Page:Rocky Mountain life.djvu/121

 with all those dear to me, and prayed the Good Spirit that I might again behold them ere my passage to the death-land.

"I fled, hoping, to reach the home of my birth;—but age had enfeebled me, and being pursued, I sought refuge in this cave. — Here, having passed a night and a day in earnest communion with the Big Medicine, —a strange feeling came upon me. I slumbered, in a dreamy state of consciousness, from then till now.

" 'But your looks again ask, who are the Shoshones?—what became of them? And from whence were the Scarred-arms?'

" 'The Lacotas will soon know the Shoshones, and bring from their I

lodges many scalps and medicine-dogs. Divided into two tribes, that nation long since sought home in other lands. One crossed the snowhills towards the sun-setting; —the Lacotas shall visit them, and avenge the blood and wrongs of ages. The other journeyed far away towards the sun of winter, and now live to the leftward of the places where the Hispanola builds his earth-lodge.23

" 'Then came the Scarred-arms from a far off country, a land of much snow and cold. Pleased with the thickly tenanted hunting grounds that here met them, they stopped for the chase, and, by a possession through successive generations, have learned to consider these grounds as their own. But they are not theirs.

" 'The Great Spirit gives them to the Lacotas, and they shall inhabit the land of their daughter's captivity.

"'Why wait ye here? Go and avenge the blood of your comrades upon the Scarred-arms. They even now light their camp-fire by the stream at the mountain's base. Fear not, —their scalps are yours! Then return ye to my people, that ye may come and receive your inheritance.

" 'Haste ye, that I may die. And, oh Warkantunga! inasmuch as thou hast answered the prayer of thine handmaid, and shown to me the faces of my people, take me from hence.'

"The awe-struck warriors withdrew. They found the enemy encamped at the foot of the mountain. They attacked him and were victorious; thirty-five scalps were the trophies of their success.

"On reaching their homes the strange adventure excited the astonishment of the whole nation. The Scarred-arms were attacked by our warriors, thus nerved with

23 It is a singular fact, that the Cumanches and Snakes, (Shoshones,) though living - nearly a thousand miles distant from each other, with hostile tribes intervening, speak precisely the same language, and call themselves by the same general name They have lost all tradition, however, of having formed one nation, in any previous age.

the hope of triumph, and were eventually driven from the country now possessed by the Locotas as their own.

"The grateful braves soon sought out the mountain, to do reverence to the medicine-woman who had told them so many good things. A niche in the mountain-side, from whence issued a sparkling streamlet, told their place of refuge; but the cave and the woman alike had disappeared.

'Each successive season do our warriors visit the Shoshones for scalps and medicine-dogs —and each of our braves, as he passes the Old Woman's