Lewis and Clark had seen the Mandan horsemen surround the buffalo herds and kill the great clumsy beasts with their arrows.  Pike records with the utmost interest how he saw a band of Pawnees in similar fashion slaughter a great gang of elk, and he dwells with admiration on the training of the horses, the wonderful horsemanship of the naked warriors, and their skill in the use of bow and spear.  It was a wild hunting scene, such as belonged properly to times primeval.  But indeed the whole life of these wild red nomads, the plumed and painted horse-Indians of the great plains, belonged to time primeval.  It was at once terrible and picturesque, and yet mean in its squalor and laziness.  From the Blackfeet in the north to the Comanches in the south they were all alike; grim lords of war and the chase; warriors, hunters, gamblers, idlers; fearless, ferocious, treacherous, inconceivably cruel; revengeful and fickle; foul and unclean in life and thought; disdaining work, but capable at times of undergoing unheard-of toil and hardship, and of braving every danger; doomed to live with ever before their eyes death in the form of famine or frost, battle or torture, and schooled to meet it, in whatever shape it came, with fierce and mutterless fortitude. [Footnote:  Fortunately these horse-Indians, and the game they chiefly hunted, have found a fit historian.  In his books, especially upon the Pawnees and Blackfeet, Mr. George Bird Grinnell has portrayed them with a master hand; it is hard to see how his work can be bettered.]

Wilkinson Descends the Arkansas.  When the party reached the Arkansas late in October Wilkinson and three or four men journied down it and returned to the settled country.  Wilkinson left on record his delight when he at last escaped from the bleak windswept plains and again reached the land where deer supplanted the buffalo and antelope and where the cottonwood was no longer the only tree.

    Pike Reaches Pike’s Peak.

The others struck westward into the mountains, and late in November reached the neighborhood of the bold peak which was later named after Pike himself.  Winter set in with severity soon after they penetrated the mountains.  They were poorly clad to resist the bitter weather, and they endured frightful hardships while endeavoring to thread the tangle of high cliffs and sheer canyons.  Moreover, as winter set in, the blacktail deer, upon which the party had begun to rely for meat, migrated to the wintering grounds, and the explorers suffered even more from hunger than from cold.  They had nothing to eat but the game, not even salt.

    Sufferings from Cold and Hunger.