Three Years on the Plains: Observations of Indians, 1867-1870Tuttle, Edmund B. (Edmund Bostwick)
History
Three Years on the Plains: Observations of Indians, 1867-1870
Tuttle, Edmund B. (Edmund Bostwick)
Frontier and pioneer life -- West (U.S.); Indians of North America; Indians of North America -- Great Plains
which are here found in great abundance, even quarried out of a bluff
and carried off by the wagon-load. The guide had been there but once,
and somehow or other he could not locate it exactly, and we had a ride
out of six miles and back without finding the spot. Still, we picked up
a few on the way. As these are now so much the fashion for jewelry, I
will describe them. First, I should say that most suppose they contain
real moss, or fern-leaves, so distinct are they seen in a clear agate
to resemble them. Thus you see imitations of pine-trees, vines, a
deer's head, and sprigs of various kinds; but it is through iron
solutions penetrating them when in a soluble state. If you take a pen
and drop some ink into a tumbler of water, it will scatter and form for
the moment an appearance like a moss agate. These agates, when found on
bluffs or dry places, are coated over with a white covering of lime or
alkali. Those in the beds of rivers found along the line of the Pacific
Railroad, are smooth and transparent. They are called the "Cheyenne
brown agate," "Granger water agate," "Church Buttes light-blue agate,"
and the "Sweet-water agate."
There are great quantities of them near Church Butte and Granger
stations, nearly nine hundred miles west of Missouri River. You have to
poke among cobble-stones, etc. to find them, and when a person comes
upon a handsome specimen, he will shout, as did a minister from
Chicago, one day, with me, when he picked up a nice one as large as an
egg,--"Glory hallelujah!"
It is like searching for gold and silver,--very exciting, and far more
pleasurable than fishing or hunting. A friend here has about sixty
pounds of agates, for which he was offered by a lapidary in New York
five dollars a pound. A handsome stone for a ring or pin is worth, when
cut into shape, from three to five dollars. The lapidary cuts them with
a steel wheel, about eight inches in diameter, using oil and
diamond-dust in cutting and polishing.
A YOUNG BRAVE.
At Chug Station I met a frontiersman named Phillips, of long
experience, who told me in his new adobe house of an old chief who had
lost five sons, and when the first was slain he cut off a piece of his
thumb, next of his forefinger, and so on, till five told of his boys
killed. The last was a brave, and supposed no ball could hit him,
wearing, he supposed, "a charmed life." He came to the "Chug" and dared
them to shoot. As he and three or four more had killed a white man and
wounded others, the people all turned out, and Phillips shot the bold
young fellow, and wounded the rest of the party so that they died. The
body of the young Indian lay by the roadside for several weeks, till
the wolves and ravens had picked his bones, and I picked up his skull,
pierced through with several balls, to bring back and present to the
post-surgeon.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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