It had begun when we arrived on the scene, in fact, it had been going on for two days. Crowds of women, some dressed in long plaid shawls and high moccasins, others in starched muslins and straw hats; bright-eyed papooses slung on their mother’s backs in beautiful white doeskin cradles; majestic chiefs six feet tall and more in high pointed Stetsons, with long robes of cotton sheeting, giddily dyed, wrapped about them, circled about the dancers, who were partly screened from spectators by the green branches seen in so many Indian dances. These Shoshones are the Indians on the penny. Grave, surly giants with copper skin, coarse jet hair and high cheek bones, powerful, with a hint of ugliness, they were another race from the laughing brown tribes of the south. They frowned upon our camera, and finally forbade us, in no uncertain manner, to use it. Even the insouciant Toby paled and hastily stuffed her camera in her coat as a big chief made a threatening lunge at it. That is why all our photographs of the Shoshones are taken from the rear. [Illustration: SHOSHONES AT SUN DANCE, FORT HALL, IDAHO. All our photographs of the Shoshones are taken from the rear.] Old women trotted to and fro constantly with bunches of sweet grass and herbs, which they laid on the ground beside the resting dancers, who used them to dry and refresh their exhausted bodies. A group of old men in the corner beat the tom-tom, squatting to their task like gnomes. The dancers, naked to the waist, wore a short apron-like garment of calico or blanket below. Their bodies, old and young, were lithe and stringy,--hardly a fat man among them. They showed much exhaustion,--as much perhaps on this second day of the dance as white men not in training would after half an hour of similar exercise. Many of them were past middle age. One was white-haired and wrinkled, but with magnificent muscles on his bare chest and arms. They alternately rested and danced in groups, so that the dancing was continuous. Running at a jog trot to a great tree in the center, decorated with elk horns and a green branch, they touched this tree with reverent obeisances and a wild upward movement of body and head, then carried their hand from it, as if transferring its vitality to their knees, their breasts and their heads. For the three days and nights the dance was to last, they would neither eat nor drink. “What does it mean?” I asked a very modern lady, dressed in flowered organdy. She smiled a superior smile, evidently holding no longer with the gods of her ancestors. “It’s a dance they think will make well sick people. I do not know,--some foolishness, I guess.”