600 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[Oct. 14, 1911. 
WHEN ANTELOPE WERE PLENTIFUL. 
Continued from page 583. 
with the pipe bowl, he went around to the back 
of the pit and placed his pipe on the ground 
there. The bowl was toward the pit, and the 
stem was leaning against a support, so that it 
pointed diagonally upward. 
“When he had placed the pipe on the ground, 
two young men who had already been told what 
to do, started out toward the prairie, one on the 
right and one on the left, following out the wings 
so as to come in behind the antelope, and all the 
people hid themselves in the trenches that were 
dug outside the high walls. 
“Now, after this, Red Lodge walked about in 
the pen and outside of it, holding in his hand 
a feather which he waved in the air, and as he 
walked and as he waved the feather, he was 
singing his sacred song. 
“After a little while the young men who had 
been sent out discovered antelope coming, and 
when they saw them they gave a loud, high- 
pitched call, which can be heard a long way. 
This was the signal to the people that the ante¬ 
lope were coming. And when the people heard 
it, everyone was glad. After the antelope had 
passed these young men they turned in and ran 
along behind them, keeping up this calling until 
the antelope were close to the pen, and had come 
between the wings. After the young men them¬ 
selves got within the wings, they began to call 
differently, and imitate the hooting of an owl. 
“As soon as the antelope have come to the 
opening of the pen, all the people who have been 
hidden in the trenches rush to the open side of 
the pen and close the opening by crowding into 
it. They run toward the antelope, and these are 
so scared and are going so fast that they cannot 
stop themselves, and they rush on and fall into 
the pit. Men and women alike then grasp the 
clubs, jump down into the pit and knock the 
antelope on the head. After all are dead the 
people climb out of the pit again. 
“Now, Red Lodge goes around behind the pit 
and takes his pipe and fills it, and after he has 
filled it, he sprinkles on top of the tobacco a 
little powdered buffalo dung. Then he goes 
away thirty or forty steps from the semi-circular 
side of the pit, strikes his fire and lights his 
pipe. He looks about on the ground until he 
finds a small flat stone. This he picks up and 
takes with him. He goes around the pen, and 
entering the opening, goes close to the edge of 
the pit, places this little flat stone on the ground, 
sits down, and, resting the bowl of his pipe on 
the stone, he smokes there alone. No one 
smokes with him. 
“As he smokes he points the stem of his pipe 
at the antelope, trying to point at each one, and 
to give to each one a smoke. Then he smokes 
to the little flat stone. Theq, he gives four 
smokes to the direction from which the antelope 
came. After he has done all this then 
he smokes his pipe out. When he is about to 
begin to clean the pipe, he first points it in the 
direction from which the antelope came. Then 
he knocks out some of the ashes on the flat stone 
and again points the pipe toward where the 
antelope came from. He knocks out more ashes 
and points again, and so until he has pointed 
four times and knocked out all the ashes on the 
rock. Now he takes the stone holding the ashes 
on it and goes down through and across the pit 
to the other side, where he climbs out, holding 
the stone carefully, and going slowly, so as not 
to spill the ashes, and walks away a few steps, 
pours the ashes off the stone on to the ground 
in four places, and puts the stone down and 
leaves it. 
“After this has been done the people get into 
the pit and begin to cut up the antelope. First 
they pick out a young, fat antelope—one about 
two years old—fat and tender. That is taken 
out on to some high hill where everything can 
see it, and without being skinned, it is cut up 
into small pieces, and left there as food for the 
birds and for the wolves. It is a sacrifice. 
“After the killing is over and these ceremonies 
have been performed and the meat has been di¬ 
vided, the medicine man lets his lodge remain 
as it is over the next night. That night he cooks 
and calls in his friends, and they sit around the 
lodge behind the circles of antelope feet and eat. 
When the medicine man puts away these ante¬ 
lope feet he does it all alone. No one knows 
what he does. 
“If after the antelope have entered the pen 
and before they reach the pit they should by 
any chance turn back and get away without fall¬ 
ing into the hole, it is certain that some one of 
the medicine man’s family or relations will die. 
“This is the way, my friend, in which we 
made our living in old times. Then the animals 
which we ate were plenty and our mai yu'n 
(mysterious power) was strong. Now there is 
nothing to eat on the prairie. Those were happy 
days.” 
Those of us who in the early days traveled 
the prairie from north to south, and east to 
west, used to wonder constantly at the great 
numbers of the antelope which day after day 
were seen on all sides of the command, feed¬ 
ing, or resting, or running, in troops of ten, or 
twenty, or thirty; and later, when winter ap¬ 
proached, gathering into great droves, which 
always numbered hundreds, and sometimes 
thousands. In those days, it is recalled, the 
meat hunters along the line of the Union Pa¬ 
cific Railroad did not trouble to hunt single 
antelope, as it was necessary to do in sum¬ 
mer, but creeping up within long range of one 
of the great herds, opened fire into the thick of 
the multitude, and kept shooting until the ani¬ 
mals had passed out of range, usually killing 
in one succession of shots a half dozen or more 
antelope, and of course wounding many more. 
Sometimes in winter, during the cold wet 
storms, the coats of the antelope would become 
covered with wet snow, which afterward froze 
to them, and the animals might become so 
chilled that they were unable to run, and could 
sometimes be knocked on the head with a club. 
It may be doubted whether the antelope ever 
occurred, save as a straggler, to the east of the 
Missouri River, in either Iowa or Minnesota; 
but all over the country to the west of that 
stream, and on the high coteaux of the Dakotas, 
it was an abundant species, existing, as I have 
elsewhere shown, from about the 80th meridian 
west to the Pacific Coast. It was by no means 
confined to the flat prairie country, but was as 
much at home in territory interspersed with bad 
lands, and among rolling foothills, or on the 
high sage-brush plateau of the great Central 
Basin as anywhere else, and was not infre¬ 
quently found feeding in little parks high up in 
the mountains. One would have imagined that 
from the flat prairie country, or that which was 
only moderately rolling, the antelope could 
never have been exterminated, for of all animals 
it is the most keen-sighted, depending almost 
wholly on its eyes for protection from its 
enemies. Not that it cannot smell. Its nose 
is as good as that of any hoofed beast, and 
will warn it of danger if the hunter neglects the 
wind. But it is upon its keen eyesight that the 
antelope especially depends. If the hunter has 
been seen, even though at a considerable dis¬ 
tance, it is hopeless for him to attempt to ap¬ 
proach the antelope, for as soon as he has 
passed out of sight they swiftly change their 
place to the top of some hill half a mile away, 
and watch for his reappearance. 
If the antelope of the old times had been 
satisfied with what his eyes told him about his 
enemies, he might have survived much longer 
in the prairie country; but although depending 
so much on his vision for safety, he was often 
quite unwilling to accept the story that his 
eyes told him; he often wanted to come back 
and take another look, to make sure that it was 
really an enemy that he had seen; and so after 
having started off and gone well out of 
harm’s way, he would stop, look again, run off 
a little further, and then stop for another look, 
and then perhaps come galloping back toward 
the half-concealed object which had alarmed 
him; until at one of his pauses to look again 
the fatal bullet cut short his life. On a num¬ 
ber of occasions, in the gray light of the morn¬ 
ing, or just as the sun was rising, I have killed 
antelope from my tent door. Or again, while 
stopping in the middle of the day to cook a 
little food, I have had antelope come up to 
the top of a hill, look down on me for a while, 
and then start galloping down, keeping on, 
until finally I have killed them within forty 
yards of the fire over which the coffee pot was 
boiling. It often happened that if a man on 
foot carelessly walked up to the top of a hill, 
beyond which antelope were feeding, and then, 
as he saw them starting to run off, dropped to 
the ground, they would before long come 
galloping back to satisfy their curiosity, and 
would come within easy rifle shot. One can 
readily credit, therefore, the stories told of flag¬ 
ging antelope in the old days. We may believe 
also some of the stories told in the old books 
to the effect that sometimes the prairie wolves 
enticed the antelope to come close to them by 
hiding, and showing parts of the body in such 
a way that the antelope could not tell what they 
were. 
This practice may possibly have been useful 
to the wolves in bringing the antelope near to 
them so that they might get a good start in those 
races by which they so frequently ran down the 
antelope by relays. 
In those old days, when these animals were so 
numerous, it used to be taken for granted that 
they would last as long as the buffalo, and that 
the buffalo would never be exterminated in our 
time. In those days none of us were far-sighted 
enough to imagine the marvelous transforma¬ 
tion which thirty years should throw over that 
vast region which was then called the Far West. 
The shining tracks of a single railway then 
thrust themselves out from the bank of the 
Missouri River into the limitless prairie, and at 
last reached the Pacific Ocean; but there were 
then no settlements along this railway. At in¬ 
tervals of ten or a dozen miles there were a 
