Racially mixed people -- Fiction; Western stories; Wyoming -- Fiction
Singing Stream did not hasten in her quest for bright fabrics with
which to stay the hand of fate. To the half-breed woman the journey to
town was not without a certain revivifying pleasure. The Indian in her
stirred to the call of the open country. The tight roof to the cabin on
Elder Creek had not the attractions for her that it had for Sally
Tumlin. She had chafed sometimes at a house with four walls. But now
the dead and gone braves rose in her as she followed the old trail
where they had so often crept to battle against their old enemies, the
Crows, before the white man’s army had scattered them. And as she drove
through the foot-hill country, she told the solemn-eyed little Judith
the story of the Sioux, and what a great fighting people they had been
before Rodney’s people drove them from their land. Judith was holding a
doll dressed exactly like herself, in soft buckskin shirt, little
trousers, and moccasins, all beautifully beaded. In her turn she told
the story to the doll.
Singing Stream told her daughter of the making of the world, as the
Sioux believe the story of creation; of the “Four who Never
Die”—Sharper, or Bladder, Rabbit, Turtle, and Monster; likewise of the
coming of a mighty flood on which swam the Turtle and a water-fowl in
whose bill was the earth atom, from which presently the world began to
grow, Turtle supporting the bird on his great back, which was hard like
rock. The rest of the myth, that deals with the rising and setting of
the sun, Singing Stream could not tell her daughter, as the old Sioux
chiefs did not think it wise to let their women folk know too much
about matters of theology. Nor did they relate to squaws the sun myth,
with its account of much cutting-off of heads—thinking, perhaps, with
wisdom, that these good ladies saw enough of carnage in their every-day
life without introducing it into their catechism.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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