of the United States is made up of
range after range of wonderful peaks and ridges, and men have peered in
among them here and there, but for all the peering and searching nothing
of the wonder to speak of has been rubbed away.

Right in the eastern, edge of one of these mountain ridges, one warm
September morning, not long ago, a band of Nez Perce Indians were
encamped. It was in what is commonly called "the Far West," because
always when you get there the West is as far away as ever. The camp was
in a sort of nook, and it was not easy to say whether a spur of the
mountain jutted out into the plain, or whether a spur of the plain made
a dent in the ragged line of the mountains. More than a dozen "lodges,"
made of skins upheld by poles, were scattered around on the smoother
spots, not far from a bubbling spring of water. There were some trees
and bushes and patches of grass near the spring, but the little brook
which trickled away from it did not travel a great way into the world,
from the place where it was born, before it was soaked up and
disappeared among the sand and gravel. Up and beyond the spring, the
farther one chose to look, the rockier and the ruggeder everything
seemed to be.

Take it all together, it was a forlorn looking, hot, dried-up, and
uncomfortable sort of place. The very lodges themselves, and the human
beings around them, made it appear pitifully desolate. The spring was
the only visible thing that seemed to be alive and cheerful and at work.

There were Indians and squaws to be seen, a number of them, and boys and
girls of all sizes, and some of the squaws carried pappooses, but they
all looked as if they had given up entirely and did not expect to live
any longer. Even some of the largest men had an air of not caring much,
really, whether they lived or not; but that was the only regular and
dignified way for a Nez Perce or any other Indian warrior to take a
thing he can't help or is too lazy to fight with. The women showed more
signs of life than the men, for some of them were moving about among the
children, and one poor, old, withered, ragged squaw sat in the door of
her lodge, with her gray hair all down over her face, rocking backward
and forward, and singing a sort of droning chant.

There was not one quadruped of any kind to be seen in or about that
camp. Behind this fact was the secret of the whole matter. Those Indians
were starving! Days and days before that they had been away out up