The highly colored scoria rocks crop out here and there, adding a beauty of their own. Summer and winter, long before the advent of the white man the coal mines in this region were burning. Looking down into the fiery furnace one may see the white-hot glow of the coal and the heated rocks glowing with a white heat. Rattlesnakes wriggle through the short grass. Quails and grouse fly up and away.
There is a banshee in the Bad Lands whose cries chill your blood if you happen to hear her, which I did not. She is most frequently seen on a hill south of Watch Dog Butte, in Dakota, her flowing hair and her long arms tossing in wild gestures, make a weird picture in the moonlight. Cattle will not remain near the butte and cowboys fear the banshee and her companion, a skeleton that walks about and haunts the camps in the vicinity. Leave a violin lying near and he will seize it and away, playing the most weird music, but you must not follow him, for he will lead you into pits and foot falls. The explanation of all this is the phosphorus found in this vicinity, which glows in the night air.
Standing Rock agency is the best known of our frontier posts. The rock from which the post takes its name is only about three feet high and two feet in width. This rock was once a beautiful Indian bride who starved herself to death upon her husband marrying a second wife. After her death the Great Manitou turned her to stone, and here she stands to this day.
Glasgow, Montana, lies in the midst of the Sioux reservation. Like the Spartans of old, these warriors of the plains dwell in tents during a part of every year. Just beyond the town tepees now dot the landscape where for a brief space the red man forgets the things taught him by his white brother and resumes his old wild ways, but at the approach of winter he abandons his tent and returns to his log cabin and to civilization.
The Indian costume is a mixture of savage and civilized dress, looking more like that of the Raggedy Man than any other.
Blackfoot is a village in the heart of the Blackfeet reservation, lying just west of that of the Sioux. These people, like the ancient Greeks, reverence the butterfly.
“Ah!” exclaim these red children of nature when they see one of these Psyches of the prairie flitting from flower to flower over the green meadow, “ah, see him now. He is gathering the dreams which he will bring to us in our sleep.”