After lunch we began
exchanging stories. My travelling companion, the surveyor, had that
spring performed a feat of note, going through one of the canyons of the
Big Horn for the first time. He went with an old mining inspector, the
two of them dragging a cottonwood sledge over the ice. The walls of the
canyon are so sheer and the water so rough that it can be descended only
when the stream is frozen. However, after six days' labor and hardship
the descent was accomplished; and the surveyor, in concluding, described
his experience in going through the Crow Reservation.
This turned the conversation upon Indians, and it appeared that both
of our hosts had been actors in Indian scrapes which had attracted my
attention at the time they occurred, as they took place among tribes
that I knew and in a country which I had sometime visited, either
when hunting or when purchasing horses for the ranch. The first, which
occurred to Captain Edwards, happened late in 1886, at the time when the
crow Medicine Chief, Sword-Bearer, announced himself as the Messiah of
the Indian race, during one of the usual epidemics of ghost dancing.
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