Page:Eleven years in the Rocky Mountains and a life on the frontier.djvu/644

Rh I am fooling with you, I would like to have you attend to this hide business, and see that we get $6 apiece for them.

—I see, my friends, the soldiers standing here about me. They are people whose business it is to die, but we think better things for them. We have given them the Black Hills; we wish they would go there and dig gold without being afraid of anybody.

Crow Creek Agency.—Around and about the hills on the prairies there are a great many dead people lying, but the Great Father has decided to give us a good price for the hills; therefore it is—because the Great Father is strong—that we are willing to give them up. We live right near a trading-post, and we become poor because we have not money to buy those things we want. I do not wish you to think that I am finding fault or out of temper. I merely say the things I am instructed to say. My people wish to have it understood that they do not wish to have any soldiers sent here or any soldier for an agent. I must tell everything that I am instructed to say; they are all here listening to see whether I say everything, and I must say all that I have been told. We would like to have Mr. Premeau appointed for interpreter. He is a white man, a man that understands the language, and does not drink whisky. My people think that the flour that is sent here for them is sent for them to eat, and they are not pleased that it is fed to the pigs about the agency; and they wish me to mention that we take a hide to the store, quite a large one, and receive an order for three dollars' worth of goods. For this large beef-hide we get one piece of leather the width of three fingers, for a belt; it is not worth more than fifty cents. That does not please us.

Last summer when I went to the council for the Black Hills, I had a pipe with me. I told them, in reference to the Black Hills, that we were bound by giving and receiving the pipe, the same as white people when they make an oath in court and swear upon the Bible, and if the party took the pipe that was offered to him in council and held it in his hand everything went well, and if he did not speak the truth always some evil would spring up in connection with it. Last summer the pipe was given in council, and what do you think of the matter now? Have the promises been kept, or has the violation of them caused war and bloodshed? I have for a long time known the ways of your people in dealing with us and taking away our country, and I know that they have