hing white
man. It was easy at that time for the Indians to secure rifles. The
Canadian-French traders to the north were only too glad to trade them
these weapons for the splendid supplies of furs which the Indians had
gathered. Many of these rifles were of excellent construction, and on a
number of occasions we discovered to our cost that they outranged the
army carbines with which we were equipped.

After the Custer massacre the frontier became decidedly unsafe for
Sitting Bull and the chiefs who were associated with him, and he
quietly withdrew to Canada, where he was for the time being safe from
pursuit.

There he stayed till his followers began leaving him and returning to
their reservations in the United States. Soon he had only a remnant of
his followers and his immediate family to keep him company. Warily he
began negotiating for immunity, and when he was fully assured that if
he would use his influence to quiet his people and keep them from the
warpath his life would be spared, he consented to return.

He had been lonely and unhappy in Canada. An accomplished orator and a
man with a gift of leadership, he had pined for audiences to sway and
for men to do his bidding. He felt sure that these would be restored to
him once he came back among his people. As to his pledges, I have no
doubt that he fully intended to live up to them. He carried in his
head all the treaties that had been made between his people and the
white men, and could recite their minutest details, together with the
dates of their making and the names of the men who had signed for both
sides.

But he was a stickler for the rights of his race, and he devoted far
more thought to the trend of events than did most of his red brothers.

Here was his case, as he often presented it to me:

"The White Man has taken most of our land. He has paid us nothing for
it. He has destroyed or driven away the game that was our meat. In 1868
he arranged to build through the Indians' land a road on which ran iron
horses that ate wood and breathed fire and smoke. We agreed. This road
was only as wide as a man could stretch his arms. But the White Man had
taken from the Indians the land for twenty miles on both sides of it.
This land he had sold for money to people in the East. It was taken
from the Indians. But the Indians got nothing for it.

"The iron horse brought from the East men and women and children, who
took the land from the Indians and drove out the