The Old Santa Fe Trail: The Story Of A Great Highway Part II

Chapter 13 INDIAN CUSTOMS AND LEGENDS.
 
 
 
 Thirty-five miles before arriving at Bent's Fort, at which point
 the Old Trail crossed the Arkansas, the valley widens and the prairie
 falls toward the river in gentle undulations.  There for many years
 the three friendly tribes of plains Indians--Cheyennes, Arapahoes,
 and Kiowas--established their winter villages, in order to avail
 themselves of the supply of wood, to trade with the whites, and to
 feed their herds of ponies on the small limbs and bark of the
 cottonwood trees growing along the margin of the stream for four
 or five miles.  It was called Big Timbers, and was one of the most
 eligible places to camp on the whole route after leaving Council Grove.
 The grass, particularly on the south side of the river, was excellent;
 there was an endless supply of fuel, and cool water without stint.
 
 In the severe winters that sometimes were fruitful of blinding
 blizzards, sweeping from the north in an intensity of fury that
 was almost inconceivable, the buffalo too congregated there for
 shelter, and to browse on the twigs of the great trees.
 
 The once famous grove, though denuded of much of its timber, may
 still be seen from the car windows as the trains hurry mountainward.
 
 Garrard, in his _Taos Trail_, presents an interesting and amusing
 account of a visit to the Cheyenne village with old John Smith,
 in 1847, when the Santa Fe trade was at its height, and that with
 the various tribes of savages in its golden days.
 
           Toward the middle of the day, the village was in a great
           bustle.  Every squaw, child, and man had their faces
           blackened--a manifestation of joy.[44]
 
           Pell-mell they went--men, squaws, and dogs--into the icy
           river.  Some hastily jerked off their leggings, and held
           moccasins and dresses high out of the water.  Others, too
           impatient, dashed the stream from beneath their impetuous
           feet, scarce taking time to draw more closely the always
           worn robe.  Wondering what caused all this commotion, and
           looking over the river, whither the yelling, half-frantic
           savages were so speedily hurrying, we saw a band of Indians
           advancing toward us.  As the foremost braves reined their
           champing barbs on the river-bank, mingled whoops of triumph
           and delight and the repeated discharge of guns filled
           the air.  In the hands of three were slender willow wands,
           from the smaller points of which dangled as many scalps--
           the single tuft of hair on each pronouncing them Pawnees.[45]
 
           These were raised aloft, amid unrestrained bursts of joy
           from the thrice-happy, blood-thirsty throng.  Children ran
           to meet their fathers, sisters their brothers, girls their
           lovers, returning from the scene of victorious strife;
           decrepit matrons welcomed manly sons; and aged chiefs their
           boys and braves.  It was a scene of affection, and a proud
           day in the Cheyenne annals of prowess.  That small but
           gallant band were relieved of their shields and lances by
           tender-hearted squaws, and accompanied to their respective
           homes, to repose by the lodge-fire, consume choice meat,
           and to be the heroes of the family circle.
 
           The drum at night sent forth its monotony of hollow sound,
           and my Mexican Pedro and I, directed by the booming,
           entered a lodge, vacated for the purpose, full of young men
           and squaws, following one another in a continuous circle,
           keeping the left knee stiff and bending the right with a
           half-forward, half-backward step, as if they wanted to go on
           and could not, accompanying it, every time the right foot
           was raised, with an energetic, broken song, which, dying
           away, was again and again sounded--"hay-a, hay-a, hay-a,"
           they went, laying the emphasis on the first syllable.
           A drum, similar to, though larger than a tambourine, covered
           with parflêche,[46] was beaten upon with a stick, producing
           with the voices a sound not altogether disagreeable.
 
           Throughout the entire night and succeeding day the voices
           of the singers and heavy notes of the drum reached us,
           and at night again the same dull sound lulled me to sleep.
           Before daylight our lodge was filled with careless dancers,
           and the drum and voices, so unpleasing to our wearied ears,
           were giving us the full benefit of their compass.  Smith,
           whose policy it was not to be offended, bore the infliction
           as best be could, and I looked on much amused.  The lodge
           was so full that they stood without dancing, in a circle
           round the fire, and with a swaying motion of the body
           kept time to their music.
 
           During the day the young men, except the dancers, piled up
           dry logs in a level open space near, for a grand demonstration.
           At night, when it was fired, I folded my blanket over my
           shoulders, comme les sauvages, and went out.  The faces
           of many girls were brilliant with vermilion; others were
           blacked, their robes, leggings, and skin dresses glittering
           with beads and quill-work.  Rings and bracelets of shining
           brass encircled their taper arms and fingers, and shells
           dangled from their ears.  Indeed, all the finery collectable
           was piled on in barbarous profusion, though a few, in good
           taste through poverty, wore a single band and but few rings,
           with jetty hair parted in the middle, from the forehead
           to the neck, terminating in two handsome braids.
 
           The young men who can afford the expense trade for dollars
           and silver coin of less denomination--coin as a currency
           is not known among them--which they flatten thin, and fasten
           to a braid of buffalo hair, attached to the crown lock,
           which hangs behind, outside of the robe, and adds much to
           the handsome appearance of the wearer.
 
           The girls, numbering two hundred, fell into line together,
           and the men, of whom there were two hundred and fifty,
           joining, a circle was formed, which travelled around with
           the same shuffling step already described.  The drummers
           and other musicians--twenty or twenty-five of them--marched
           in a contrary direction to and from and around the fire,
           inside the large ring; for at the distance kept by the
           outsiders the area was one hundred and fifty feet in diameter.
           The Apollonian emulators chanted the great deeds performed
           by the Cheyenne warriors.  As they ended, the dying strain
           was caught up by the hundreds of the outside circle, who,
           in fast-swelling, loud tones, poured out the burden of
           their song.  At this juncture the march was quickened,
           the scalps of the slain were borne aloft and shaken with
           wild delight, and shrill war-notes, rising above the
           furious din, accelerated the pulsation and strung high
           the nerves.  Time-worn shields, careering in mad holders'
           hands, clashed; and keen lances, once reeking in Pawnee
           blood, clanged.  Braves seized one another with an iron
           grip, in the heat of excitement, or chimed more tenderly
           in the chant, enveloped in the same robe with some maiden
           as they approvingly stepped through one of their own
           original polkas.
 
           Thirty of the chiefs and principal men were ranged by the
           pile of blazing logs.  By their invitation, I sat down with
           them and smoked death and its concomitant train of evils to
           those audacious tribes who doubt the courage or supremacy
           of the brave, the great and powerful, Cheyenne nation.
 
 It is Indian etiquette that the first lodge a stranger enters on
 visiting a village is his home as long as he remains the guest of
 the tribe.  It is all the same whether he be invited or not.
 Upon going in, it is customary to place all your traps in the back
 part, which is the most honoured spot.  The proprietor always occupies
 that part of his home, but invariably gives it up to a guest.
 With the Cheyennes, the white man, when the tribe was at peace with
 him, was ever welcome, as in the early days of the border he generally
 had a supply of coffee, of which the savage is particularly fond--
 Mok-ta-bo-mah-pe, as they call it.  Their salutation to the stranger
 coming into the presence of the owner of a lodge is "Hook-ah-hay!
 Num-whit,"--"How do you do?  Stay with us."  Water is then handed by
 a squaw, as it is supposed a traveller is thirsty after riding;
 then meat, for he must be hungry, too.  A pipe is offered, and
 conversation follows.
 
 The lodge of the Cheyennes is formed of seventeen poles, about three
 inches thick at the end which rests on the ground, slender in shape,
 tapering symmetrically, and eighteen feet or more in length.  They are
 tied together at the small ends with buffalo-hide, then raised until
 the frame resembles a cone, over which buffalo-skins are placed,
 very skilfully fitted and made soft by having been dubbed by the
 women--that is, scraped to the requisite thinness, and made supple
 by rubbing with the brains of the animal that wore it.  They are
 sewed together with sinews of the buffalo, generally of the long
 and powerful muscle that holds up the ponderous head of the shaggy
 beast, a narrow strip running towards the bump.  In summer the
 lower edges of the skin are rolled up, and the wind blowing through,
 it is a cool, shady retreat.  In winter everything is closed, and I
 know of no more comfortable place than a well-made Indian lodge.
 The army tent known as the Sibley is modelled after it, and is the
 best winter shelter for troops in the field that can be made.
 Many times while the military post where I had been ordered was
 in process of building, I have chosen the Sibley tent in preference
 to any other domicile.
 
 When a village is to be moved, it is an interesting sight.  The young
 and unfledged boys drive up the herd of ponies, and then the squaws
 catch them.  The women, too, take down the lodges, and, tying the
 poles in two bundles, fasten them on each side of an animal, the
 long ends dragging on the ground.  Just behind the pony or mule,
 as the case may be, a basket is placed and held there by buffalo-hide
 thongs, and into these novel carriages the little children are put,
 besides such traps as are not easily packed on the animal's back.
 
 The women do all the work both in camp and when moving.  They are
 doomed to a hopeless bondage of slavery, the fate of their sex in
 every savage race; but they accept their condition stoically, and
 there is as much affection among them for their husbands and children
 as I have ever witnessed among the white race.  Here are two instances
 of their devotion, both of which came under my personal observation,
 and I could give hundreds of others.
 
 Late in the fall of 1858, I was one of a party on the trail of a band
 of Indians who had been committing some horrible murders in a
 mining-camp in the northern portion of Washington Territory.  On the
 fourth day out, just about dusk, we struck their moccasin tracks,
 which we followed all night, and surprised their camp in the gray
 light of the early morning.  In less than ten minutes the fight
 was over, and besides the killed we captured six prisoners.  Then as
 the rising sun commenced to gild the peaks of the lofty range on
 the west, having granted our captives half an hour to take leave
 of their families, the ankles of each were bound; they were made
 to kneel on the prairie, a squad of soldiers, with loaded rifles,
 were drawn up eight paces in front of them, and at the instant
 the signal--a white handkerchief--was dropped the savages tumbled
 over on the sod a heap of corpses.  The parting between the condemned
 men and their young wives and children, I shall never forget.
 It was the most perfect exhibition of marital and filial love that
 I have ever witnessed.  Such harsh measures may seem cruel and
 heartless in the light of to-day, but there was none other than
 martial law then in the wilderness of the Northern Pacific coast,
 and the execution was a stern necessity.
 
 The other instance was ten years later.  During the Indian campaign
 in the winter of 1868-69 I was riding with a party of officers and
 enlisted men, south of the Arkansas, about fourty miles from Fort Dodge.
 We were watching some cavalrymen unearth three or four dead warriors
 who had been killed by two scouts in a fierce unequal fight a few
 weeks before, and as we rode into a small ravine among the sand hills,
 we suddenly came upon a rudely constructed Cheyenne lodge.  Entering,
 we discovered on a rough platform, fashioned of green poles, a dead
 warrior in full war-dress; his shield of buffalo-hide, pipe ornamented
 with eagles' feathers, and medicine bag, were lying on the ground
 beside him.  At his head, on her knees, with hands clasped in the
 attitude of prayer, was a squaw frozen to death.  Which had first
 succumbed, the wounded chief, or the devoted wife in the awful cold
 of that winter prairie, will never be known, but it proved her love
 for the man who had perhaps beaten her a hundred times.  Such tender
 and sympathetic affection is characteristic of the sex everywhere,
 no less with the poor savage than in the dominant white race.
 
 To return to our description of the average Indian village: Each lodge
 at the grand encampment of Big Timbers in the era of traffic with
 the nomads of the great plains, owned its separate herd of ponies
 and mules.  In the exodus to some other favoured spot, two dozen or
 more of these individual herds travelled close to each other but
 never mixed, each drove devotedly following its bell-mare, as in
 a pack-train.  This useful animal is generally the most worthless
 and wicked beast in the entire outfit.
 
 The animals with the lodge-pole carriages go as they please,
 no special care being taken to guide them, but they too instinctively
 keep within sound of the leader.  I will again quote Garrard for
 an accurate description of the moving camp when he was with the
 Cheyennes in 1847:--
 
           The young squaws take much care of their dress and horse
           equipments; they dash furiously past on wild steeds,
           astrideof the high-pommelled saddles.  A fancifully
           coloured cover, worked with beads or porcupine quills,
           making a flashy, striking appearance, extended from withers
           to rump of the horse, while the riders evinced an admirable
           daring, worthy of Amazons.  Their dresses were made of
           buckskin, high at the neck, with short sleeves, or rather
           none at all, fitting loosely, and reaching obliquely to
           theknee, giving a Diana look to the costume; the edges
           scalloped, worked with beads, and fringed.  From the knee
           downward the limb was encased in a tightly fitting legging,
           terminating in a neat moccasin--both handsomely wrought
           with beads.  On the arms were bracelets of brass, which
           glittered and reflected in the radiant morning sun, adding
           much to their attractions. In their pierced ears, shells
           from the Pacific shore were pendent; and to complete the
           picture of savage taste and profusion, their fine
           complexions were eclipsed by a coat of flaming vermilion.
 
           Many of the largest dogs were packed with a small quantity
           of meat, or something not easily injured.  They looked
           queerly, trotting industriously under their burdens; and,
           judging from a small stock of canine physiological
           information, not a little of the wolf was in their
           composition.
 
           We crossed the river on our way to the new camp.  The alarm
           manifested by the children in the lodge-pole drays, as they
           dipped in the water, was amusing.  The little fellows,
           holding their breath, not daring to cry, looked imploringly
           at their inexorable mothers, and were encouraged by words
           of approbation from their stern fathers.
 
           After a ride of two hours we stopped, and the chiefs,
           fastening their horses, collected in circles to smoke their
           pipe and talk, letting their squaws unpack the animals,
           pitch the lodges, build the fires, and arrange the robes.
           When all was ready, these lords of creation dispersed to
           their several homes, to wait until their patient and
           enduring spouses prepared some food.  I was provoked, nay,
           angry, to see the lazy, overgrown men do nothing to help
           their wives; and when the young women pulled off their
           bracelets and finery to chop wood, the cup of my wrath was
           full to overflowing, and, in a fit of honest indignation,
           I pronounced them ungallant and savage in the true sense
           of the word.
 
 The treatment of Indian children, particularly boys, is something
 startling to the gentle sentiments of refined white mothers.
 The girls receive hardly any attention from their fathers.  Implicit
 obedience is the watchword of the lodge with them, and they are
 constantly taught to appreciate their inferiority of sex.  The daughter
 is a mere slave; unnoticed and neglected--a mere hewer of wood and
 drawer of water.  With a son, it is entirely different; the father
 from his birth dotes on him and manifests his affection in the most
 demonstrative manner.
 
 Garrard tells of two instances that came under his observation while
 staying at the chief's lodge, and at John Smith's, in the Cheyenne
 village, of the discipline to which the boys are subjected.
 
           In Vi-po-nah's lodge was his grandson, a boy six or seven
           months old.  Every morning his mother washed him in cold
           water, and set him out in the air to make him hardy;
           he would come in, perfectly nude, from his airing, about
           half-frozen.  How he would laugh and brighten up, as he felt
           the warmth of the fire!
 
           Smith's son Jack took a crying fit one cold night, much to
           the annoyance of four or five chiefs, who had come to our
           lodge to talk and smoke.  In vain did the mother shake and
           scold him with the severest Cheyenne words, until Smith,
           provoked beyond endurance, took the squalling youngster in
           his hands; he shu-ed and shouted and swore, but Jack had
           gone too far to be easily pacified.  He then sent for a
           bucket of water from the river and poured cupful after
           cupful on Jack, who stamped and screamed and bit in his
           tiny rage.  Notwithstanding, the icy stream slowly descended
           until the bucket was emptied, another was sent for, and
           again and again the cup was replenished and emptied on the
           blubbering youth.  At last, exhausted with exertion and
           completely cooled down, he received the remaining water
           in silence, and, with a few words of admonition, was
           delivered over to his mother, in whose arms he stifled his
           sobs, until his heartbreaking grief and cares were drowned
           in sleep.  What a devilish mixture Indian and American
           blood is!
 
 The Indians never chastise a boy, as they think his spirit would be
 broken and cowed down; instead of a warrior he would be a squaw
 --a harsh epithet indicative of cowardice--and they resort to any method
 but infliction of blows to subdue a refractory scion.
 
 Before most of the lodges is a tripod of three sticks, about seven
 feet in length and an inch in diameter, fastened at the top, and the
 lower ends brought out, so that it stands alone.  On this is hung
 the shield and a small square bag of parflêche, containing pipes,
 with an accompanying pendent roll of stems, carefully wrapped in
 blue or red cloth, and decorated with beads and porcupine quills.
 This collection is held in great veneration, for the pipe is their
 only religion.  Through its agency they invoke the Great Spirit;
 through it they render homage to the winds, to the earth, and to
 the sky.
 
 Every one has his peculiar notion on this subject; and, in passing
 the pipe, one must have it presented stem downward, another the
 reverse; some with the bowl resting on the ground; and as this is
 a matter of great solemnity, their several fancies are respected.
 Sometimes I required them to hand it to me, when smoking, in imitation
 of their custom; on this, a faint smile, half mingled with respect
 and pity for my folly in tampering with their sacred ceremony, would
 appear on their faces, and with a slow negative shake of the head,
 they would ejaculate, "I-sto-met-mah-son-ne-wah-hein"--"Pshaw!
 that's foolish; don't do so."
 
 Religion the Cheyennes have none, if, indeed, we except the respect
 paid to the pipe; nor do we see any sign or vestige of spiritual
 worship; except one remarkable thing--in offering the pipe, before
 every fresh filling, to the sky, the earth, and the winds, the motion
 made in so doing describes the form of a cross; and, in blowing the
 first four whiffs, the smoke is invariably sent in the same four
 directions.  It is undoubtedly void of meaning in reference to
 Christian worship, yet it is a superstition, founded on ancient
 tradition.  This tribe once lived near the head waters of the
 Mississippi; and, as the early Jesuit missionaries were energetic
 zealots, in the diffusion of their religious sentiments, probably to
 make their faith more acceptable to the Indians, the Roman Catholic
 rites were blended with the homage shown to the pipe, which custom
 of offering, in the form of a cross, is still retained by them;
 but as every custom is handed down by tradition merely, the true
 source has been forgotten.
 
 In every tribe in whose country I have been stationed, which comprises
 nearly all the continent excepting the extreme southwestern portion,
 his pipe is the Indian's constant companion through life.  It is his
 messenger of peace; he pledges his friends through its stem and its
 bowl, and when he is dead, it has a place in his solitary grave,
 with his war-club and arrows--companions on his journey to his
 long-fancied beautiful hunting-grounds.  The pipe of peace is a sacred
 thing; so held by all Indian nations, and kept in possession of chiefs,
 to be smoked only at times of peacemaking.  When the terms of treaty
 have been agreed upon, this sacred emblem, the stem of which is
 ornamented with eagle's quills, is brought forward, and the solemn
 pledge to keep the peace is passed through the sacred stem by each
 chief and warrior drawing the smoke once through it.  After the
 ceremony is over, the warriors of the two tribes unite in the dance,
 with the pipe of peace held in the left hand of the chief and in his
 other a rattle.
 
 Thousands of years ago, the primitive savage of the American continent
 carried masses of pipe-stone from the sacred quarry in Minnesota
 across the vast wilderness of plains, to trade with the people of
 the far Southwest, over the same route that long afterward became
 the Santa Fe Trail; therefore, it will be consistent with the character
 of this work to relate the history of the quarry from which all the
 tribes procured their material for fashioning their pipes, and the
 curious legends connected with it.  I have met with the red sandstone
 pipes on the remotest portions of the Pacific coast, and east, west,
 north and south, in every tribe that it has been my fortune to know.
 
 The word "Dakotah" means allied or confederated, and is the family
 name now comprising some thirty bands, numbering about thirty thousand
 Indians.  They are generally designated Sioux, but that title is
 seldom willingly acknowledged by them.  It was first given to them
 by the French, though its original interpretation is by no means clear.
 The accepted theory, because it is the most plausible, is that it is
 a corruption or rather an abbreviation of "Nadouessioux," a Chippewa
 word for enemies.
 
 Many of the Sioux are semi-civilized; some are "blanket-Indians,"
 so called, but there are no longer any murderous or predatory bands,
 and all save a few stragglers are on the reservations.  From 1812 to
 1876, more than half a century, they were the scourge of the West and
 the Northwest, but another outbreak is highly improbable.  They once
 occupied the vast region included between the Mississippi and the
 Rocky Mountains, and were always migratory in their methods of living.
 Over fifty years ago, when the whites first became acquainted with
 them, they were divided into nearly fifty bands of families, each with
 its separate chief, but all acknowledging a superior chief to whom
 they were subordinate.  They were at that time the happiest and most
 wealthy tribe on the continent, regarded from an Indian standpoint;
 but then the great plains were stocked with buffalo and wild horses,
 and that fact alone warrants the assertion of contentment and riches.
 No finer-looking tribe existed; they could then muster more than
 ten thousand warriors, every one of whom would measure six feet, and
 all their movements were graceful and elastic.
 
 According to their legends, they came from the Pacific and encountered
 the Algonquins about the head waters of the Mississippi, where they
 were held in check, a portion of them, however, pushing on through
 their enemies and securing a foothold on the shores of Lake Michigan.
 This bold band was called by the Chippewas Winnebagook (men-from-the-
 salt-water).  In their original habitat on the great northern plains
 was located the celebrated "red pipe-stone quarry," a relatively
 limited area, owned by all tribes, but occupied permanently by none;
 a purely neutral ground--so designated by the Great Spirit--where no
 war could possibly occur, and where mortal enemies might meet to
 procure the material for their pipes, but the hatchet was invariably
 buried during that time on the consecrated spot.
 
 The quarry has long since passed out of the control and jurisdiction
 of the Indians and is not included in any of their reservations,
 though near the Sisseton agency.  It is located on the summit of
 the high divide between the Missouri and St. Peter's rivers in
 Minnesota, at a point not far from where the ninety-seventh meridian
 of longitude (from Greenwich) intersects the forty-fifth parallel
 of latitude.  The divide was named by the French Coteau des Prairies,
 and the quarry is near its southern extremity.  Not a tree or bush
 could be seen from the majestic mound when I last was there, some
 twenty years ago--nothing but the apparently interminable plains,
 until they were lost in the deep blue of the horizon.
 
 The luxury of smoking appears to have been known to all the tribes
 on the continent in their primitive state, and they indulge in the
 habit to excess; any one familiar with their life can assert that
 the American savage smokes half of his time.  Where so much attention
 is given to a mere pleasure, it naturally follows that he would devote
 his leisure and ingenuity to the construction of his pipe.  The bowls
 of these were, from time immemorial, made of the peculiar red stone
 from the famous quarry referred to, which, until only a little over
 fifty years ago, was never visited by a white man, its sanctity
 forbidding any such sacrilege.
 
 That the spot should have been visited for untold centuries by all
 the Indian nations, who hid their weapons as they approached it,
 under fear of the vengeance of the Great Spirit, will not seem strange
 when the religion of the race is understood.  One of the principal
 features of the quarry is a perpendicular wall of granite about
 thirty feet high, facing the west, and nearly two miles long.  At the
 base of the wall there is a level prairie, running parallel to it,
 half a mile wide.  Under this strip of land, after digging through
 several slaty layers of rock, the red sandstone is found.  Old graves,
 fortifications, and excavations abound, all confirmatory of the
 traditions clustering around the weird place.
 
 Within a few rods of the base of the wall is a group of immense gneiss
 boulders, five in number, weighing probably many hundred tons each,
 and under these are two holes in which two imaginary old women reside
 --the guardian spirits of the quarry--who were always consulted before
 any pipe-stone could be dug up.  The veneration for this group of
 boulders was something wonderful; not a spear of grass was broken or
 bent by his feet within sixty or seventy paces from them, where the
 trembling Indian halted, and throwing gifts to them in humble
 supplication, solicited permission to dig and take away the red stone
 for his pipes.
 
 Near this spot, too, on a high mound, was the "Thunder's nest," where
 a very small bird sat upon her eggs during fair weather.  When the
 skies were rent with thunder at the approach of a storm, she was
 hatching her brood, which caused the terrible commotion in the heavens.
 The bird was eternal.  The "medicine men" claimed that they had often
 seen her, and she was about as large as a little finger.  Her mate
 was a serpent whose fiery tongue destroyed the young ones as soon as
 they were born, and the awful noise accompanying the act darted
 through the clouds.
 
 On the wall of rocks at the quarry are thousands of inscriptions and
 paintings, the totems and arms of various tribes who have visited
 there; but no idea can be formed of their antiquity.
 
 Of the various traditions of the many tribes, I here present a few.
 The Great Spirit at a remote period called all the Indian nations
 together at this place, and, standing on the brink of the precipice
 of red-stone rock, broke from its walls a piece and fashioned a pipe
 by simply turning it in his hands.  He then smoked over them to the
 north, the south, the east, and the west, and told them the stone
 was red, that it was their flesh, that they must use it for their
 pipes of peace, that it belonged to all alike, and that the war-club
 and scalping-knife must never be raised on its ground.  At the last
 whiff of his pipe his head went into a great cloud, and the whole
 surface of the ledge for miles was melted and glazed; two great ovens
 were opened beneath, and two women--the guardian spirits of the place--
 entered them in a blaze of fire, and they are heard there yet
 answering to the conjurations of the medicine men, who consult them
 when they visit the sacred place.
 
 The legend of the Knis-te-neu's tribe (Crees), a very small band in
 the British possessions, in relation to the quarry is this: In the
 time of a great freshet that occurred years ago and destroyed all the
 nations of the earth, every tribe of Indians assembled on the top
 of the Coteau des Prairies to get out of the way of the rushing and
 seething waters.  When they had arrived there from all parts of the
 world, the water continued to rise until it covered them completely,
 forming one solid mass of drowned Indians, and their flesh was
 converted by the Great Spirit into red pipe-stone; therefore, it was
 always considered neutral ground, belonging to all tribes alike, and
 all were to make their pipes out of it and smoke together.  While they
 were drowning together, a young woman, Kwaptan, a virgin, caught hold
 of the foot of a very large bird that was flying over at the time,
 and was carried to the top of a hill that was not far away and above
 the water.  There she had twins, their father being the war-eagle
 that had carried her off, and her children have since peopled the
 earth.  The pipe-stone, which is the flesh of their ancestors,
 is smoked by them as the symbol of peace, and the eagle quills
 decorate the heads of their warriors.
 
 Severed about seven or eight feet from the main wall of the quarry
 by some convulsion of nature ages ago, there is an immense column
 just equal in height to the wall, seven feet in diameter and
 beautifully polished on its top and sides.  It is called The Medicine,
 or Leaping Rock, and considerable nerve is required to jump on it from
 the main ledge and back again.  Many an Indian's heart, in the past,
 has sighed for the honour of the feat without daring to attempt it.
 A few, according to the records of the tribes, have tried it with
 success, and left their arrows standing up in its crevice; others
 have made the leap and reached its slippery surface only to slide off,
 and suffer instant death on the craggy rocks in the awful chasm below.
 Every young man of the many tribes was ambitious to perform the feat,
 and those who had successfully accomplished it were permitted to
 boast of it all their lives.