56 



made them fear they would meet with retribution, and this I endeav- 

 ored to impress upon them. We were at the time almost in sight of 

 the place where these Indiana had plundered Sir George Gore in 1856,. 

 for endeavoring to proceed through their country, and one of them 

 was actually mounted on one of his best horses taken at that time. 

 Sir George Gore's party was only about half as numerous as mine; 

 but there were a number of my party which I had picked up at Fort 

 Laramie on whom we placed very little reliance. 



The grounds of their objections to our traversing this region were 

 very sensible, and of sufficient weight, I think, to have justified them 

 in their own minds in resisting ; and as these are still in force for the 

 prevention of the passage of any other party of whites not large 

 enough to resist successfully, they are of sufficient importance to be 

 repeated here. In the first place, they were encamped near large herds 

 of buffalo, whose hair not being sufficiently grown to make robes, the 

 Indians were^, it may be said, actually herding the animals. No one 

 was permitted to kill any in the large bands for fear of stampeding 

 the others, and only such were killed as straggled away from the 

 main herds. Thus the whole range of the buffalo was stopped so that 

 they could not proceed south, which was the point to which they were 

 travelling. The intention of the Indians was to retain the buffalo in 

 their neighborhood till their skins would answer for robes, then to 

 kill the animals by surrounding one band at a time and completely 

 destroying each member of it. In this way no alarm is communi- 

 cated to the neighboring bands, which often remain quiet almost in 

 sight of the scene of slaughter. 



For us to have continued on then would have been an act for which 

 certain death would have been inflicted on a like number of their own 

 tribe had they done it; for we might have deflected the whole range of 

 the bufialo fifty or one hundred miles to the west, and prevented the 

 Indians from laying in their winter stock of provisions and skins, on 

 which their comfort if not even their lives depended. Their feelings 

 towards us, under the circumstances, were not unlike what we should 

 feel towards a person who should insist upon setting fire to our barns. 

 The most violent of them were for immediate resistance, when I told 

 them of my intentions ; and those who were most friendly, and in 

 greatest fear of the power of the United States, begged that I would 

 ''take pity" on them and not proceed. I felt that, aside from its 

 being an unnecessary risk to subject my party and the interests of the 

 expedition to, it was almost cruelty to the Indians to drive them to 

 commit any desperate act which would call for chastisement from the 

 government. 



But this was not the only reason they urged against our proceed- 

 ing. They said that the treaty made with General Havney gave to 

 the whites the privilege of travelling on the Platte and along White 

 river, between Fort Pierre and Laramie, and to make roads there, 

 and to travel up and down the ]\l^g80uri in boats ; but that it guaran- 

 tied to them that no white people should travel elsewhere in their 

 country, and thus frighten away the buffalo by their care^less manner 

 of hunting them. And finally, that my party was there examining 

 the country to ascertain if it was of value to the whites, and to di&- 



