His worst wound he received from the Sioux. They shot an arrow clear through his body, so that the arrow continued on, dropping blood. But he lashed his horse forward, against them, and won another victory. Such honorable scars he kept covered with red paint, that all who saw might read. These stories, and others, as pictured by the robe, Mahtotohpa told to Artist Catlin, while Indian trader James Kipp translated the words, and Four Bears acted out the scenes; and they three sat upon the robe itself. The Cheyenne chief's knife he gave to Artist Catlin. He also made a copy of the pictures, on another robe, and the knife and the second robe were sent to the Catlin Indian gallery, at Washington, where they doubtless may be seen at this day. Mahtotohpa's end came to him as follows: In the summer of 1837, a great death attacked the Mandan towns. It was the small pox. The Sioux hedged the towns so closely that there was no escape into the prairie. The Mandan men, women and children, thus herded together, died by hundreds. Mahtotohpa was among the last left. He witnessed all his family and friends stretched cold and lifeless, and he decided to try a sacrifice to the anger of the Great Spirit. So he dragged his wives and children together and covered them decently with buffalo robes. Then he went out to a little hill, and laid himself down, with a vow not to eat or drink, if the Great Spirit would stay the plague. On the sixth day he was very weak; but he crept back to his lodge, and again laid himself down, in a robe, beside his family. And on the ninth day, he, too, died. However, the plague was not stayed for many days. Of the sixteen hundred Mandans in the two towns, only thirty-one remained alive; of all the Mandan nation there were scarce above one hundred; and today they number about one hundred and fifty. CHAPTER XVIII A SEARCH FOR THE BOOK OF HEAVEN (1832) THE LONG TRAIL OF THE PIERCED NOSES The Nez Perces or "Pierced Noses" really were not Pierced Noses any more than any other Indians; for the North American red men, the country over, wore ornaments in their noses when they chose to. But as the Pierced Noses this nation in the far Northwest was known. They were members of the Sha-hap-ti-an family of North Americans--a family not so large as the Algonquian, Siouan, Shoshonean and several other families, yet important. Their home was the valley and river country of western Idaho, and the near sections of Oregon and Washington. The two captains, Lewis and Clark, were well treated by them along the great Snake River, above the entrance to the greater Columbia. They were a small Indian; a horse Indian who lived on buffalo as well as fish, and scorned to eat dog like the Sioux; a brave fighting Indian; and withal a very honest, wise-minded Indian, whose boast, up to 1877, was that they had never shed the white man's blood.