Louisiana and Aaron Burr 371 



The prairie was dotted over with innumerable an- 

 telope. These have always been beasts of the open 

 country; but the elk, once so plentiful in the great 

 Eastern forests, and even now plentiful in parts of 

 the Rockies, then also abounded on the plains, 

 where there was not a tree of any kind, save the few 

 twisted and wind-beaten cottonwoods that here and 

 there, in sheltered places, fringed the banks of the 

 rivers. 



Lewis and Clark had seen the Mandan horsemen 

 surround the buffalo herds and kill the great clumsy 

 beasts with their arrows. Pike records with the ut- 

 most interest how he saw a band of Pawnees in 

 similar fashion slaughter a great gang of elk, and 

 he dwells with admiration on the training of the 

 horses, the wonderful horsemanship of the naked 

 warriors, and their skill in the use of bow and 

 spear. It was a wild hunting scene, such as be- 

 longed properly to times primeval. But indeed the 

 whole life of these wild red nomads, the plumed and 

 painted horse-Indians of the great plains, belonged 

 to time primeval. It was at once terrible and pic- 

 turesque, and yet mean in its squalor and laziness. 

 From the Blackfeet in the North to the Comanches 

 in the South they were all alike; grim lords of war 

 and the chase; warriors, hunters, gamblers, idlers; 

 fearless, ferocious, treacherous, inconceivably cruel ; 

 revengeful and fickle; foul and unclean in life and 

 thought ; disdaining work, but capable at times of un- 

 dergoing unheard-of toil and hardship, and of brav- 

 ing every danger; doomed to live with ever before 



