Delorier Looked Up From His Work With
A Laugh, And Began To Imitate This Curious Medley Of Sounds With A
Most Ludicrous Accuracy.
At this they were repeated with redoubled
emphasis, the musician being apparently indignant at the successful
efforts of a rival.
They all proceeded from the throat of one little
wolf, not larger than a spaniel, seated by himself at some distance.
He was of the species called the prairie wolf; a grim-visaged, but
harmless little brute, whose worst propensity is creeping among
horses and gnawing the ropes of raw hide by which they are picketed
around the camp. But other beasts roam the prairies, far more
formidable in aspect and in character. These are the large white and
gray wolves, whose deep howl we heard at intervals from far and near.
At last I fell into a doze, and, awakening from it, found Delorier
fast asleep. Scandalized by this breach of discipline, I was about
to stimulate his vigilance by stirring him with the stock of my
rifle; but compassion prevailing, I determined to let him sleep
awhile, and then to arouse him, and administer a suitable reproof for
such a forgetfulness of duty. Now and then I walked the rounds among
the silent horses, to see that all was right. The night was chill,
damp, and dark, the dank grass bending under the icy dewdrops. At
the distance of a rod or two the tents were invisible, and nothing
could be seen but the obscure figures of the horses, deeply
breathing, and restlessly starting as they slept, or still slowly
champing the grass. Far off, beyond the black outline of the
prairie, there was a ruddy light, gradually increasing, like the glow
of a conflagration; until at length the broad disk of the moon,
blood-red, and vastly magnified by the vapors, rose slowly upon the
darkness, flecked by one or two little clouds, and as the light
poured over the gloomy plain, a fierce and stern howl, close at hand,
seemed to greet it as an unwelcome intruder. There was something
impressive and awful in the place and the hour; for I and the beasts
were all that had consciousness for many a league around.
Some days elapsed, and brought us near the Platte. Two men on
horseback approached us one morning, and we watched them with the
curiosity and interest that, upon the solitude of the plains, such an
encounter always excites. They were evidently whites, from their
mode of riding, though, contrary to the usage of that region, neither
of them carried a rifle.
"Fools!" remarked Henry Chatillon, "to ride that way on the prairie;
Pawnee find them - then they catch it!"
Pawnee HAD found them, and they had come very near "catching it";
indeed, nothing saved them from trouble but the approach of our
party. Shaw and I knew one of them; a man named Turner, whom we had
seen at Westport. He and his companion belonged to an emigrant party
encamped a few miles in advance, and had returned to look for some
stray oxen, leaving their rifles, with characteristic rashness or
ignorance behind them. Their neglect had nearly cost them dear; for
just before we came up, half a dozen Indians approached, and seeing
them apparently defenseless, one of the rascals seized the bridle of
Turner's fine horse, and ordered him to dismount. Turner was wholly
unarmed; but the other jerked a little revolving pistol out of his
pocket, at which the Pawnee recoiled; and just then some of our men
appearing in the distance, the whole party whipped their rugged
little horses, and made off. In no way daunted, Turner foolishly
persisted in going forward.
Long after leaving him, and late this afternoon, in the midst of a
gloomy and barren prairie, we came suddenly upon the great Pawnee
trail, leading from their villages on the Platte to their war and
hunting grounds to the southward. Here every summer pass the motley
concourse; thousands of savages, men, women, and children, horses and
mules, laden with their weapons and implements, and an innumerable
multitude of unruly wolfish dogs, who have not acquired the civilized
accomplishment of barking, but howl like their wild cousins of the
prairie.
The permanent winter villages of the Pawnees stand on the lower
Platte, but throughout the summer the greater part of the inhabitants
are wandering over the plains, a treacherous cowardly banditti, who
by a thousand acts of pillage and murder have deserved summary
chastisement at the hands of government. Last year a Dakota warrior
performed a signal exploit at one of these villages. He approached
it alone in the middle of a dark night, and clambering up the outside
of one of the lodges which are in the form of a half-sphere, he
looked in at the round hole made at the top for the escape of smoke.
The dusky light from the smoldering embers showed him the forms of
the sleeping inmates; and dropping lightly through the opening, he
unsheathed his knife, and stirring the fire coolly selected his
victims. One by one he stabbed and scalped them, when a child
suddenly awoke and screamed. He rushed from the lodge, yelled a
Sioux war-cry, shouted his name in triumph and defiance, and in a
moment had darted out upon the dark prairie, leaving the whole
village behind him in a tumult, with the howling and baying of dogs,
the screams of women and the yells of the enraged warriors.
Our friend Kearsley, as we learned on rejoining him, signalized
himself by a less bloody achievement. He and his men were good
woodsmen, and well skilled in the use of the rifle, but found
themselves wholly out of their element on the prairie. None of them
had ever seen a buffalo and they had very vague conceptions of his
nature and appearance. On the day after they reached the Platte,
looking toward a distant swell, they beheld a multitude of little
black specks in motion upon its surface.
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