310 CALENDAR HISTORY OF THE KIOWA [eth.an-n.IT 



SUMMER 1801 



Toiguut Apdn'tsep-de K f'ulo, "Suu dauce when they left the spotted 

 horse tied." The picture shows the spotted or piuto horse tied to the 

 medicine lodge. 



This dance was held near a canyon, on the south bank of upper Wal- 

 nut creek, entering the Arkansas at the Great Bend in Kansas. The 

 event recorded throws another curious light on Indian belief. At the 

 sun dance no one but the taime priest must attenii>t any " medicine," 

 but on this occasion a man called Doguatal-edal, " Big-youug-man," 

 became "crazy" and committed sacrilegious acts, tearing off his feather 

 headdress and throwing it upon the faime image, and afterward, 

 when they were smoking to the sun, taking the pipe and throwing it 

 away. No reason is given for these strange actions, except that he 

 was temporarily crazy, as he had never acted strangely before, but the 

 Indians believe that, as his conscience troubled him after he came to his 

 senses, he gave this horse to the taime as an atone- 

 ment. At the close of the dance he tied a spotted 

 horse to one of the poles inside the medicine lodge 

 and left it there, where it probably died. Such a 

 thing as tying a horse to the medicine lodge had 

 never before been heard of, although a horse was 

 sometimes sacrificed to the sun by tying it to a tree 

 Fir,. 120-s.mm.er 1861- ^^.^^ ^^pQ,^ ^jjg jijjjg ^^j leaving it there to perish. 



The old war chief Gaapiatah twice sacrificed a 

 horse in this manner, once during the cholera of 1849, when he offered 

 a gray horse as a propitiatory sacrifice for himself, his parents, and 

 brothers and sisters ; also again, in the smallpox epidemic of 18C1-62 

 (see next year), he offered a fine black-eared horse, hobbling it and 

 tying it to a tree, with a prayer to the spirit of the disease to take his 

 horse and spare himself and his children and friends. On both occa- 

 sions his faith appears to have been rewarded, as none of his relatives 

 died. The horse offered on this last occasion was of the kind called 

 fd-Mfi, "black-eared," considered by the Kiowa to be the finest of all 

 horses. 



Dogdatal<§dal afterward led a small war party, seven in number, 

 including one woman, into Mexico. None of them ever returned, all 

 the warriors having been killed, probably by Ute warriors, among 

 whom the woman was found living by Big-bow and his companions 

 when they visited that tribe in 1894. It was on this occasion that the 

 Kiowa tribe gained the first intimation concerning the fate of the party. 

 The woman was then the wife of a Ute and the mother of three of his 

 children. Bigbow wanted her to return home with them, especially 

 as her sou by her Kiowa husband was still living, but her Fte husband 

 was unwilling to come, and she refused to leave him and her three 

 other children. 



