Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/310

 to one side, upon entering the village, all the heavy or cumbrous wraps with which we could dispense. The disagreeable consequence was that many men had feet and fingers, ears and noses frozen, among them being Lieutenant Hall and myself. Hall had had much previous experience in the polar climate of these northwestern mountains, and showed me how to treat myself to prevent permanent disability.

He found an air-hole in the ice, into which we thrust feet and hands, after which we rubbed them with an old piece of gunny-sack, the roughest thing we could find, to restore circulation. Steward Bryan, who seemed to be full of resources and forethought, had carried along with him a bottle of tincture of iodine for just such emergencies; this he applied liberally to our feet and to all the other frozen limbs, and thus averted several cases of amputation. While Steward Bryan was engaged in his work of mercy, attending to the wounded and the frozen, Mills's and Egan's detachments were busy setting fire to the lodges, of elk and buffalo hide and canvas, which numbered over one hundred.

For the information of readers who may never have seen such lodges or "tepis," as they are called in the language of the frontier, I will say that they are large tents, supported upon a conical frame-work of fir or ash poles about twenty feet long, spread out at the bottom so as to give an interior space with a diameter of from eighteen to twenty-five feet. This is the average size, but in each large village, like the present one, was to be found one or more very commodious lodges intended for the use of the "council" or for the ceremonies of the "medicine" bands; there were likewise smaller ones appropriated to the use of the sick or of women living in seclusion. In the present case, the lodges would not burn, or, to speak more explicitly, they exploded as soon as the flames and heat had a chance to act upon the great quantities of powder in kegs and canisters with which they were all supplied. When these loose kegs exploded the lodge-poles, as thick as a man's wrist and not less than eighteen feet long, would go sailing like sky-rockets up into the air and descend to smash all obstacles in their way. It was a great wonder to me that some of our party did not receive serious injuries from this cause.

In one of the lodges was found a wounded squaw, who stated that she had been struck in the thigh in the very beginning of