Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/447

 the winter sun shone brightly, these martial scions would sometimes forget their dignity long enough to dismount and engage in a game of shinny with their gayly-attired sisters, who rarely failed to bring out all the muscle that was in them.

It would be impossible to give more than the vaguest shadow of the occurrences of that period without filling a volume. Indian life was not only before us and on all sides of us, but we had also insensibly and unconsciously become part of it. Our eyes looked upon their pantomimic dances—our ears were regaled with their songs, or listened to the myths and traditions handed down from the old men. "Spotted Tail" said that he could not remember the time when the Sioux did not have horses, but he had often heard his father say that in his youth they still had dogs to haul their "travois," as their kinsmen, the Assiniboines, to the north still do.

"Friday" said that when he was a very small child, the Arapahoes still employed big dogs to haul their property, and that old women and men marched in front laden with paunches filled with water, with which to sprinkle the parched tongues of the animals every couple of hundred yards.

"Fire Crow," a Cheyenne, here interposed, and said that the Cheyennes claimed to have been the first Northern Indians to use horses, and thereupon related the following story: "A young Cheyenne maiden wandered away from home, and could not be found. Her friends followed her trail, going south until they came to the shore of a large lake into which the foot-prints led. While the Indians were bewailing the supposed sad fate of their lost relative, she suddenly returned, bringing with her a fine young stallion, the first the Cheyennes had ever seen. She told her friends that she was married to a white man living near by, and that she would go back to obtain a mare, which she did. From this pair sprung all the animals which the Cheyennes, Sioux, and Arapahoes now have."