When a chief wishes to collect his adherents
he sends a mounted messenger abroad, carrying
a small bag of tobacco and his pipe
adorned with wampum. If the summons be
to peaceful council the tobacco bag is blue and
green; if it be to war, the colours of the bag
are red and black. The warrior to whom the
pipe is brought and silently presented smokes
it a little if he will accept the invitation, and
returns it without smoking if the invitation be
declined. When two tribes are at war
together, private adventurers may collect
scalps in the enemy's country at discretion;
when they are at peace, and one warrior is
anxious to " raise hair," he cannot go into a
neighbour's country without asking his chief's
permission.

On the twenty-third of October the
travellers started northward on their second
prairie expedition. They expected buffalo
in seven or eight days, but again were
disappointed. Their journey commenced in
intense frost over a prairie lately burnt, on
which were buffalo bones and enormous
granite boulders, whose white masses were in
strong relief against the jet black ground.
The prairie is jet black immediately after a
fire, but, when the wind has blown over it a
little while it softens down into a stone colour.
In crossing this part of the prairie, when the
frost was at its sharpest, the travellers saw an
extensive mirage. The whole country seemed
to be one vast lake. They crossed St. Peter
River, and Potatoe River with its boggy sides,
saw wild, white prairie wolves, and slept in
the lodge of an Indian at Bigstone Lake. The
domestic circle in the lodge consisted of the
Indian himself, who was recovering from a
bullet wound in the back, his two squaws,
his two mothers-in-law and his own mother,
six or seven children, and a dozen puppies.
The whole group, in itself evil-scented, was
lighted and warmed up by a buffalo dung
fire.

The journey onward was still through an
open prairie, burnt as far as the eye could
reach. A burnt prairie has a diminishing
effect upon the landscape, so that it is impossible
to judge of distances upon it. An Indian
village on its march was fallen in with, the
men carrying nothing, the women and dogs
having enormous burdens. The buffalo robes,
full of puppies and children, were alive with
little red noses peeping out in a confused
mass. At night the travellers had lighted a
large fire, and were feasting upon pork and
flour, when they were joined by three Indians
on their way to a village northward, and one
of these was an old friend. Nevertheless,
though these warriors were shaking with cold,
and had eaten nothing during the last
hundred miles but half a skunk—an animal
unsavoury to the nose at any rate—they sat
down gravely a hundred yards from the fire,
and did not intrude upon the pork eaters
until they were invited to come to the fire and
fall to. They came in a leisurely and
dignified way, though famishing with cold and
hunger. "When they did begin upon the
meat, however," says Mr. Sullivan, "they
consumed more of our pork in five minutes
than we should have eaten in five days."

The journey still continued through snow and
over burnt prairie, and at length buffalo were
seen a great way off. In a village of Indians,
on the banks of the Shian, flakes of meat were
found drying on every pole; there the guides,
who had become sulky, left their friends to
encamp for the night, hungry, among thick
snow, laughed at by the little Indian
ragamuffins, while the said guides had transferred
themselves into warm quarters, and were
feasting on fat cow. Next morning the guides
were missing, and the travellers thrown for
the present on their own resources. They
got hold of an old chief, gave him sugar and
tobacco, and endeavoured to make him understand
that they desired to become his lodgers.
To make their meaning clear they shifted
their baggage to his residence, and took up
their abode with him at once. With this
chief—a good natured old fellow named
Wah-ton-she, The Good Man,—they dwelt
for six or seven days in peace. During all
this time it snowed hard, and the white men
kept a pot boiling, from which they could
supply coffee or tea to the villagers, of whom
there were never less than thirty looking at
them, curious but civil, stealing nothing.
Wah-ton-she, had quite an European affection
for his wife and children; one little boy of
about two years old he used to nurse and
cram with fat cow till he could hardly
breathe, and when his little pet was quite
distended he would get a lump of fat, grease him
well over the stomach, and then lay him before
the fire to settle gradually down into his
former shape.

The prairie Indians depend wholly for
subsistence on the chase of their one friend, the
buffalo. Out of the buffalo herds are
constructed lodges, beds, robes, moccassins,
leggings, saddles, powder flasks (from the horns),
bows (from the ribs), and arrow heads. Out
of them comes meat. When buffaloes are
scarce the Indian starves. From childhood
to old age, therefore, the great subject of his
conversation, when it is not scalps, is buffalo.
Some young men, while the travellers were
dwelling in this village, were sent out as
spies upon the movements of the herds, with
strict direction not to hunt, or to disturb
the animals in any way. One, however,
being tempted, killed a cow. The chiefs
heard of this in the evening, and at night the
police of the tribe went to the young man's
lodge, and slit it all to pieces, breaking his gun,
and tumbling him and his family out into the
cold, when the thermometer was below zero.
The slaughter of two bulls that came into the
camp, and the discovery that friends of their
tribe journeying to them had been waylaid and
scalped by the Blackfeet, with the consequent
martial excitement, were the other principal