“Then they made known to the people how the boy was the only one to kill an enemy. They showed the Snake scalp and the head-chief was proud of his son. He tied that scalp to a long pole and told the boy to hold it aloft, and to shout as they rode triumphantly through the camp: ‘My name is Running Wolf; I am the youngest of the war party and the only one to kill an enemy. Behold! Here is the scalp.’ Thus it happened that my father got the name of Running Wolf. “When my father was head-chief of the tribe, he went by the name of Iron Shirt, because he was accustomed to wear a shirt which was decorated with shining pieces of metal. He was also head man of the band of Grease Melters. He was a large and muscular man, with fine mind and a wonderful memory. He knew all the legends and lore of his tribe. He could tell the age of a horse by its whinny and of a man by the sound of his voice. He kept ‘winter-counts’ by making pictures on buffalo robes. He recorded important events in the history of the tribe—places of tribal camps, battles and the names of war chiefs, years of smallpox, summers of drought and winters when snows were deep and food scarce. He kept count of the winter when many of our people died from the cough-sickness, the winter when the children broke through the ice, when some moose came into our camp, also the winter when we had to eat dogs to keep from starving, the time a herd of antelope broke through the ice, when we caught some antelope in the deep snow, when buffalo were scarce, and the time we made the first treaty with white men. “Sixty-one winters have passed since we had our first great sickness of smallpox (1836); forty-two, since we had the big camp on the Yellowstone River (1855), the time eight Indian tribes came together and our head-chiefs were Little Dog, Big Snake, and Lame Bull; twenty-seven winters since the coming of the North-West Mounted Police (1870), and twenty-one since the bad winter, when many of our horses were frozen to death (1876). “I was born in the spring, the year the first white men appeared in our country. And I was still a young boy when my father became the owner of his first Medicine Pipe. This happened in one of our tribal camps, which was being held in mid-summer. Wolf Child was the owner of a Pipe and chose my father as his successor. He told the medicine pipe men he wanted them to take my father. “Now it happened that my father was a ‘bear-man’—that is, his power came from the grizzly bear. He had a sacred bearskin inside his lodge, which he kept hanging from the lodge-poles, just over his couch. The word ‘bear’ must never be spoken in the presence of a Medicine Pipe; it has an evil influence. For this reason the medicine pipe men were always afraid to offer a Pipe to my father, with the sacred bearskin so near.