In less than ten minutes the fight was over, and besides the killed we
captured six prisoners. Then as the rising sun commenced to gild the
peaks of the lofty range on the west, having granted our captives half
an hour to take leave of their families, the ankles of each were bound;
they were made to kneel on the prairie, a squad of soldiers, with loaded
rifles, were drawn up eight paces in front of them, and at the instant
the signal--a white handkerchief--was dropped the savages tumbled over
on the sod a heap of corpses. The parting between the condemned men and
their young wives and children, I shall never forget. It was the
most perfect exhibition of marital and filial love that I have ever
witnessed. Such harsh measures may seem cruel and heartless in the
light of to-day, but there was none other than martial law then in the
wilderness of the Northern Pacific coast, and the execution was a stern
necessity.

The other instance was ten years later. During the Indian campaign in
the winter of 1868-69 I was riding with a party of officers and enlisted
men, south of the Arkansas, about fourty miles from Fort Dodge. We were
watching some cavalrymen unearth three or four dead warriors who had
been killed by two scouts in a fierce unequal fight a few weeks before,
and as we rode into a small ravine among the sand hills, we suddenly
came upon a rudely constructed Cheyenne lodge. Entering, we discovered
on a rough platform, fashioned of green poles, a dead warrior in full
war-dress; his shield of buffalo-hide, pipe ornamented with eagles'
feathers, and medicine bag, were lying on the ground beside him. At his
head, on her knees, with hands clasped in the attitude of prayer, was a
squaw frozen to death. Which had first succumbed, the wounded chief, or
the devoted wife in the awful cold of that winter prairie, will never be
known, but it proved her love for the man who had perhaps beaten her a
hundred times. Such tender and sympathetic affection is characteristic
of the sex everywhere, no less with the poor savage than in the dominant
white race.

To return to our description of the average Indian village: Each lodge
at the grand encampment of Big Timbers in the era of traffic with the
nomads of the great plains, owned its separate herd of ponies and mules.
In the exodus to some other favoured spot, two dozen or more of these
individual herds travelled close to each other but never mixed, each
drove devotedly following its be