We had not gone on more than a couple of hundred yards, when, suddenly, I heard, rather than felt, something plunk into the lower flap of my robe in front of my left thigh, and at the same time my horse made a sudden leap that threw me back upon him behind the saddle. I should have gone clear off had I not been pinned to the horse: an arrow in my robe and into his wither pinned me to him. As I jounced back into the saddle with a yell, I looked around and saw a man in a side trail, not fifty yards away. He was fitting a fresh arrow to his bow, and farther out in the grove a dozen men were coming on the run on his trail, holding their weapons ready to attack us. As I fired at the first man, and he fell, one of the others, the only one of them who had a gun, fired and shot down the horse directly in front of me. At that my horse flinched back and I had no little difficulty in making him leap the obstruction. I passed it just as Red Crow and Heavy Robe fired, and out of the comer of my eye, so to speak, I saw another one of the enemy go down. We drew away from them as fast as we could go, their arrows dropping harmlessly behind us.
The snow was so deep that the enemy could not come directly after us from the side trail they were in; they had to follow it up to its junction with our trail and then tum down the main trail. We soon passed out of sight of them. Nevertheless, they kept after us, yelling all the time, and by that we knew that the rest of their party were somewhere ahead of us, gathered around the fire from which came the smoke, now stronger than ever in our nostrils.
We all wore heavy buffalo-robe mittens attached to a long buckskin thong passing over our shoulders, so that we could instantly release our hands from them and they would still be in place when we wanted to slip them on again. But, convenient as that was, we nearly froze our hands while firing our guns and then reloading them. We had no more than finished loading when we saw forty or fifty men ahead, right in our trail and running toward us. Between them and us was no branch trail, and, noting that, Heavy Robe called out that we must turn back and take a branch trail that we had just passed. I turned my horse at once and so became the leader. But it was no easy task for Red Crow and Heavy Robe to turn the loose animals about to follow me. We lost time, and a cloud of arrows and one gunshot were discharged at us by the lower enemy party while we were making the turnabout.
As soon as Heavy Robe had his part of the loose stock turned and following Red Crow, he stopped his animal, and fired back and killed the lead man of the enemy. He then came on, hurrying to overtake us, and as he came he raised the Blackfeet war song, and Red Crow and I joined in it crazily, exultingly, for the fire of battle — of men falling before us — was in our hearts.
I now came to the trail branching from ours obliquely down the valley and toward the river. I passed it, turned my horse square about, hoping thereby to force the loose animals between Red Crow and me to turn into it. They did not understand what was wanted of them, and came to a halt, and Red Crow was obliged to flounder his horse past them and ride into it, and then Heavy Robe urged them on, and as they could not pass me they were obliged to turn into the branch and follow Red Crow. All that took time, valuable time, during which both parties of the enemy were closing in upon us. Heavy Robe's gun was empty, but Red Crow and I fired our pieces, he at the lower, and I at the upper party, and we each wounded a man, how seriously we could not tell. Their comrades passed them and ran after us, firing their two guns and their arrows at long range, and again without effect, and we soon rode out of sight of them.
On and on we went through grove after grove of timber and through open bottoms. We were tired, we were hungry, but we dared not stop. Heavy-Robe said that we must keep going until midnight, and we would then halt only long enough to cook and eat some meat. I kept my eyes upon the Seven Persons, the big dipper, and thought that they never had swung around so slowly. And then, when they pointed to a little more than midnight time, we rode into a very heavy trail in the timber, and saw on both sides of it the snow strewn with small tree-cuttings and shreds of bark, and Heavy Robe called back to us, "This is the work of the Earth House people. You shall soon see their village!'"
That was good news. We went on faster in the broad, hard-beaten trail, soon emerged from the grove, and saw, away out ahead in the long, wide bottom, a dark splotch in its whiteness which Heavy Robe said was the upper village of the Pi-nap'-ut-se-na, or Lower Gros Ventres, or, as they are otherwise called, the Minnetarees. "There they are, our friends!'" he said. "We shall be welcome there — yes, more than welcome, when we tell them that we have certainly killed three Assiniboines and wounded two more, right here in their Big River Valley!"
As we neared the village we saw that it was surrounded with a stockade of tall cottonwood posts. The broad trail led us to the passageway in it, which we found had been closed for the night with an inset of heavy posts. We came to a halt before it, and Heavy Robe shouted: "Open, friends! Open the way for us!"
Three or four times he shouted that, and then we heard footsteps creaking upon hard frozen snow, and finally four or five men looked down upon us from the top of the stockade, and one of them spoke to us. Of course we could not understand his language, nor he our tongue, but when he spoke he also used the sign language, in which he asked us who we were?
"We are your friends! We are Pi-kun'-il," Heavy Robe signed in answer, and at once the passageway was cleared for us, and as we rode in and dismounted, the men embraced us and signed to us that we were very welcome in their village.
People were now coming to us from all parts of it, and one of them, a robe-wrapped man who thrust his face almost into mine, gave me quite a shock of surprise by saying to me in French: "You are white! Who are you, and where from?"
"I am Hugh Monroe. We come from the camp of the Pi-kun'-il Blackfeet," I answered.
"Ha! You are English! But you speak French as though you were French!" he exclaimed.
"My mother is a De la Roche," I explained.
"Ha! Yes! The De la Roches of Montreal and Three Rivers!" he exclaimed. "I know the family; that is, I saw them often in my youthful days. Myself, I am Toussaint Charboneau, one-time Nor’wester, now free man! Free! Free! But, of course, you have heard of me!"
"No, I can't say that I have," I answered.
"Is it possible! Well, then, I must tell you," he cried. "Me, I am the man who led the American soldiers, Lewis and Clark, and their men, from here to the Western Ocean and back!"
"I have heard of them," I said, " and of a Snake, named Grass Woman, who brought them to her people."
"Ha! My woman! Tsaka'-kawia, Bird Woman, as these Minnetarees named her!' he cried. "But come, M'sieu Monroe. You and your friends, you shall camp with me!"
While Charboneau and I talked together, Heavy Robe and Red Crow were telling the Minnetarees, in the sign language, about our fight with the Assiniboines; and now, as the Frenchman led us to his lodge, the whole village was aroused, and the warriors were hurrying out to saddle their horses and ride up the valley to attack the enemy. After unpacking our outfit and tethering our animals to some piles of Cottonwood browse, we went inside and found ourselves in a wonderfully warm, comfortable lodge all of forty feet in diameter. Along its walls, about six feet in height, were several raised couches with buffalo leather curtains. In the center a small fire was burning, the smoke going out of a square opening in the upslanting, post-and-beam, and pole roof, heavily covered with earth, as was the insloping split-log, faced circular wall. As we entered, a woman rose from mending the fire and turned toward us, and, thinking to give her a pleasant surprise, I said to her: "How! Bo-i'-naiv!"
Well, I did surprise her! She started back with a jerk, clapping a hand to her breast; then, recovering herself, addressed me in a torrent of Snake words; to which I shook my head, negatively, and then told her, in signs, that I did not understand the Snake language. I added that a chief of her people, named Black Lance, with many lodges of Snakes, was camping and hunting with our tribe, the Pi-kun'-i Blackfeet. And then Charboneau broke our conversation by very crossly ordering her — in French — to hurry and prepare food for us. Right then and there I conceived an intense dislike for him!
"You must excuse me. You called me by my right name; you mentioned my people; I did not think about the food!" she said in good French. And with tears in her eyes she turned to set several earthen pots before the fire. She was a very handsome woman of about thirty years. Not tall, rather slender, and very quick and graceful in all that she did. Her long, well-braided hair hung down over her back to her knees. She had on a gown of blue trade cloth, trimmed across the breast with several rows of elk rushes, and belted at the waist.
I now introduced my friends to Charboneau. He shook hands with them and told me to tell them that they were very welcome in his poor lodge, and then he assigned us our places in it, a couch for my almost-brother and me and another for Heavy Robe. He drew aside the curtains to them, and we were glad enough to lay aside our weapons and heavy buffalo robe wraps and sit down to rest. In a few moments the woman had warmed the food and set it before us in queer little gray earthen jars of native make. It was good food, com boiled with meat, and we ate a lot of it. We had no sooner finished eating than we tumbled over on our couches, and almost instantly fell asleep.
Near daylight we were awakened by Charboneau, and sat up to find a tall, heavy-set, fine-appearing warrior in the lodge, no other than Red Shield, head chief of the village. He informed us that messengers had come in from the party that had gone out against the Assiniboines and had brought bad news. It appeared that we had seen only a part of the enemy, for his men had come upon more than two hundred of them, and had been driven back with a loss of seven killed. He had sent to the lower villages for reinforcements, but knew that he could not get many, as most of the men were off on a buffalo hunt down the river. He asked us to go with him, with our good guns, and help fight our common enemy. Of course we could not refuse to do that, and soon after daylight we were hurrying with the party he led up the valley. At mid-forenoon we came upon the Minnetarees who had gone out from the village in the night. They were halted before a large grove, at the edge of which the trail was barricaded with a long, high pile of brush. Back of the pile the smoke from several fires was rising in the still, cold air, "There they are, the Cut-Throats," the leader of the night party told us. "There they are, safe behind their barricade, roasting meat at their fires and comfortable. And we are not strong enough to attack them. They surprised us last night and killed seven of our number!"
"Well, we cannot crush that barricade until help comes from the lower villages," Red Shield declared. And so we waited there in the terrible cold, and some time after noon the reinforcements came to us, about two hundred men from the other Minnetaree village and from the village of the Ahnahaways, or Black Moccasins, and the two Mandan villages. The leader of the Mandans was no other than Ma-to-to'-pa, or Four Bears, Lone Walker's close friend. He gave us more than hearty greeting, and said that we must visit him as soon as possible and stop with him a long time.
We believed that the brush of the barricade concealed heavy dead timber and limbs which our horses could not break through, and, of course, the snow was so deep that we could not rush our animals past the ends of it, and so flank the enemy behind it. We simply had to make the attack on the trail, and it was certain that some, at least, of those in the lead would fall before they could penetrate the barrier. Red Shield took command of the whole party, and ordered that those who had no shield should take the rear of the line. That included Heavy Robe and Red Crow and me, but Heavy Robe declared that as he was now at the head of the line with the chiefs, he would remain with them, and so, of course. Red Crow vowed that he would stick close to his leader, and I had to declare that I would do so, too.
Red Shield looked back at the long line of us, more than two hundred riders strung out in single file in the trail, and gave the order to charge, and away we went, and simultaneously the war song of four different tribes was raised, the most tremendous burst of discord that I ever heard. It quite drowned out the sound of the war song of the Pi-kun'-i, which my companions and I were shouting as loudly as we could.
Back of the barrier the smoke of the enemy camp-fires still rose in the frost-filled air, but not a man could we see as we approached the wide, high brush pile across the trail. We did not doubt that two hundred Cut-Throats were watching us through its interstices, confident that they could kill so many of our lead men that the rest would turn and flee from them. Nearer and nearer we rode to the obstruction, and still we could not see even one of the enemy. I wanted, oh, so much! to see them; it is far easier, let me tell you, to approach seen danger than it is that which is hidden! There were ten men ahead of me. I saw them one by one burst through the barricade as though it were so much straw, and then with a few jumps, my horse carried me through the gap they had made in the brush. I looked along the length of the barrier, and then ahead, and laughed a choking, foolish kind of laugh. We had been tricked! The Cut-Throats had cleared six large spaces of snow and on the bared ground had built carefully constructed fires of mixed dry-and-green wood that was sure to smoulder and smoke for a day or more, and then they had gone their way! Around each fireplace was a great litter of willow cuttings and strands of rawhide rope, and two or three broken, oblong circlets of willow withes. The enemy had made snowshoes, and then gone up the beaten trail down which my companions and I had come the previous evening. Heavy frost stood like fuzz in their footprints in the snow, proving that they were hours ahead of us, but anyhow we followed, and silently enough; the various tribal war songs had come to a sudden end!
Not far above the barricade we came upon the seven Minnetarees that the Cut-Throats had killed. They were all scalped and horribly mutilated. We passed on through the grove, across a long, open bottom, through another grove, and came to the place where the enemy had put on their snowshoes and struck off due north, across the frozen river. On the opposite side a long point ran out from the plain to a small grove, and, screened by it, they had left the valley and struck out for their camp, on Mouse River, perhaps, or farther north, on the Assiniboine. Reluctantly, sullenly, the chase was abandoned right there, and we turned back down the trail, some of the Minnetarees dropping out to bury their dead, others to go on up the trail to take the scalps and weapons of the Cut-Throats that Heavy Robe and Red Crow and I had killed.
Well, when we returned to the village and dismounted in front of Charboneau's lodge, Sacajawea came out and told us to put our horses in a small roped-in enclosure that she had made. Defying the bitter cold she had made three or four trips to the distant timber with her travoy horse, and brought in loads of cottonwood browse for the animals and fuel for the lodge.
"You are very good to us. We must try to do something for you," I told her, when we had gone inside and were gathered about the fire.
"I love to do things for real people!" she exclaimed. "I would have done anything — I would have died for Red Hair and Long Knife, the great white chiefs with whom I went to the Western Ocean. Oh, that I could meet them once more, just once before I die!"
"Woman! Cease jabbering in your bad French and prepare for us a little dinner!" her man commanded, and she shrank away from him to her work.
Charboneau had been asleep on his couch when we entered. He now roused up, reached out for his pipe, and listlessly asked me what we had accomplished up-river? I answered as shortly as I could that we had been given the slip by the Assiniboines, and he laughed.
"I expected something like that would happen!" he said. "In one way or another, the Assiniboines generally get the best of these foolish villagers!"
"It is not a laughing matter to them that they have lost seven of their number!" I somewhat angrily replied.
"Ah, but they should not have gone up there in the night; they might have known they would be ambushed!" he sneered.
I had an angry reply ready for that, but just then caught Sacajawea's eyes upon me. She signed me not to argue with him, so I turned to my companions and told them what he had said. They made no comment upon it, but I knew from the expression of their faces that they disliked him as much as I did.
"Eat! Eat heartily!" he told us, when the woman set food before us. "I am poor, but what I have I share with you so long as it lasts. Yes, I am very poor! I have only two horses, both small — almost worthless. I have no traps. I am very miserable! Now, if I had even one good horse, I could do something; I could hunt, and set deadfalls for wolves. As I am, I cannot improve my condition."
I turned to my companions: "This man," I told them, "is complaining of his poverty; he is making a talk for one of our horses. As we need him for interpreting, let us give him one."
"Give him my roan horse!" Heavy Robe grimly told me. "I would see him dead before he should have anything of mine, were it not for his woman. She is good to us: for her sake I give him the horse!"
I told Charboneau at once that we gave him our big roan, and at that he brightened up and became very talkative. Later on, when some chiefs came in to visit with us, I found that we could not use him as an interpreter, except in conjunction with his wife. Although he had been with the Minnetarees for years, he had not mastered their language! His way of interpreting was to have Sacajawea tell him in French what the Minnetarees said, and he would then change it into better French, or into English. To save time I had the woman interpret to me in French, and I turned the matter into Blackfeet.
After we had delivered our load of presents to the chiefs, with the messages of friendship from Lone Walker, they soon went their way. Charboneau went out to gamble in a near-by lodge, and left us alone with Sacajawea. That was just what I wanted. I felt that she would help me, and so I said to her: "I want to tell you what is in my heart. My chief, Terrible Tongue, Hudson's Bay Company factor at our Mountain Fort, has ordered me to try to make peace between the Cheyennes and the Blackfeet, and persuade the Cheyennes to go north with us in the spring and trade at our post. Tell me how I shall do this?'"
"Be careful; don't talk so loudly," she answered, "and if my man comes in, start talking about some other matter!"
"You have been good to my poor Snake people," she went on, "and that is one reason why I want to help you. Another reason is that I want to help the Cheyennes; many of them are my friends. They are a brave people; a clean, hardworking people. They trap and hunt all winter long, and catch great numbers of beaver, and tan buffalo robes so soft that they fold like trade cloth. Then, in the spring, they come here and get cheated out of the result of their work. If they would only wait for the American traders, they would do well enough. But long before the trade boats come up the river, the Northwesters come from the Assiniboine with pack-trains of goods, and they pay the Cheyennes, and all who will trade with them, almost nothing for their furs. Why, they ask sixty beaver skins for a gun! Twenty skins for a blanket! And for everything else prices beyond reason. Now, your Company charges much less, does it not?"
"Only twenty skins for a gun, ten skins for a blanket, and six skins for three yards of trade cloth, enough for a woman's gown," I answered.
"Reasonable enough," she said, "and oh, how I do love peace! I would like to see peace between all tribes. I cry when I think of my Snake people, all the tribes of the plains against them, and they without guns, and so unable to defend themselves, hiding and starving for the greater part of the time in the forests of little game on the west side of the mountains.
"Now, listen! My man was once a Northwester, and he is still in league with it against all other traders, even the Americans. If he learns that you will try to bring about peace with the Cheyennes, in order to get their trade, he will do something to prevent it. You must tell no one, Minnetaree, Mandan, or Ahnahaway, that you want their trade. Just say that you would like to meet the Cheyennes, and bring about a peace between them and the Blackfeet. You remember that chief. Big Man, who was here to-night, and to whom you gave presents. He asked you to visit him. Do so, for he is really a Cheyenne, adopted by the Mandans, and so a chief in both tribes. Try to get him to go with you to the Cheyenne camp. If he will take you there, you will, at least, be sure to be well received, and get a hearing."
"I shall do as you advise," I told her; and we then talked of other things. She finally wound up the evening by telling me the story of her capture by the Minnetarees.
IV: Bird Woman’s Story of Her Capture
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SO here begins Bird Woman's own story as she told it to Hugh Monroe: —
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I must first tell you something about my Snake people [she began]. It is not because they are cowards that they are poor, that they hide and hunger in the mountain forests; it is because they cannot possibly hold their own against the tribes of the plains, the Blackfeet tribes especially. Always, when they went out upon the plains after buffalo, they would be driven back by enemies far outnumbering them. At last, in a summer of little rain, when few salmon ascended the rivers, and there were but few roots, the chiefs of the Snakes, the Flatheads, and the Pend'Oreilles counseled together. Said the Snake chief: "It seems to me that we have not had good sense. We have been going out upon the plains to hunt, you Flatheads in one place, you Pend'Oreilles in another, and my people in another, and that is where we have made a mistake. Let us now band together and go out to hunt buffalo; we will then number so many warriors that I doubt that the Blackfeet, or our other enemies, will even attempt to drive us from their plains. Their plains, say I? Why, they are our plains, too, and so are the herds of buffalo and antelope that cover them! Come! Let us all make plenty of arrows, and then go out and kill all that we want of our plains animals!"
The other chiefs agreed with the Snake chief to do that. They called themselves names because they had not long since banded together to hunt upon the plains. As soon as they and their warriors had made all the arrows that they could possibly need, the three tribes of them crossed the mountains and camped just above the Great Falls of the Missouri, in the midst of countless herds of buffalo. I do not know how long ago that was; it was some time before I was born.
Now the people of the three tribes were happy. They feasted upon the plenty of buffalo that the hunters killed. The women dried great quantities of it for future use, and tanned many buffalo hides for warm winter robes, and for leather for lodge skins. And day after day they kept scouts far out in all directions to watch for the approach of enemies. At last, one morning, some of them were discovered, coming from the north. The scouts hurried to camp with the news, and said that the war party numbered about two hundred men, all on foot. When the chiefs of the three tribes heard that they were glad. They laughed. "We are more than six hundred men," they said. "This day we shall teach the enemy something that they will never forget! We shall kill all of them, except two or three, who shall go home and tell their people that we are now united, and so powerful that they cannot drive us from the plains!"
All the warriors of the three tribes mounted their best horses, slung their thick, bullhide shields, and with bows and arrows in hand rode out gladly to destroy the enemy war party. There they were, right out on the open plain, heading for the valley where the little river meets the big river, just above the falls. When they saw our warriors riding out to battle with them, they did not halt; they raised their war song and kept right on, and our chiefs said to one another: "They are crazy! Crazily brave! They should know — but it seems they do not — that we shall soon wipe them out!"
Nearer and nearer the Snake, the Flathead, and the Pend'Oreille warriors rode to them, arrows fitted to their bows, and shields held ready to stop the flight of enemy arrows, and as they rode, their chiefs kept cautioning them not to shoot until they were so close to the enemy that they could see their eyes. But before they could ride that near, the enemy came to a halt, and some of them raised what appeared to be shining sticks, pointed them at the riders, and suddenly there burst from the ends of them fire, and smoke, and booms of thunder, and riders and horses fell as though they had been struck by lightning. Five riders and three horses went down, and all the rest of those more than six hundred riders turned and fled back to camp, and gathered in their horses and mounted their women and children and what they could of their property in their great hurry, and away they went up the trail to the mountains, once more to hide from their plains enemies and starve in the forests of the west slope. Never again, they said to one another, could they venture out after buffalo. Their plains enemies had been favored by their gods. They had been given thunder and lightning! It was useless to try to fight enemies who had the weapons of the sky gods, the terrible weapons with which great trees were scattered into splinters, with which even the solid rock of the mountains was broken into small pieces!
There followed winters and summers of hunger for the three tribes. They hid deep in the forests, catching a few salmon, killing a little game, eating what roots they could find, and summer after summer the plains warmen sought them, raiding their horse herds, and killing many of the people with the thunder and lightning weapons of the sky gods. It was a hard life that those mountain tribes led. But at last it was learned that those weapons were not sky god weapons. A party of Snakes, wandering far south, met white men; men who carried these same weapons, and who said that they were not medicine; that they made them themselves, and also the black stuff like sand, and the round balls with which they fed them. They would not give nor sell the Snakes even one of them, and so, watching their chance, the war party stole one of the weapons and food for it, and hurried north to their people with it. Thereafter, knowing that these weapons were man-made, not god-made, they became less timid, and at times ventured out upon the plains after buffalo, going out generally in the late fall when war parties of the plains tribes had ceased roaming about.
Thus it was when I was born, when I was growing up, a young girl in the camp of my people. Many, oh, many times I have fled from sudden attacks upon us by the Blackfeet, the Minnetarees, and other plains enemies. We lived in constant fear of them, especially in the summer-time. From the going of the snow until it came again, the moons were moons of terror for us all.
As I grew older, deer and elk became more and more scarce in our mountain country, because of the constant hunting of them, and at last, in the spring of my tenth summer, food became so scarce that we had to cross the mountains and go down to hunt buffalo or starve to death on the west side. We were then well down on a fork of our Big River, or, as my white chiefs have named it, the Snake River. We could not wait there for the summer run of salmon to come up it; we broke camp and moved up to the west side of the pass at the head of the Missouri River. From there some of our hunters went on discovery through the pass and down the east slope, and, returning a few days later, brought what meat they could pack on their riding horses. They reported that the buffalo were well below the Three Forks of the east side of Big River, too far away for our men to hunt them from where we were; so our chiefs decided that we should cross the pass and go down and camp somewhere near the Forks. It was better, they said, for us to die with full bellies than to die from starvation where we were.
We crossed the pass, followed down the trail running to the Great Falls, and camped on the West Fork of Big River, not far above its meeting-point with the Middle Fork. From there our hunters went down the valley every day, always returning before sunset with buffalo meat and hides. For the first time in many moons we had enough to eat, yes, and meat to spare, which the women dried for future use. They worked from sunrise to sunset, cutting the meat into thin sheets for drying and tanning the hides of the buffalo that the men brought in. But all of us, men, women, and children, ate and worked and played with fear in our hearts, always watching for a war party from some of the plains tribes to come in sight. We dared not sleep in our camp; as soon as the sun set and we had finished our evening meal, we scattered out, a family here, a family there, to sleep in the thick brush in the valley or up on the mountain-side. My friend, that was a terrible life we led; a life of constant fear! It is the kind of life that my Snake people still live! Oh, how my heart goes out to them! Just think, my friend, how I feel when I see the warriors of this village return from a raid with scalps that they have torn from the heads of my poor relatives!
One morning, soon after our hunters had gone down the valley to hunt more buffalo, one of them came hurrying back as fast as his horse could carry him and shouting to us that the enemy were coming. Right on his heels came others, hurrying to run in our horses from the mountain-side, and get us mounted and started off up the trail for the pass, while still others, among them my father, tried to keep the enemy back until we were well upon our way. I cannot begin to tell you the awful confusion that our camp was so suddenly thrown into! Women and children ran aimlessly about, crying, shrieking, paying no attention to the old men begging them to take courage, to wait for the horses that were being run in, and then to catch gentle ones and ride off up the trail. Some of the women ran at once for the brush with their children, and others gathered their little ones and started up the trail; only a few of them heeded the old men and waited for the horses to be brought in.
I was playing with three or four girls, and we were a little way above camp when the trouble began. We ran down into the camp as fast as we could, and I called and called my mother, running first to our lodge, then to other places, but I could not find her. I tried to stop people and ask them if they had seen her, but they paid no attention to me, seemed not to hear me, and, hardly knowing what I was about, I turned and ran from camp, got into the timber and brush and made my way up the valley as fast as I could go. I soon heard the boom of guns, the shouts of the fighters, off down the valley. I ran on faster, if that was possible, tearing my way through the brush, often stumbling against a dead branch or log and falling flat. Now and then I saw women and children on one side or the other of me, and I would hurry toward them, find that my mother was not with them and go on in search of her. I was a good runner, I was strong of body, but all too soon I began to tire, to run slower and slower. Out to my right I heard people, my people, calling to one another, urging their horses on as they fled for the pass. I worked my way out to the trail, just as a last party of them were passing, and I cried out to them for help, for a horse, but they were so frightened that they never even looked toward me, and I stumbled on after them a little way, then turned back into the brush and went on.
At last the timber and brush on my side of the river gave out. Ahead was a long, open bottom, but on the opposite side of the river the growth of timber continued. I looked for a place to cross the river and got into it, but the water was very deep and swift, and I went quite a long way up the open bottom before I found a shallow ford. As I started to cross it I saw four riders coming and thought that they were my people. I stopped on the shore, intending to ask them to let me ride behind one of them. Then, all too late, I saw that they were enemy riders, and I ran into the river, stooping low, hoping that the bank would prevent them from seeing me as I crossed over Into the brush. I did not look back; I had to watch my footing upon the slippery stones of the ford. I was no more than halfway to the brush when, above the roar of a rapid close upstream, I heard a horse splash into the water behind me, heard him make two or three jumps, heard other horses splash into the water, and then a rider suddenly seized my left arm and yanked me up on his horse in front of him. I whirled about and looked at him, and tried to bite and scratch his face, but he just laughed, and clasped me with his left arm so that I could not hurt him. He turned his horse about, and the three other riders turned too, and down the trail we went, they talking and laughing in their language so strange to me, I frightened so much that I could not cry, no, not even when we passed a boy and a girl, two of my playmates, lying dead beside the trail! On our way down to the camp we were joined by others of the enemy, some of them with captured horses, two of them with girl captives of my own age. Oh, how low-hearted we were; so sad feeling, and so afraid of our captors, that we did not even speak to one another as we were borne on down the trail!
When we arrived at camp we found there a gathering of more than a hundred of the enemy, a few of them holding a great band of Snake horses, others guarding boy and girl prisoners, the rest going about through the camp, taking whatever they found that pleased them, and setting fire to the lodges, hides, saddles, everything that would burn. We were nine prisoners, four boys and five girls, all of them of about my age. One of the girl prisoners, named Otter Woman, was my close friend. She ran to me as soon as my captor let me down from his horse, and we cried together. She told me that she had been captured by the man who had brought me in, and that he had left her with some of his companions when he went on in pursuit of our people.
While the camp was burning, our captor caught a horse for Otter Woman and one for me, and saddled them with saddles that he saved from the burning. The other prisoners were also given saddled horses, and we were all soon ordered to mount and ride. We just had to go. There were riders in front of us, riders behind us; we could not possibly escape from our captors by riding away from them. Down the trail we went, passing here and there one and another of our people, dead and scalped. And as we passed each one the boys and girls cried afresh; all but Otter Woman and I. We felt as badly as the others, worse, perhaps, but somehow we could not cry.
On and on we went down the valley, and at sunset made camp beside the river. We prisoners were ordered to build a little fire for ourselves and were given plenty of fat buffalo meat to roast. We did cook it, but felt so sad that we could no more than taste it. All around us the war party were gathered about little fires, talking, laughing, roasting meat. There was a full moon; the night was so bright that we could see the great band of horses out on the flat, four or five men constantly riding around them and keeping them together while they grazed. We were very miserable. We mourned for our relatives, dead, perhaps, and we trembled as we thought of what might be in store for us, — death, most likely!
After a time the man who had captured Otter Woman and me came and sat near us, and said to us in signs: "You two are mine. I shall take you to my big lodge, and there you will have plenty to eat, good clothing, and you will help my women in their work, and you will be the same to me as my own children. So do not be afraid of me. But do not try to escape; if you do, I shall have to kill you, for I cannot be bothered by chasing you and bringing you back."
We made no answer to that; so, looking straight at us, he went on: "How is it? Do you understand?" And we then signed back to him that we did. He was a man of about fifty years was our captor, and he had a kind face and a soft, laughing voice, but, oh, how Otter Woman and I feared him that first evening! He signed to us all to lie down and go to sleep, and we all did lie down around our little fire. Otter Woman and I closely side by side, and then he made signs, "That is good!'' and moved away from us. We did not intend, any of us, to sleep. We watched the circle of our captors, hoping to escape from them when they lay down and fell asleep. But before they did that they left three men on guard and these came and sat near us. At midnight three others took the watch and they lay down. And at that, afraid though we were, we, too, slept. We were so tired that we could not keep awake.
We were awakened at daylight, taken to the river to wash ourselves, brought back and given more meat, and told to hurry cooking and eating it. We were now so hungry, and so much less frightened, that we did eat. After that the horses were brought in, and we were soon all mounted and on our way again down the valley. We rode steadily until noon, and again, after a short rest, until night. During the long day we had become somewhat used to our captivity, and less and less afraid that our captors were going to do worse than make slaves of us. But we did not intend to be slaves; we sat around our little fire that evening and made all kinds of plans to escape and return to the mountains and find our people, hiding, we were sure, somewhere in the forests of the west side. But as fast as we made our plans we saw that they were not good. How could we escape when, all through the night, there was a guard over us? We could not do it! Again we became very low-hearted; we cried; and crying, fell asleep.
V: The Escape of Her Companions
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ON the fourth evening of our capture we camped just above the falls of the river. That was as far as we had ever come out upon the plains with our people. On the following day we traveled until evening along a trail running across a high, waterless plain, and then again struck the river and made camp. Then for two days we crossed a great plain, and in the evening of the second day made camp at the west end of some mountains, the Bearpaw Mountains of your Blackfeet country, as I afterward learned. Used as we were to a mountain country, the plains terrified us. We had not thought that they were of so great extent. As far as we could see to the north and the east, they ran to the very edge of the world without a break, and to the southeast, past a point of low mountains, they were also without end. If we did in some way escape from our captors we saw that, without horses or the means of carrying water, we should die from thirst before we could ever recross them.
On that night, at the point of the mountains, our captors for the first time left no guard over the camp when they lay down to sleep, and the horse herd, with its guard of three or four men, was out of sight from us behind a ridge. As soon as we were sure that we were to have no guard we began to whisper to one another that as soon as it was safe to do so, we should one by one crawl out from camp into the dark pine forest near by and then run for our lives.
"But where shall we run?" one of the boys asked us. "We do not want to go east, we cannot go west across the waterless plain. I say that this is not the time for us to try to escape; we must wait. And, anyhow, seeing that we were quiet enough this night, our captors will cease watching us, and so, when the right time comes, we shall surely get away from them."
We all agreed that the boy was right, and soon went to sleep.
On the following morning, leaving the little mountain range on our right, we soon came to a small stream running east in a wide, low valley in the plain. We were sure that it came from our great mountains; it was the stream that, later on, my white chiefs named Milk River. We said to one another that, if we could escape from our captors now, we could follow it up to our mountains, and then turn south along them to the Big River, — the Missouri, — and then through the pass at the head of it to our people. As we rode along in the midst of our captors we agreed to try to escape from them that night.
On that day the great number of game herds that we saw astonished us. The wide valley and the great plain through which it ran were grass-hidden by buffalo and antelope, and in every grove of timber were herds of elk and both kinds of deer. Late in the afternoon, as we passed a point of timber, we came upon a big bear that was going into it with an antelope fawn hanging from its mouth. As soon as it saw us it dropped the fawn, sat up and looked at us, and then, with loud roars, came charging straight at us. Think of it! A bear charging more than a hundred riders, driving several hundred horses! It had no fear of the thunder of the horses' feet; no fear of the odor of many men that the west wind carried to it. With long, swift leaps it came straight at us, and we all, captors and prisoners, scattered out before it and rode for our lives, and, fast as we rode, it almost overtook one of us, a girl who was on a small, slow horse. It followed us a long way before it gave up the chase, and then, when it did stop, our captors did not tum back to attack it. They rounded up the scattered herd of horses and we went on.
That evening, when we made camp by the river, and just below a large grove, our captors for the first time ordered us to gather wood for the cooking-fires. We were afraid to go into the timber; we thought that there might be in it another of the great bears of this plains country, bears much larger than we had ever seen in our mountains, and in signs we told our captors that we were afraid. At that one of them turned upon us so fiercely that we just ran for the timber, more afraid of him than we were of bears. After all, we said to one another, there might not be a bear in that grove. We went into the grove; a step or two at a time; farther and farther in; so far at last that we were out of sight of our captors.
"Come! Let us run! Let us go up this grove and hide in the thick willows, and when night falls, start up this valley for our mountains!" one of the boys proposed.
"We should never reach our mountains; the big bears would kill us all!" said a girl, and all the other girls agreed with her that that was true enough.
Said a boy, "I have been thinking hard; this is how it is with us: were we to escape from our captors, and from the bears along the way, still we should never reach our mountains; for without a bow and arrows to kill meat for us, we should starve to death on the long trail."
And what he said was true enough. It was true, too, as others said, that there were no roots in this country; that the berries were not ripe; that we had seen only a very few very small fish in the little river.
Then said the first boy — he was older and more wise than any of us: "Let us hurry and gather a lot of wood for the fires. Although our hearts are very low, let us talk and laugh around our fire. So shall we make our captors think that we no longer want to escape from them. They will cease watching us. There will come a time when we can steal bow and arrows from them; a gun, even; and then we shall do the best we can to travel back to our people."
As our leader proposed, that we did. We surprised our captors by our talk and laughter that evening; we could see them watching us; talking about us; agreeing that we were forgetting our people and the wrong that they had done to them and to us.
Day after day we rode on and on down that valley, once cutting a big bend in it, and on the evening of the fifth day from the time that we struck it, camped at its junction with a very wide river of dirty water that we knew was no other than the Big River we had left not far out from our mountains. And here its valley was quite wide, and its groves of cottonwoods and willows of great length and breadth. Could we escape from our captors into one of them, we believed that they would never find us.
On this evening we did not wait to be told to gather firewood. We began bringing it in from a great heap of dry drift that was lodged on a sandbar just below the mouth of the little river. There were several logs in it that could easily be rolled into the stream, and we noticed that the boy who had become our leader — his name was Elk Horn — looked at them a long time, and let us make a trip to camp with wood while he walked around them and upon them, and, standing at one end and then another, pushed against them with the back of his legs. We were providing wood for six fires every evening. On this evening he told us to make our fire at the edge of the circle nearest the river, unless we were ordered not to do so. We did make it there, and were not told to move it to the center of the circle. None of our captors paid any attention to us, other than to lay beside our place plenty of meat of a fat cow that they had killed while we were making camp.
After we had cooked and eaten all the meat that we wanted. Elk Horn said to us: "Now I am going to tell you something. While I am telling it, little by little, do not all look at me. Look at one another, saying a few words, and do some laughing. Now I begin: If I can steal a bow and arrows or a gun, after our captors fall asleep, we shall try to escape from them."
He stopped there, and we talked and laughed about nothing, but it was hard to do because we were so anxious to hear what more he had to say.
"At the edge of the drift pile by the river are two dry logs that we can roll into the water," he went on. "If I can get a bow and arrows or a gun, without awaking any one, we shall then, one by one, crawl away from here and down the bank of the river to the drift. When we are all there we shall roll the logs in so that they will float, and then half of us clinging to one and half to the other, we shall push out and swim to the other shore. Of course we shall drift downstream a long way in doing that —" There he paused while we talked and laughed again, and then went on: "But once we get into the timber on the other side we shall be safe; our captors will hunt a long time for us up this side of the river and never think that we crossed it. In the shelter of the timber over there we can go on and on up the valley, traveling in the daytime and killing what meat we need, and so, if the bears do not get any of us, we shall all be again with our people by the end of another moon; maybe before that; it may not be as far to our mountains as we think. There! I have said it. Be sure, all of you, to keep awake and watch me, and one by one follow me to the drift if I leave the circle!"
We all thought Elk Horn's plan a good one. One by one we told him that we should do as he said. Oh, how fast our hearts beat! Mine did, anyhow, as we watched our captors, hoping that they would soon lie down and sleep and sleep soundly. Some of them did so soon after their evening meal, but others sat up, smoking and talking, as long as there was any wood to burn. We all lay down soon after Elk Horn had told us his plan for escape, our little fire went out, and we watched our captors, pretending that we were asleep. Would you believe it—my close friend, Otter Woman, lying by my side, almost at once went to sleep! I nudged her, pinched her, whispered to her that she must keep awake. She promised that she would and went right to sleep again! And I soon knew, from the way they breathed, that all the others, except Elk Horn, were asleep! He was on the opposite side of the fireplace from me, lying on his stomach, his head to the enemy. I could see him now and then slowly raise his head and look at them. I felt sure that he would not sleep.
Two men remained up, talking and smoking, long after all the others were asleep. Three or four times their little fire went down to nothing but a few red coals, and they would liven it with handfuls of dry twigs. As I watched these men I found that I was getting sleepy; two or three times I caught myself falling asleep; it was only by the greatest effort that I made myself break out of a doze and open my eyes. After the two men could find no more twigs and had lain down by their dying fire, I found it still more difficult to keep awake, and toward the last of my watch I cast off my robe, exposing myself to the cold night air, and even bit my wrists now and then. So doing, I did keep awake, and was the only one of us to see Elk Horn when he began to wriggle like a snake toward the nearest sleeping group of our captors. In the bright moonlight I could see him quite plainly. He went so slowly that he did not seem to move at all, and, as he neared the sleeping men, he often as slowly raised up and looked at them for a long time. Watching him, I was becoming more and more excited; all feeling of sleep left me; my whole body began to tremble with eagerness for his success. When he had crawled quite near the sleepers, I sat up so that I could see plainly all that he did. Oh, how my heart went down as I saw him, after crawling close to the nearest of the sleepers, begin to back away. I thought that he was giving up; was coming back to us; that there would be no escape for us!
But no! He back-crawled only to start again, circling around to the right of the circle of sleepers. Having done that, he crawled straight to the outer one of them, more slowly than ever, paused by his side, and then as slowly began backing away from him, and, finally turning, came toward us. I almost cried out loud, "He has seized it!" when I saw that he was shuffling along with him something that he gripped with his right hand, and as he neared us I made out that it was a bow and arrow case!
It was now time for me to awaken our sleepers, and, right at the start, I made a great mistake: I should have begun with my best friend, Otter Woman, lying at my side. Instead of that I awakened the girl nearest me on my right, then one by one the girls beyond her, and from them I passed around to the boys and one by one aroused them. I did this very carefully, putting my hand upon the mouth of each one, and whispering, "Awake! It is time to go!" And as I awakened them, girls and boys, they would one by one sit up, see Elk Horn coming, and then begin crawling toward the bank of the river.
I now came around back to Otter Woman, put my hand over her mouth and whispered to her to awake. She never moved. I shook her gently, whispering again and again, but all that she would do was to breathe more heavily. I dared not pinch her, nor do anything else that would make her wake suddenly and cry out. I continued to hold my hand upon her mouth and move her head this way and that, and whisper, "Awake! Come, we must go!" And all that time our companions were going. I looked around and saw that they had all of them, excepting one other girl, the first that I had awakened, gone out of sight down the slope of the river-bank. This other girl had gone to sleep again right after I had awakened her! Oh, how angry I was at these two girls! I was minded to leave them! I did start to do so, but my love for Otter Woman drew me back to her. Again I rolled her head and whispered to her; time and again I did that, and still without effect. So, finally, after a look at the sleeping men, I stood up, took hold of her two hands, and began to pull her to her feet; and at that she suddenly awoke, shrieking as loudly as she could, "No, No! Don't kill me!"
Ha! As one man, our captors awoke and sprang to their feet, looking around and calling to one another, and then came rushing to us, some of them seizing Otter Woman and me, and the other girl, Leaping Fish Woman, while others ran in all directions seeking the missing. Scared as I was, I noticed that none of them went farther than the edge of the slope of the bank, and the two or three who ran to it turned and also ran for the timber above us, after hurriedly looking down the slope and out at the drift pile on the sandbar. We were soon left with but one man guarding us, the man who had captured Otter Woman and me at the Three Forks of the Big River — the man who owned us. All of the others had gone off into the timber along the little river, and some across it, into the big grove of cottonwoods running up the main river. This man was not at all angry at us for attempting to escape, and he did not seem to care if our companions were recaptured or went free. He just laughed at us, and signed to us to go with him into the timber and gather some wood, and that we should then build a fire and roast and eat some meat.
Of course we were wondering what had become of our companions. We did not believe that they had had time to get the logs into the water and push out into the stream before our captors were aroused by Otter Woman's shrieks. We were quite sure that they had hidden in the drift pile, or behind it, when the shrieking and shouting began. And now, as we went with the man toward the timber, I heard, surely heard, a splash in the water behind us. We all heard it, and we three looked at one another and at our captor, but he paid no attention to it. I afterward saw that it was a sound natural enough to him, a dweller on this Big River; its banks and sandbars are being continually cut and swept away by its current. It was not until I returned to my people with my white chiefs that I learned that the splash that we heard really was the splash of a log from the drift pile. Those boys and girls had hidden behind the pile, and then, when all became still, they got one log into the stream and, drifting far down with it, reached the other shore. From there, after almost two moons of travel, they entered our west side country and found our people. Elk Horn had no trouble in killing what meat they wanted, and in making fire with a bow drill, with the bow and arrows that he had taken from the sleeping enemy, nor, on that long trail, did those boys and girls see any enemies; they did have two narrow escapes from the great bears of the Big River Valley.
We were three sad-hearted girls that sat by the little fire we built for our captor. He offered us meat, but we refused it; even the sight of it, in our despair, sickened us. As he ate his meat our captor often broke out laughing, and finally signed to us: "My friends up there in the timber are like birds, running in all directions in search of their little ones. Myself, I have my little ones; here you are right with me. I wish that you could see your faces: so sad, so old-looking, as if you were very, very old and about to die! No, my little ones, you are not to die; you will soon be living in a good lodge; eating plenty of food; wearing good gowns. Yes, you will soon be happy enough. Come, now, wipe away your tears and laugh!"
Otter Woman and I just sat and stared at him. But the other girl was different; even then, young as she was, she would get quickly, fearlessly angry. In answer to the man she suddenly darted her head forward like a snake, and spat at him! And at that the man laughed all the harder and signed to her: "Now, that is what I like to see, a brave heart! Women of brave heart make good wives. I shall buy you from your captor, and when you grow up you shall be my wife!"
In answer to that, Leaping Fish Woman again spat at him, and signed, too, "I hate you!"
