Two Of His Young Men Then Ran Up And Held Him Fast While
He Scalped Him Alive.
Then they built a great fire, and cutting the
tendons of their captive's wrists and feet, threw him in, and held
him down with long poles until he was burnt to death.
He garnished
his story with a great many descriptive particulars much too
revolting to mention. His features were remarkably mild and open,
without the fierceness of expression common among these Indians; and
as he detailed these devilish cruelties, he looked up into my face
with the same air of earnest simplicity which a little child would
wear in relating to its mother some anecdote of its youthful
experience.
Old Mene-Seela's lodge could offer another illustration of the
ferocity of Indian warfare. A bright-eyed, active little boy was
living there. He had belonged to a village of the Gros-Ventre
Blackfeet, a small but bloody and treacherous band, in close alliance
with the Arapahoes. About a year before, Kongra-Tonga and a party of
warriors had found about twenty lodges of these Indians upon the
plains a little to the eastward of our present camp; and surrounding
them in the night, they butchered men, women, and children without
mercy, preserving only this little boy alive. He was adopted into
the old man's family, and was now fast becoming identified with the
Ogallalla children, among whom he mingled on equal terms. There was
also a Crow warrior in the village, a man of gigantic stature and
most symmetrical proportions.
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