368 ON THE ETHNOGRAPHY AND PHILOLOGY OF THE 
scattered all over the dry and gravelly plains. Sometimes they are situated upon the high 
terraces along the rivers, but generally they are upon the high, arid plains, many miles 
from water. A good deal ofa fabulous character has been written in regard to the habits 
and habitations of this little animal. Some have even observed a council-house in the 
centre of the village, which is supposed to be laid out in regular streets, reserving a public 
square for meetings and discussions for the general good of the community. Others have 
imagined a particular large sleek dog to be the chief, and contend that they have seen 
him receive visits and apparently give directions to many of the citizens, who, after re- 
ceiving the same, departed to give others an opportunity to state their requests. With a 
zeal for knowledge, and a perseverance in labor, truly creditable in many respects, attempts 
have been made to dig to the bottom of their subterranean abodes, as well as to drown 
them out, but most of these experiments have resulted in failure. It does not occur to 
the laborious hunters that the dog can dig as well as they, and that if their holes are so 
constructed as not to be affected by the heavy rains that fall on the level places, where 
their villages are always situated, they would not be likely to be disturbed by a few pails 
of water. The truth is, the animal does not dig deep, seldom more than four or five feet, 
but penetrates the earth in a horizontal direction. It lays up no stock of provisions for 
the winter, but lives on the roots of grass, which it reaches by digging up toward the 
surface when the ground is covered with snow. ‘This explains their extensive burrowing 
in different directions, seeking support, and crossing each other’s routes in many places, 
leading persons to suppose their different chambers are thus connected for convenience, to 
associate and talk over their national and domestic affairs during the long winter evenings. 
The uncertainty of success in digging them out is thus seen, and a man might continue 
his excavations for miles without securing the inhabitant. ‘The dog must have food, and 
having but little hair upon his body cannot endure the cold on the surface, therefore he 
finds his food below it in winter, and in his subterranean travels comes across others of 
his village friends engaged in the same pursuit. In this manner they destroy in the 
course of time all the vegetation in their immediate vicinity, and are obliged to remove 
to some other locality, and abandon their holes to the owls and rattlesnakes. 
Crossing the Dakota country through the middle portion south and west of the Mis- 
souri, from the Niobrara to Grand River, the prairies, though occasionally twenty to fifty 
miles in breadth, cannot come under the head of level plains like the district on the 
opposite side. The distance is not great between the rivers on the west side. Although 
their junctions with the Missouri are widely separated, yet their sources all occur near 
each other, as they take their rise in and near the Black Hills. In travelling across this 
portion of the country in a transverse direction, a man on foot is seldom obliged to camp 
without wood or water, the heads of the valleys or ravines of one watercourse extending 
to within a distance from five to forty miles of the tributaries of another. 
