This They
Used As A Slow Match, Carrying It Always Lighted.
Whenever they
wished to warm themselves, they would gather together a little
dry wormwood, apply the match, and in an instant produce a
cheering blaze.
Captain Bonneville gives a cheerless account of a village of
these Diggers, which he saw in crossing the plain below Powder
River. "They live," says he, "without any further protection from
the inclemency of the season, than a sort of break-weather, about
three feet high, composed of sage (or wormwood), and erected
around them in the shape of a half moon." Whenever he met with
them, however, they had always a large suite of half-starved
dogs: for these animals, in savage as well as in civilized life,
seem to be the concomitants of beggary.
These dogs, it must be allowed, were of more use than the beggary
curs of cities. The Indian children used them in hunting the
small game of the neighborhood, such as rabbits and prairie dogs;
in which mongrel kind of chase they acquitted themselves with
some credit.
Sometimes the Diggers aspire to nobler game, and succeed in
entrapping the antelope, the fleetest animal of the prairies. The
process by which this is effected is somewhat singular. When the
snow has disappeared, says Captain Bonneville, and the ground
become soft, the women go into the thickest fields of wormwood,
and pulling it up in great quantities, construct with it a hedge,
about three feet high, inclosing about a hundred acres.
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