Ranching in the Bad Lands 23 



neighborhood, though a small party of harmless 

 Grosventres occasionally passes through; yet it is 

 but six years since the Sioux surprised and killed 

 five men in a log station just south of me, where the 

 Fort Keogh trail crosses the river; and two years 

 ago, when I went down on the prairies toward the 

 Black Hills, there was still danger from Indians. 

 That summer the buffalo hunters had killed a couple 

 of Crows, and while we were on the prairie a long- 

 range skirmish occurred near us between some 

 Cheyennes and a number of cowboys. In fact, we 

 ourselves were one day scared by what we thought 

 to be a party of Sioux; but on riding toward them 

 they proved to be half-breed Crees, who were more 

 afraid of us than we were of them. 



During the past century a good deal of senti- 

 mental nonsense has been talked about our taking the 

 Indians' land. Now, I do not mean to say for a mo- 

 ment that gross wrong has not been done the In- 

 dians, both by Government and individuals, again 

 and again. The Government makes promises im- 

 possible to perform, and then fails to do even what 

 it might toward their fulfilment; and where brutal 

 and reckless frontiersmen are brought into contact 

 with a set of treacherous, revengeful, and fiendishly 

 cruel savages a long series of outrages by both sides 

 is sure to follow. But as regards taking the land, 

 at least from the Western Indians, the simple truth 

 is that the latter never had any real ownership in 

 it at all. Where the game was plentiful, there they 

 hunted; they followed it when it moved away to 



