It was a touching sight to witness these men calling upon their God for help. All of them had passed middle life, and some were gray-haired, blind and tottering; but they prayed with a fervor and earnestness that compelled respect. They threw their souls into their prayers, and as a son might entreat his earthly father for some great gift, so they plead with _Ti-ra´-wa_. Their bodies quivered with emotion, and great drops of sweat stood upon their brows. They were thoroughly sincere.
After the last of the articles had been placed upon the ground, their voices grew lower and at length died away. A moment later a drum sounded, and a dozen or twenty young warriors sprang into the circle and began the buffalo dance. This was kept up without intermission for three days, and as soon as it was over, the tribe moved out of the village on the hunt.
From the village on the Loup, we traveled southward; for in those days the region between the Platte and the Smoky rivers swarmed with buffalo. With the Pawnees were a few Poncas, Omahas and Otoes, so that there were about four thousand Indians in the camp. It was the summer hunt of the tribe. Twice each year the agent permitted them to visit the buffalo range. The meat which they killed and dried on these hunts, the corn and squashes which they grew on their farms, and the small annuities received from the Government, were all they had to subsist on from season to season. Thus the occasion was one of importance to the Indians. Perhaps only the older heads among them fully appreciated its economic interest; but for all it was a holiday time; a temporary escape from confinement. Life on the reservation was monotonous. There was nothing to do except to sit in the sun and smoke, and tell stories of the former glories of the nation; of successful fights with the Sioux and Cheyennes, and of horse stealing expeditions, from which the heroes had returned with great herds of ponies and much glory. Now, for a little while, they returned to the old free life of earlier years, when the land had been all their own, and they had wandered at will over the broad expanse of the rolling prairie. Now, for a time, it was as it had been before the cornfields of the white man had begun to dot their river bottoms, before the sound of his rifle had made wild their game, before the locomotive's whistle had shrieked through the still, hot summer air. Half a year's provision was now to be secured. The comfort--almost the existence--of the tribe for the next six months depended on the accumulation of an abundant supply of dried buffalo meat, and no precaution was omitted to make the hunt successful. It would not do to permit each individual to hunt independently. Indiscriminate buffalo running by six or eight hundred men scattered over the prairie, each one working for himself alone, would result in the killing of some few buffalo, but would terrify and drive away all the others in the neighborhood. This matter was too important to be trusted to chance. The hunting was systematized.