Seventy years ago, when some of the events here recounted took place, Indians were Indians, and the plains were the plains indeed. Those plains stretched out in limitless rolling swells of prairie until they met the blue sky that on every hand bent down to touch them. In spring brightly green, and spangled with wild flowers, by midsummer this prairie had grown sere and yellow. Clumps of dark green cottonwoods marked the courses of the infrequent streams—for most of the year the only note of colo

It is the first thing that I can recollect, and comes back to me now dimly—only as a dream. My mother used to tell me of it, and often to laugh at me. She said I was then about five or six years old. I must have been playing with other little boys near the lodge, and the first thing that I remember is seeing people running to and fro, men jumping on their horses, and women gathering up their children. I remember how the men called to each other, and that some were shouting the war cry; and then

Always as winter drew near, the camps came closer together, and the people began to make ready to start off on the hunt for buffalo. By this time food was scarce, and the people needed new robes; and now that the cold weather was at hand, the hair of the buffalo was long and shaggy, so that the robes would be soft and warm, to keep out the winter cold. I remember that before the tribe started there used to be a great ceremony, but I was too young to understand what it all meant, though with the

I must have been ten years old when my uncle first began to talk to me. Long before this, when he had made a bow and some arrows for me, he had told me that I must learn to hunt, so that in the time to come I would be able to kill food, and to support my mother and sisters. "We must all eat," he had said, "and the Creator has given us buffalo to support life. It is the part of a man to kill food for the lodge, and after it has been killed, the women bring in the meat, and prepare it to be eaten,

Once when I was a little older, I was out on the hills one day, watching the horses. They were feeding quietly, and I lay on a hill and went to sleep. Suddenly I was awakened by a terrible crash close to my head, and I knew that a gun had been fired close to me, and I thought that the enemy had attacked me and were killing me, and would drive off the horses. I was badly frightened. I sprang to my feet, and started to run to my horse, and in doing this I ran away from the camp, but before I reach

I had lived twelve winters when I did something which made my mother and all my relations glad; for which they all praised me, and which first caused my name to be called aloud through the camp. It was the fall of the year, and the leaves were dropping from the trees. Long ago the grass had grown yellow; and now sometimes when we awoke in the morning it was white with frost; little places in the river bottom, where water had stood in the springtime, and which were still wet, were frozen in the m

Soon after I had killed my big buffalo, my uncle had sent for me and when I had gone to his lodge, he said, "Come with me"; and we walked out on the prairie where his horses were feeding. He carried a rope in his hand, and, throwing it over the fast buffalo horse, that he had told me to ride when I first hunted buffalo, he put the rope in my hand, and said: "Son, I give you this horse; he is fast, and he is long-winded. You have seen that he can overtake buffalo. I tell you now that he is a good

It was late in the winter, when I was fifteen years old, that I made my first trip to war. We were camped on a large river, and not far from our camp was a village of the Arapahoes. One day I went to visit their camp, taking with me only my buffalo robe and my bow and arrows. At the camp I found a number of young men of my tribe, and I went into the lodge where they were sitting, and sat down near the door. Soon after I had entered a young man of my tribe proposed that our young men should gambl

That summer my uncle gave me a gun, and now I was beginning to feel that I was really a man, and I hunted constantly, and had good luck, killing deer and elk, and other game. One day the next year, with a friend, I was hunting a two days' journey from the camp. We had killed nothing until this day, when we got a deer, and toward evening stopped to cook and eat. The country was broken with many hills and ravines, and before we went down to the stream to build our fire I had looked from the top of

During the next two years I went to war five times, always as a servant, but always I had good luck. This was because early, after my first trip to war, I had asked an old man, one of my relations, to teach me how to make a sacrifice which should be pleasing to those spirits who rule the world. It was in the early summer, when the grass was high and green, not yet turning brown, that, with this old man, Tom Lodge, I went out into the hills to suffer and to pray, to ask for help in my life, and t

It was not long after this that buffalo were found, and we began to kill them, as we used to do in the old times; and then a great misfortune happened to me. One day I was chasing buffalo on a young horse, and as it ran down a steep hill, it stumbled among the stones, and fell down, rolling over, and I was thrown far; and, as I fell to the ground, my knee struck against a large stone. When I got up my leg was useless, and I could not walk, but I managed to catch my horse, and crawling on it I re

Soon after this something strange happened. I had a friend named Sun's Road. He was a little younger than I, perhaps eighteen or twenty years old, big enough to have a sweetheart, and there was a girl in the camp that he wished to please. He had been more than once to war and had done well, but he wanted to do still better. He was eager to do great things, to make the people talk about him and say that he was brave and always lucky. Like most other young men, he wished to become a great man. Our

The next summer I went with a party to war against the Mexicans. There were seventeen men, and two of them, Howling Wolf and Red Dog, had taken their wives with them. We took many horses, and were coming back, when, while we were passing through the mountains, two of the young men who had been sent ahead as scouts came hurrying back and told us that they had been seen by a camp of enemies, and that many of them were coming. We had a little time, and perhaps if the leaders of the party had been w