American Museum of Natural History -- Fiction; Indians of North America -- Fiction; Nature stories, American; Western stories
"And at that time we didn't know ourselves, not till long afterward. You
see, we thought we had got away from the Potawatami because our ponies
were fresh and theirs had been running buffaloes. Rut the truth was they
had followed us until they heard the noise of the shooting where Our
Folks attacked the Kitkahhahki. It was the first they knew of the attack
and they went to the help of their friends. Until they came Our Folks
had all the advantage. But the Potawatami shoot to kill. They carry
sticks on which to rest the guns, and their horses are trained to stand
still. Our men charged them as they came, but the Potawatami came
forward by tens to shoot, and loaded while other tens took their places
... and the Medicine of the Arrows had been broken. The men of the
Potawatami took the hearts of our slain to make strong Medicine for
their bullets and when the Cheyennes saw what they were doing they
ran away.
"But if we three had not broken the Medicine, the Potawatami would never
have been in that battle.
"Thus it is," said the Dog Soldier, putting his pipe in his belt and
gathering his robes about him, "that wars are lost and won, not only in
battle, but in the minds and the hearts of the people, and by the
keeping of those things that are sacred to the people, rather than by
seeking those things that are pleasing to one's self. Do you understand
this, my son?"
"I think so," said Oliver, remembering what he had heard at school. He
felt the hand of the Dog Chief on his shoulder, but when he looked up it
was only the Museum attendant come to tell him it was closing time.
THE END
APPENDIX
GLOSSARY OF INDIAN AND SPANISH NAMES
THE BEGINNING OF THE TRAIL
The appendix is that part of a book in which you find the really
important things, put there to keep them from interfering with the
story. Without an appendix you might not discover that all of the
important things in this book really _are_ true.
All the main traveled roads in the United States began as animal or
Indian trails. There is no map that shows these roads as they originally
were, but the changes are not so many as you might think. Railways have
tunneled under passes where the buffalo went over, hills have been cut
away and swamps filled in, but the general direction and in many places
the actual grades covered by the great continental highways remain
the same.
THE BUFFALO COUNTRY
_Licks_ are places where deer and buffaloes went to lick the salt they
needed out of the ground. They were once salt springs or lakes
long dried up.
_Wallows_ were mudholes where the buffaloes covered themselves with mud
as a protection from mosquitoes and flies. They would lie down and work
themselves into the muddy water up to their eyes. Crossing the Great
Plains, you can still see round green places that were wallows in the
days of the buffalo.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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