ABOUT the year 1820, among the Sioux, on Teton river, was a young chief whose reputation had extended throughout the West, and excited the envy and wonder, not only of the warriors of his own nation, but of every tribe, from the Chippeways, who paddle bark canoes on the western lakes, to the root-digging Shoshones at the base of the Rocky Mountains; and far and near the hearts of the young Indian girls were taken captive by the rude chivalry which added brilliancy to his invariable success. Like many other heroes, with his early history was mingled not a little of the fabulous and superhuman, and what was most singular, was, that there appeared to be some grounds for this belief, it being well known that he was not a Sioux by birth—a hunting-party of that tribe having found him, when a mere infant, lying in the open prairie, partially wrapped in a white buffalo-robe, a string of grisly-bear’s teeth around his neck, and an eagle-feather in his little clenched hand—all unmistakable evidences of exalted birth. The tradition did not stop here, for if the testimony of some was to be credited, a great war-eagle was perceived soaring away into the blue, from whose talons, beyond doubt, the child must have dropped. One thing was certain, the insignia of a chief about the young stranger admitted of no dispute, and accordingly as a chief and with no small care was he reared. But now that Ta-his-ka (“the white buffalo,” a name given him by the Sioux, from the robe in which he was found) had grown, young as he was, to be the most prominent warrior and successful hunter from the Pacific to the Mississippi, it appeared that his parentage was not so celestial as had been by some imagined, for the Pawnees formally demanded the chief as one of themselves; and to prove their priority of right, described minutely a scar on his hip, which, whether really what they claimed it to be, or a mark of which they had obtained secret information and craftily turned to account, was found to be as they had described. The only result of this extraordinary proposal was a storm of words in the Tepe-wah-kah (council-house) of the Sioux, directed against the audacity of the Pawnees, and an amount of hate cherished between the two tribes which filled some of the lodges with scalps and others with wailing as well on the Teton, as in the vicinity of the River Platte. Ta-his-ka himself both in the council and on the prairies was foremost in opposing the Pawnees, and the trophies torn from these last were neither few nor bloodless when the young chief headed a hunting party whose search was more frequently after the hunters of the buffaloes than the herds themselves. But the latter were not readily baffled, and bringing all their ingenuity into play to entrap his person, succeeded at last one day in decoying Ta-his-ka into a ravine, where his braves were every man slain, and he himself, while performing feats worthy of a copper-colored Achilles, stunned by an arrow and disarmed