Here congregate at certain seasons the merchants of the plains and mountains, with their stocks of peltry. Chiefs of the Shian, the Kio-way, and Arapaho, sit in solemn conclave with the head traders, and smoke the calumet over their real and imaginary grievances. Now O-cun-no-whurst, the Yellow Wolf, grand chief of the Shian, complains of certain grave offenses against the dignity of his nation! A trader from the "big lodge" (the fort) has been in his village, and before the trade was opened, in laying the customary chief's gift "on the prairie" has not "opened his hand," but "squeezed out his present between his fingers," grudgingly and with too sparing measure. This was hard to bear, but the Yellow Wolf would say no more!
Tah-kai-buhl, or, "He Who Jumps," is deputed from the Kioway to warn the white traders not to proceed to the Canadian to trade with the Comanche. That nation is mad--a "heap mad" with the whites, and has "dug up the hatchet" to "rub out" all who enter its country. The Kioway loves the pale-face, and gives him warning (and "He Who Jumps" looks as if he deserves something "on the prairie" for his information).
Shawh-noh-qua-mish, "The Peeled Lodge-pole," is there to excuse his Arapaho braves, who lately made free with a band of horses belonging to the fort. He promises the like shall never happen again, and he, Shawh-noh-qua-mish, speaks with a "single tongue." Over clouds of tobacco and kinnik-kinnik these grave affairs are settled and terms arranged.
In the corral, groups of leather-clad mountaineers, with decks of euchre and seven up, gamble away their hard-earned peltries. The employes-- mostly St. Louis Frenchmen and Canadian voyageurs--are pressing packs of buffalo-skins, beating robes, or engaged in other duties of a trading-fort. Indian squaws, the wives of mountaineers, strut about in all the pride of beads and "fofar-raw," jingling with bells and bugles, and happy as paint can make them. Hunters drop in with animals packed with deer or buffalo meat to supply the fort; Indian dogs look anxiously in at the gateway, fearing to enter and encounter their natural enemies, the whites; and outside the fort, at any hour of the day or night, one may safely wager to see a dozen cayeutes or prairie wolves loping round, or seated on their haunches, and looking gravely, on, waiting patiently for some chance offal to be cast outside. Against the walls, groups of Indians too proud to enter without an invitation, lean, wrapped in their buffalo-robes, sulky and evidently ill at ease to be so near the whites without a chance of fingering their scalp-locks; their white lodges shining in the sun, at a little distance from the riverbanks--their horses feeding in the plain beyond.