Wild Horses and the Indians 
By GEO. BIRD GRINNELL 
Continued from page 210. 
T HE adventure of a party of horse catchers, 
which took place in the Southwest eighty 
years ago, gives a very fair idea of the 
chances and mischances of a party of Indians 
who were out on a war path. 
In 1828 Bull Hump came with a large party 
of Comanche warriors to the stockade which 
Wm. W. Bent had built at the mouth of Huer¬ 
fano. While they were there some of the young 
men went out and saw the moccasin tracks and 
other signs of a war party of Cheyenne which 
had just gone away from the post. Bull 
Hump asked Bent if he knew where these 
Cheyenne came from, where their village was. 
Bent told them they came in from over north¬ 
east where there was a village. The Comanche 
remained there that afternoon and had a feast, 
and that night they started off. From that time 
on the Comanche war party tried to find the 
village of the Cheyenne. They sent out ahead 
a small party of scouts to look for it, and at 
length they returned and reported that the 
Cheyenne village was a little further ahead on 
a creek which the whites now call Bijou Creek. 
f 
d hat night a lot of Bull Hump’s men slipped off 
from him and went over to the village and ran 
off the Cheyenne horses. They took all the 
horses and the Cheyenne could not follow them, 
for they had nothing to ride. 
At this time Yellow Wolf and Little Wolf, 
Cheyennes, with about eighteen or twenty men, 
had been out running wild horses on the Arkan¬ 
sas River. During this trip Walking Coyote, a 
Ponca captive, caught himself a great many-wild 
horses, about thirty-five head. 
They were coming back up the Arkansas River 
with their horses, and above the mouth of Sand 
Creek, where it runs into the Arkansas River, 
they turned off toward what is called the Black 
Lake on the way to their camp on the South 
Platte, where the main Cheyenne village was. 
As they were going along in the night, Yellow 
W olf and Little Wolf and Big Old Man being 
in the lead, while all the others were behind 
driving the horses, the leaders smelled a fire 
made of buffalo chips. They stopped and when 
the others had come up Yellow Wolf said, “Can 
you smell that?’’ and they said, “Yes.” Yellow 
Wolf said to his men, “Two of you get on your 
fastest horses and go up there and see who they 
are.” 
It was in the middle of the night. They were 
making for the Black Lake (Mdhksta'av ihan') 
•—about forty or forty-five miles due north of old 
Fort Lyon—where there is a big spring. Black 
Lake was so called from the color of the soil 
round about. Its water is alkali, but horses and 
buffalo drank it, though people did not. The 
large fine spring was west of it. This was a 
great range for wild horses, and deep horse 
trails, as deep as the old buffalo trails, came to 
it from many directions. 
Yellow Wolf said to the scouts starting out, 
“Go to the spring. That is the only water that 
there is about here, and if they have camped 
anjwvhere they must be there. Find out who 
they are, but be very careful.” 
The scouts started out, following up the smell 
of the smoke. When it got strong and they 
thought they were pretty near to the fire, they 
stopped, and one of them held the two horses 
while the other crept up very quietly, closer and 
closer, until he had come near enough to see 
a number of small fires and to hear people talk¬ 
ing; and getting still nearer he could hear, as 
he listened, that these people were talking 
Comanche. The man who crept up could see 
that the place was black with horses and that 
the camp was a large one. 
Yellow Wolf was a great chief, a very wise 
man. When the scouts returned Yellow Wolf 
said, “We must turn off here and go around and 
get on the opposite side of them.” This 
would bring the Cheyenne on the side of the 
Comanche which was toward their own camp, 
so that when the Comanches pursued them they 
would be running toward the big Cheyenne camp 
and not from it. Everybody kept very quiet and 
drove along slowly and quietly until they had 
come to the opposite side of the Comanche camp. 
There Yellow Wolf left some men with the herd 
of wild horses and said to them, “Just as soon as 
daylight comes, so that you can see well, start 
your horses along. We will get down there and 
they will charge on us and you will hear firing. 
When you hear this, do not wait. Hurry the 
horses along as fast as you can.” Then all the 
others rode quietly up as close as they dared to 
the Comanche camp and waited there until just 
about daylight, till they could begin to see fairly 
well. 
Yellow Wolf told his young men that there 
were a good many Comanche and that it must 
be a large war party. To Walking Coyote, his 
adopted son, of whom he thought more than he 
did of his own sons, he said: “My son, you 
know what to do. Do the best you can. You 
have a fast horse and you must stay behind and 
try to fight off these Comanche, while we run 
