LET 'ER BUCK 



doubt that it belongs to the ceremonial or War Dance 

 of the Red Men, of the Umatillas. You are looking 

 out upon the descendants of the tribes that composed 

 the great dominating Shahaptian stock of Amerinds, 

 whose hunting grounds were the vast territory of the 

 Snake River and the middle Columbia, from the Bitter 

 Root Mountains to the Cascade range, and as danger- 

 ous a race as the whites ever encountered in their 

 march across the continent. 



Rainbow blankets, eagle- feathered war bonnets, with 

 their long streamers down their backs, necklaces of 

 bear's claws, embroidered moccasins, blankets and 

 shirts bedecked with elks' teeth, fantastically painted 

 faces and near-naked bodies streaked in broad bands of 

 ochre and black: squaws dressed in beautiful, beaded 

 buckskin jackets and skirts, ornamented with their 

 wealth of elk's teeth, with leggins of red and green 

 flannel and plain buckskin moccasins, still seem to ex- 

 press that stoical kinship with sun and earth, water 

 and sky, that their ancestors felt before the coming 

 of the Paleface. 



It all goes to form a multicolored, snake-like line as 

 it winds its course — a colossal, coiling serpent shim- 

 mering in iridescent scales of reds, greens, yellows, 

 blues, violets, blacks, orange and whites. Now subtly 

 twisting it resolves itself into a mammoth circle of ever- 

 changing harmony on its mat of yellow sawdust. 

 Here it metamorphoses into a great human kaleido- 

 scope, designs a new spectacle at every turn and out of 

 this living rainbow evolves the "War Dance" and the 

 "Love Dance" — the "Indian step and a half," as one 

 cow-puncher facetiously put in. 



"Haya! haya! haya! Hay-ya! — ya-a!" intones the 

 weird accompanying chant as hundreds of Amerinds 



176 



