The Rickaree Chief,
Who Accompanied The Party For A Time, Was So Affected By The Sight
That He Cried Aloud During The Whole Proceeding.
When the reasons
for the punishment were explained to him, he acknowledged the justice
of the sentence, but said he would have punished the offender with death.
His people, he added, never whip even their children at any age whatever.
On the eighteenth of October, the party reached Cannonball River,
which rises in the Black Hills and empties in the Missouri
in Morton County, North Dakota. Its name is derived from the
perfectly round, smooth, black stones that line its bed and shores.
Here they saw great numbers of antelope and herds of buffalo,
and of elk. They killed six fallow deer; and next day they counted
fifty-two herds of buffalo and three herds of elk at one view;
they also observed deer, wolves, and pelicans in large numbers.
The ledges in the bluffs along the river often held nests of the calumet bird,
or golden eagle. These nests, which are apparently resorted to, year after
year, by the same pair of birds, are usually out of reach, except by means
of ropes by which the hunters are let down from the cliffs overhead.
The tail-feathers of the bird are twelve in number, about a foot long,
and are pure white except at the tip, which is jet-black. So highly prized
are these by the Indians that they have been known to exchange a good horse
for two feathers.
The party saw here a great many elk, deer, antelope, and buffalo,
and these last were dogged along their way by wolves who follow them to feed
upon those that die by accident, or are too weak to keep up with the herd.
Sometimes the wolves would pounce upon a calf, too young and feeble
to trot with the other buffalo; and although the mother made an effort
to save her calf, the creature was left to the hungry wolves, the herd
moving along without delay.
On the twenty-first of October, the explorers reached a creek
to which the Indians gave the name of Chisshetaw, now known as
Heart River, which, rising in Stark County, North Dakota, and running
circuitously through Morton County, empties into the Missouri opposite
the city of Bismarck. At this point the Northern Pacific Railway
now crosses the Missouri; and here, where is built the capital
of North Dakota, began, in those days, a series of Mandan villages,
with the people of which the explorers were to become tolerably
well acquainted; for it had been decided that the increasing
cold of the weather would compel them to winter in this region.
But they were as yet uncertain as to the exact locality at which they
would build their camp of winter. Here they met one of the grand
chiefs of the Mandans, who was on a hunting excursion with his braves.
This chief greeted with much ceremony the Rickaree chief who
accompanied the exploring party.
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