This level prairie was known as the Laramie plains, and even so far back as the day Oscar gazed upon it it was historic ground. Little mounds of stone, and the bleaching and crumbling bones of horses and cattle, marked the spot where more than one desperate battle had been fought between the hardy pioneers and their savage foes, and when Oscar, a few days later, was brought face to face with these mementoes, he wondered at his own temerity in so eagerly accepting a commission that took him to a country in which such scenes had been enacted. He knew that the Laramie plains were still debatable ground; that the outrages that had been perpetrated there might at almost any day be repeated. It was true that the country was now thickly settled,—at least the old pioneer thought so,—that comfortable ranches and dug-outs were scattered over the prairie, from fifteen to twenty miles apart, and that numerous droves of sheep and cattle cropped the grass which had once afforded pasturage for countless thousands of buffalo; but these evidences of the irresistible progress of civilization did not intimidate the Indian. They rather served to enrage him and to excite his cupidity. Isolated ranches could be easily plundered, and the flesh of sheep and cattle was fully as palatable as that of the buffalo, which had been driven away. Of course there was no trouble to be apprehended at that season of the year, it being too near winter for the Sioux to break out into open hostilities. A plains Indian does not like to move during the snowy season. Indeed it is almost impossible for him to do so, for the reason that his main dependence—his pony (without which, so old hunters say, the Indian is not a foe to be feared)—is utterly unfit for service. His food being deeply buried under the drifts, he is forced to content himself with the branches of the cottonwood, which the squaws cut for him to browse upon. He becomes reduced almost to a skeleton, and even staggers, as he walks about to find some sheltered nook into which he can retreat for protection from the keen winds which cut through the thickest clothing like a knife. His master, whom he has perhaps carried safely through a score of successful hunts and forays, pays not the slightest attention to him. Comfortably settled in his teepee, hugging a little fire over which a white man would freeze to death, the warrior sits with his buffalo-robe around him, passing the time in smoking and sleeping, but arousing himself at intervals to engage in a game of chance with some of his companions, or to send his squaw to the agency to draw the rations a generous government provides for all the “good” Indians. But when spring comes, and the snow melts away, and the tender grass begins to spring and grow luxuriantly beneath the genial influence of the sun, a great change takes place in the Indian and his pony.