HUNTING AND DANCING. 285 
down the game; the squaws not only have it 
to cure and pack, but to skin an ss. 
Except such tribes as are expert with the 
rifle, very few of the prairie Indians hunt 
other game than the buffalo: not, as some 
have presumed, because they deem all small 
game too ignoble for them, but because the 
former is at once easiest taken, and affords the 
most bounteous supply of food. The antelope 
is too wild and fleet for their mode of hunt- 
ing, and is only occasionally taken by strata- 
gem; while the deer, as difficult to take in 
the chase, is less easily entrapped. But, 
mounted upon their trained steeds, and with 
the arrow or lance, they are not to be excelled 
in the chase. A few of them, let loose among 
a herd of buffalo, will soon have the plain 
strewed with their carcasses. 
Among the amusements of the Indians 
generally, dancing is perhaps the most favor- 
ite. Besides a war accompaniment, it is prac- 
tised as a recreation, and often connected 
with their worship. Their social frolics, in 
which the squaws are commonly permitted 
to join, are conducted with less ferocity of 
manner than their war dances; though even 
these are accompanied with the wildest and 
most comical gesticulations, and songs full at 
once of mirth and obscenity. In these, as 
well as in the war and scalp dances, a sort of 
littie drum and a shrill squeaking pipe are 
their common instruments of music. 
As so many tongues, entirely different, are 
spoken by the prairie Indians, a ‘language of 
