BUSHNELL] VILLAGES WEST OF THE MISSISSIPPI - 165 
way, and seeking the Pawnee, he wrote: “ About ten o’clock on the 
following day we found the great Pawnee trail, and, following it, 
came at mid-day to the place where they had camped the night 
before, and a most hideous spectacle did it present; the grass was 
all trodden into mud—hundreds of circular heaps of charred wood 
attested the number of fires that had been used; and the whole plain 
was strewed with split heads, bare skeletons, and scattered entrails 
of buffalo; while some hundreds of the half-starved Pawnee dogs 
who had lingered behind the village were endeavoring to dispute 
some morsels of the carcasses with the gaunt snarling wolves. who 
were stripping the scanty relics of skin and sinew which are left by 
Indian butchery attached to the bone.” (Op. cit., p. 438.) This 
vivid description of the appearance of an abandoned camp site quite 
agrees with a reference made by Dr. Grinnell a few years ago. 
Writing of events during the year 1853, and alluding to an 
abandoned camp of the Pawnee that year discovered by the 
Cheyenne, he said: “It was a big camp; and there were many fires. 
It seemed as if the Pawnees had been camped there killing buffalo 
for a long time. There were still many dogs in the camp. On one 
side was a well-beaten trail which led to another camp two hundred 
yards off where a number of people had been camped, not in lodges 
but in shelters made of willows bent over, after the fashion of a 
sweat-house.” (Grinnell, (2), p. 86.) 
These temporary and easily erected structures of the Pawnee were 
probably quite similar in form and appearance to that of the 
Cheyenne, part of which is shown in plate 14. But in the latter 
instance the cover is not formed of the primitive buffalo skin, but 
of canvas, or some other material obtained from, the trader. 
The Pawnee had a strange method of dealing with their sick or 
wounded during the movement of a village from place to place, 
and, so wrote Father De Smet, “if, in the long journeys which they 
undertake in search of game, any should be impeded, either by age 
or sickness, their children or relations make a small hut of dried 
grass to shelter them from the heat of the sun or from the weather, 
leaving as much provision as they are able to spare, and thus abandon 
them to their destiny . . . If, some days after, they are successful 
in the chase, they return as quickly as possible to render assistance 
and consolation. These practices are common to all the nomadic 
tribes of the mountains.” (De Smet, (2), pp. 356-357.) It is more 
than probable that similar grass shelters were constructed and used 
by small parties when away from the villages, but such structures 
would necessarily have been of only temporary use. 
In addition to the semicircular skin-covered lodge mentioned by 
Murray, the Pawnee evidently made use of the conical tipi. This 
was described by Dunbar when he wrote: “Their movable dwellings 
