BUFFALO HUNTING
When we cleared that brush patch I looked back. The buffaloes were no
more than fifty yards behind us and the brush was gone, trampled down to
its roots. I did not see the two horses that Mink Woman had been
leading, or think of them at that time; my one thought was to get away
from that onrushing wall of shaggy, sharp-horned, bobbing heads. Red
Crow, frantically thumping his horse with his heels, was leading us,
heading obliquely toward Badger River, and waving to us to follow him.
Mink Woman was just ahead of me, but she had the slower horse and I was
gaining upon her, even as the buffaloes were gaining upon us all. I
wondered if we could possibly clear their front. I rode up beside the
girl, on her left, and hung there to protect her as best I could. Nearer
and nearer came the buffaloes. When they were within fifty feet of us,
and we still fifty or sixty yards from the river, I fired my gun at them
and to my surprise dropped a big cow. But that had no effect upon the
others; they surged on over her body as though it were no more than an
ant hill.
"I must try again!" I said to myself and holding gun and bridle in my
right hand, drew a pistol with my left. It was to be my last shot, and I
held it as long as I could. We neared the river; the herd kept gaining
upon us, came up to us and I leaned out and fired straight at a big head
that I could almost touch with the muzzle of the pistol. It dropped.
Looking ahead then I saw that we were close to the edge of a high
cutbank at the edge of the river, saw Red Crow leap his horse from it
and go out of sight; a couple more jumps of our horses and we, too,
would clear it. But just then a big head thumped into the side of my
horse, knocking him against Mink Woman's horse. As I felt him falling
with me I let go pistol and gun and bridle, and reaching out blindly
grasped the mane of her horse with both hands and swung free. The next
instant another big head struck her horse a mighty thud in the flank and
whirled him half around and off the cutbank, and down we went with a
splash into deep water; we were safe!
I let go the horse, and the girl, still on its back, swam it downstream
to shallow water, I following, and we finally passed below the cutbank
and went ashore on the point, Red Crow going out a little ahead of us. A
man skinning a buffalo there whirled around and stared at us
open-mouthed, and then cried: "What has happened to you?"
"You did it, you stampeded the buffaloes onto us! We have had a narrow
escape!" Red Crow answered.
But my one thought now was of my gun and pistol; I ran on to find them,
dreading to see them trampled into useless pieces of wood and iron, and
the hunter mounted his horse and came with the others after me.
It was a couple of hundred yards up to where we had made our sudden
turn, and there in the trampled and broken brush patch we found the two
pack horses, frightfully gored and trampled, both dead. Mink Woman had
led them by a single, strong rawhide rope, and the buffaloes striking it
had dragged them, gored them, knocked them off their feet.
We went on, past the first buffalo that I had killed, and soon came to
the other one, and just beyond it to my horse, disemboweled, down, and
dying. Red Crow put an arrow into him and ended his misery. Just in
front of him lay my gun, and I gave a shout of joy when I saw that it
had not been trampled. We could not find the pistol, and it occurred to
me that it might be under the dead horse; we turned him over and there
it was, pressed hard into the ground but unbroken! We looked at one
another and laughed, and Red Crow sang the "I Don't Care" song--I did
not know it then--and the hunter said: "All is well! You have lost
horses, they are nothing. You are wet, your clothes will dry. You have
two fat buffaloes, be glad!"
And at that we laughed again. But I guess that my laugh had a little
shake in it; I kept seeing that terrible wall of frightened buffaloes
thundering out upon us!
The first thing that I did was to reload my gun and recovered pistol,
and draw the wet charge and reload it. Then Mink Woman and I turned to
our two buffaloes and Red Crow hurried home for horses to replace those
that we had lost. It was late afternoon when we got into camp with our
loads of meat. So ended another experience in my early life on the
plains.
During the following days of our encampment there on the Two Medicine,
the whole time was given over to the ceremonies of the o-kan, or
medicine lodge, as our company men came to call it, and I was surprised
to learn by it how intensely religious these people were, and how
sincerely they reverenced and honored their gods. My greatest surprise
came at the start, when I learned that it was women, not men, who had
vowed to build the great lodge to the sun, the men merely assisting
them. It was then, too, that I got my first insight into the important
position of women in the tribe; they were far from being the slaves and
drudges that I had been told they were.
During the year that had passed a number of women had vowed to the sun
to build this sacrifice to him if he would cure some loved relative of
his illness, or bring him safely home from the war trail, and those
whose prayers were granted now banded together, under the lead of the
most experienced one of their number, to fulfill their vows. The
different ceremonies were very intricate, and to me, with my slight
knowledge of the language, quite mysterious. But, Christian though I
was, I was completely carried away by them, and took part in some of
them as I was told to do by Lone Walker and his family.
On the day after the great lodge was put up, Red Crow's mother took him
and Mink Woman and me into it, and had one of the medicine women give
us each a small piece of the sacred dried buffalo tongues which were
being handed to all the people as they came in for them. I held mine,
watching what the others did with theirs, and then, when my turn came, I
held it up to the sky and made a little prayer to the sun for good
health, long life, and happiness, and having said that, I buried a part
of the meat in the ground, at the same time crying out: "Hai-yu!
Sak-wi-ah-ki, kim-o-ket!" (Oh, you! Earth Mother, pity me!)
After that was done the mother and Red Crow and his sister made
sacrifices to the sun, giving a beautifully embroidered robe, a bone
necklace, and a war bonnet, which a medicine man hung to the roof poles
while they prayed. But I was not forgotten; the good mother handed me a
pair of new, embroidered moccasins and told me to hand them to the
medicine man to hang up, and prayed for me while he did so. I could not
understand half of it, but enough to know that in her I had a true
friend, a second mother as it were.
On the following day I learned that I had a second father, too. The
warriors, gathered in front of the great lodge, were one by one counting
their coups, their deeds of bravery, with the aid of friends enacting
each scene of battle, and showing just how they had conquered the enemy.
It was all like a play; a very interesting play. As Red Crow and I stood
at the edge of the crowd looking on, Lone Walker saw us, raised his hand
for silence, and said loudly, so that all could hear: "There stand my
two sons, my red son and my white son. Come, son Red Crow, count coups
for yourself and your brother, too, as he cannot yet speak our language
well."
At that Red Crow took my hand and we walked out in front of the chief,
turned and faced the crowd, and then Red Crow described how we had
killed the big grizzly, I going to his rescue and giving it the death
shot just in time to save him. He ended, and the drummers stationed
beside the chiefs banged their drums, and the people shouted their
approval. Following that, Lone Walker again addressed the crowd: "By
that brave deed which you have heard, my white son has earned a name for
himself," he said. "It was a brave deed; by his quick rush in and timely
shot he saved my red son's life, and so he must have a brave and good
man's name. I give him the name of one who has recently gone from us in
his old age. Look at him, all of you, my son, Rising Wolf!"
And at that the people again shouted approval, and the drummers banged
their drums. Of course I did not know then all that he had said, but I
did know that I had been named Mah-kwi-i-po-ats (Wolf Rising, or, as the
whites prefer to translate it, Rising Wolf).
The preparations for building the o-kan required two days' time; the
attendant ceremonies four days more, four, the sacred number, the number
of the world directions, north, south, east, and west. On the morning
following the last day of the ceremonies we broke camp and, leaving the
great lodge and its wealth of sun offerings to the elements, moved south
again, or, rather, southwest, in order to regain the mountain trail.
Their religious duties fulfilled, the people were very happy, and I felt
as light-hearted as any of them, and eager to see more--see all of their
great country.
We crossed Badger River, and then Sik-o-kin-is-i-sak-ta, or
Black Barkbirch River, and encamped on a small stream named
O-saks-i-i-tuk-tai, Back Fat, or as our French _voyageurs_ later
translated it, Depouille Creek. From there our next camp was on
Kok-sis-tuk-wi-a-tuk-tai (Point-of-Rocks River). I never knew why the
whites named it Sun River. Nor did I dream that the day was to come when
I would see its broad bottoms fenced in and irrigated, and a fort built
upon it to house blue-coated American soldiers. If I then gave the
future any thought, it was that those great plains and mountains would
ever be the hunting-ground of the Blackfeet, and the unfailing source
of a great supply of furs for our company.
We camped on this stream well out from the mountains, and the next
morning, moving on, at noon arrived at its junction with a great river
which at first sight I knew must be the Missouri, the O-muk-at-ai of the
Blackfeet tribes. Below, not far away by the sound, I could hear the
dull roar of a waterfall. We turned downstream, crossed on a swift and
fairly deep ford above the falls, and went into camp. As soon as the
lodges were up and the women had cooked some meat for us, Red Crow and I
saddled fresh horses and struck out to see the country. We had come to
the trail of Lewis and Clark, and I was anxious to learn if they had had
any followers, if the American Fur Company's men had come into the
country, as my factor feared.
We rode to the fall, and after looking at it moved on down and came upon
an old and very dim trail along which lay here and there log cuttings
about eight feet long and a foot or more in diameter. They were well
worn; small pieces of rock and gravel were embedded in them, and I saw
at once that they had been used for rollers under boats in portaging
them around the falls. I realized how great a task that had been when
Red Crow guided me down to all the falls, the last a number of miles
below our camp. The Blackfoot name for the falls is I-pum-is-tuk-wi
(Rock-Wall-across-the-River.)
Sitting on the shore of the river below the last falls, at the point
where the portage had begun, I tried to get some information from Red
Crow as to the white men who had passed up there, but he could tell me
nothing. As we talked I was idly heaping a pile of sand before me, and
in doing so uncovered two long, rusty spikes.
"What a find! What a rich find! Give me one of them," Red Crow
exclaimed, and I handed him one.
"See! It is long. It will make two arrow points," he explained. And at
that I carefully pocketed mine. Material for arrowheads, iron, I mean,
was very valuable at that time, in that country. Our company was selling
arrow points of hoop iron at the rate of a beaver skin for six points.
Some of the Blackfeet hunters were still using flint points which they
made themselves.
And that reminds me of something. At the foot of the buffalo trap cliffs
on the Two Medicine I picked up one evening a number of flint and
obsidian arrow points, many of them perfectly and beautifully fashioned.
I took them to the lodge and offered them to Lone Walker, thinking that
I was doing him a good turn. But he started back from them as though
they had been a rattlesnake, and refused to even touch them. "Some of
those, especially the black ones, are surely Crow points, and so unlucky
to us," he explained. "This was Crow country. We took it from them.
Maybe our fathers killed the owners of those points. But the shadows of
the dead keep coming back to watch their property, and cause sickness,
trouble, to any who take it. I wish that you would take the points back
where you got them and leave them there."
I did so, but carefully cached them under a rock, and years later
recovered them. But that is not all. After returning to the lodge I
asked Lone Walker where the people obtained the black, as they called
it, ice rock for making their arrows, and he told me that away to the
south, near the head of Elk River, or in other words, the Yellowstone,
were springs of boiling water, some of them shooting high in the air
with tremendous roaring, and that near one of these springs was a whole
butte of the ice rock, and it was there that his people went to get
their supply. "But it is a dreadful place!" he concluded. "We approach
it with fear in our hearts, and make great sacrifices to the gods to
protect us. And as soon as we arrive at the ice rock butte we snatch up
what we need of it and hurry away."
He was telling me, of course, of the wonderful geysers of the
Yellowstone. I believe that I am the first white person who ever heard
of them.
But to continue: When Red Crow and I returned home that evening, I asked
Lone Walker if his people had seen the white men who had left the cut
logs in the trail around the falls, and he replied that neither the
Pi-kun-i, nor any other of the Blackfeet tribes had seen them, but he
himself had heard of them from the Earth House People--the Mandans--when
visiting them several summers back. They had been a large party,
traveling in boats, had wintered with the Mandans and gone westward,
even to the Everywheres-water of the west, and the next summer had come
back, this time on horses instead of in boats. If you have read Lewis
and Clark's "Journal," you will remember that they met and fought--on
what must have been Cutbank River--some people that they thought were
Blackfeet. They were not. They must have been a war party of Crows or
some other tribe going through the country.
I next asked Lone Walker if he had ever seen white men on the Missouri
River waters.
"Two. In the Mandan camp. Of a race the Mandans call Nothing White Men,"
he answered.
And from that time the Blackfoot name for the French has been
Kis-tap-ap-i-kwaks (Useless, or Nothing White Men), as distinguishing
them from the English, the Red Coats, and the Americans, Long Knives.
Lone Walker's answer pleased me; it was evident that the American Fur
Company had not entered the Blackfoot, or even the Mandan country, far
below. But even then that company was pushing, pushing its forts farther
and farther up the Missouri, and the day was coming, far off but coming,
when I would be one of its employees!
We camped there at the falls several days and hunted buffaloes, making
several big runs and killing all the meat that was wanted at that time.
Our lodges were pitched close to the river, right where the whites are
now building the town they have named Great Falls.
Our next move was out to the point of the little spur of the mountains
that is named Highwood. Its slopes were just alive with deer and elk,
especially elk, and Red Crow and I killed two of them, big fat bulls,
for a change of meat for our lodges. We did all the hunting for Lone
Walker's big family; they required an awful lot of meat; of fresh meat
about three pounds a day for each person, and each day there were also a
number of guests to be fed. At a rough guess I put the amount that we
used at three hundred pounds a day. Do you wonder that Red Crow and I,
and Mink Woman helping us, were kept pretty busy?
Leaving the Highwood we moved out to Arrow River (Ap-si-is-i-sak-ta),
and once more I felt that I was in country that white men had never
seen. The Arrow River valley is for most of its course a deep, walled
gash in the plains; there are long stretches of it where neither man nor
any animal, except the bighorn, can climb its red rock cliffs. But the
moment I first set eyes upon it, I liked it. I always did like cliffs,
their ledges, and caves hiding one can never tell what mysteries. There
were many bighorn along these cliffs, and mule deer were plentiful in
all the rough breaks of the valley. Out on the plains endless herds of
buffaloes and antelopes grazed, coming daily down steep and narrow,
deep-worn trails to drink at the river; and in the valley itself every
patch of timber fringing the stream sheltered white-tailed deer and elk.
There were many beavers, pond beavers and bank beavers, along the
stream. Bear tracks were everywhere to be seen, in the dusty game
trails, and in the river shore sands.
We wound down into the deep canyon by following a well-worn game trail
down a coulee several miles in length, and when we went into camp
between a fine cottonwood grove and the stream, and Lone Walker said
that we would remain there for some time, I was much pleased, for I
wanted to do a lot of hunting and exploring along the cliffs with Red
Crow.
We could not do it the next day, for we had to get meat for the two
lodges. That was not difficult. With Mink Woman to help us, and leading
six pack horses, we left very early in the morning and rode down the
valley for four or five miles, examining the many game trails that came
into the valley; there was one in every break, every coulee cutting the
rock wall formation. We at last struck a well-worn trail that came into
the valley through a gap in the cliff not twenty feet wide, and under a
projecting rock shelf about ten feet high. We saw that we could climb
onto the shelf, and shoot straight down at the game as it passed, so Red
Crow rode up the trail to look out on the plain and learn if it would
pay us to make our stand there. He was gone a long time, and when he
returned said that a very large herd of buffaloes was out beyond the
head of the coulee, and slowly grazing toward it; he thought that it
would be coming in to water before noon. We therefore hid our horses in
some timber below the mouth of the coulee, and then all three climbed
up on the rock shelf and sat down. I held my gun ready, laid a pistol on
either side of me, and Red Crow strung his bow and got out a handful of
arrows.
It was hot there on that shelf. The sun blazed down upon us, and we
could not have held out had not a light wind been blowing down the
coulee. It was past noon when a most peculiar noise came to us with the
wind; a deep, roaring noise like distant, but steady thunder. I asked
what caused it.
"It is the bulls; the buffalo bulls are grunting because now is their
mating season," Red Crow explained. "They now take wives. They are very
mad; they fight one another, and night and day keep up that grunting."
The noise became louder and louder. "They come. They are coming now to
drink," said Red Crow, and soon after that we saw the lead of the herd
coming around a bend in the coulee. A number of bulls came first, heads
down, and swaying as they walked with ponderous tread, and as they came
nearer I saw that they were making that peculiar noise with their mouths
closed, or all but closed. It was what I called a grunting bellow, very
deep sounding, long sustained, a sound wholly unlike any other sound in
the world. It was a sound that exactly fitted the animal that made it.
As the buffalo's appearance was ever that of a forbidding, melancholy
animal brooding over strange mysteries, so was its close-mouthed
bellowing expressive of great sadness, and unfathomable mystery; of
age-old mysteries that man can never penetrate. Often, as we gazed at
bulls standing on some high point, and as motionless as though of stone,
Indians have said to me: "They know! They know everything, they see
everything! Nothing has been hidden from them from the time Old Man made
the world and put them upon it!"
Perhaps so! Let us not be too sure that we are the only wise ones that
roam this earth!
Well, the herd came on, the bulls moaning and switching and cocking up
their short, tufted tails, and presently the coulee was full of the
animals as far as we could see. We had drawn back from the edge of the
shelf and sat motionless, only our heads in view, and so we remained
until the head of the long column had passed out into the bottom. I then
leaned forward, and Red Crow sprang to his feet, and we began shooting
down, choosing always animals with the broadest, most rounding hips, and
therefore the fattest meat. With my rifle, and one after the other my
pistols, I shot three good cows, and Red Crow shot four with his bow and
arrows. All seven of them fell close around the mouth of the coulee.
Those that had passed out into the bottom, unhurt, ran off down the
valley. The rest, back up the coulee, turned and went up on the plain,
in their hurry and scrambling raising such a cloud of dust that we
nearly strangled in it. We got down from the shelf and began butchering
our kills, taking only the best of the meat with the hides. We got into
the camp before sundown, our horses staggering under their heavy loads.
We had broiled tongue for our evening meal.
Yes, buffalo tongue, a whole one each of us, and some service berries,
were what the women set before us that evening. How is it that I
remember all those little details of the vanished years? I cannot
remember what happened last year, or the year before, yet all of that
long ago time is as plain to me as my hand before my face!
The next morning, with pieces of dry meat and back fat in our hands for
breakfast, Red Crow and I rode out of camp at daylight for a day on the
cliffs. On the previous day we had seen numbers of bighorn along them,
and, opposite the mouth of the coulee where we had killed the buffaloes,
had discovered what we thought was the entrance to a cave. We wanted to
see that. We had told Mink Woman that she could not go with us, but
after going down the valley for a mile or more found her close at our
heels. Nor would she go back: "I want to see that cave as much as you
do," she said. "I help you hunt, and butcher your kills; it is only
fair that you do something for me now and then."
It was a beautiful morning, clear, cool, windless. As we rode along we
saw deer and elk dodging out of our way, a beaver now and then and
coveys of sage hens and prairie grouse. While waiting for the buffaloes
to come in, the day before, we had looked out a way by which we thought
it would be possible to reach the cave, and now, leaving the horses a
half mile or more above our stand on the shelf, we began the ascent of
the cliffs. The cave was located at the back of a very long shelf about
two thirds of the way up the canyon side, and we believed that we could
reach its western end by climbing the series of small shelves and sleep
slopes under that part of it.
We climbed a fifty-foot slope of fallen boulders and came to the first
shelf, a couple of feet higher than our heads, and Red Crow told me to
use his back as a mount, and go up first. He leaned against the rock
wall, bending over. I handed my gun to Mink Woman and, stepping up on
his back and then on his shoulders, and steadying myself by keeping my
hands against the wall, straightened up; and as my head rose above the
level of the shelf I saw something that made me gasp.