r
mutinous conduct, was sentenced to receive seventy-five lashes on the
bare back. The sentence was carried out then and there. The Rickaree
chief, who accompanied the party for a time, was so affected by the
sight that he cried aloud during the whole proceeding. When the reasons
for the punishment were explained to him, he acknowledged the justice of
the sentence, but said he would have punished the offender with
death. His people, he added, never whip even their children at any age
whatever.

On the eighteenth of October, the party reached Cannonball River, which
rises in the Black Hills and empties in the Missouri in Morton County,
North Dakota. Its name is derived from the perfectly round, smooth,
black stones that line its bed and shores. Here they saw great numbers
of antelope and herds of buffalo, and of elk. They killed six fallow
deer; and next day they counted fifty-two herds of buffalo and three
herds of elk at one view; they also observed deer, wolves, and pelicans
in large numbers.

The ledges in the bluffs along the river often held nests of the calumet
bird, or golden eagle. These nests, which are apparently resorted to,
year after year, by the same pair of birds, are usually out of reach,
except by means of ropes by which the hunters are let down from the
cliffs overhead. The tail-feathers of the bird are twelve in number,
about a foot long, and are pure white except at the tip, which is
jet-black. So highly prized are these by the Indians that they have been
known to exchange a good horse for two feathers.

The party saw here a great many elk, deer, antelope, and buffalo, and
these last were dogged along their way by wolves who follow them to feed
upon those that die by accident, or are too weak to keep up with the
herd. Sometimes the wolves would pounce upon a calf, too young and
feeble to trot with the other buffalo; and although the mother made an
effort to save her calf, the creature was left to the hungry wolves, the
herd moving along without delay.

On the twenty-first of October, the explorers reached a creek to which
the Indians gave the name of Chisshetaw, now known as Heart River,
which, rising in Stark County, North Dakota, and running circuitously
through Morton County, empties into the Missouri opposite the city of
Bismarck. At this point the Northern Pacific Railway now crosses the
Missouri; and here, where is built the capital of North Dakota, began,
in those days, a series of Mandan