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.
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