Produced by David Newman and the PG Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

[Illustration:  People looking from the lodges]

WHEN BUFFALO RAN

BY GEORGE BIRD GRINNELL

Copyright, 1920, by Yale University Press.

First published, 1920.

Table of Contents.

Introduction:  The Plains Country
The Attack on the Camp
Standing Alone
The Way to Live
Lessons of the Prairie
On a Buffalo Horse
In the Medicine Circle
Among Enemy Lodges
A Grown Man
A Sacrifice
A Warrior Ready to Die
A Lie That Came True
My Marriage

List of Illustrations.

People Looking from the Lodges
Hunting in the Brush along the River
My Grandmother Lived in Our Lodge
My Grandfather ...  Long before Had Given up the Warpath
I Killed Many Buffalo and My Mother Dressed the Hides
Holding the Pipe to the Sky and to the Earth
“Do Not Go, Wait a Little Longer”
Watch the Men and Older Boys Playing at Sticks

The Plains Country.

Seventy years ago, when some of the events here recounted took place,
Indians were Indians, and the plains were the plains indeed.

Those plains stretched out in limitless rolling swells of prairie until they met the blue sky that on every hand bent down to touch them.  In spring brightly green, and spangled with wild flowers, by midsummer this prairie had grown sere and yellow.  Clumps of dark green cottonwoods marked the courses of the infrequent streams—­for most of the year the only note of color in the landscape, except the brilliant sky.  On the wide, level river bottoms, sheltered by the enclosing hills, the Indians pitched their conical skin lodges and lived their simple lives.  If the camp were large the lodges stood in a wide circle, but if only a few families were together, they were scattered along the stream.

In the spring and early summer the rivers, swollen by the melting snows, were often deep and rapid, but a little later they shrank to a few narrow trickles running over a bed of sand, and sometimes the water sank wholly out of sight.

The animals of the prairie and the roots and berries that grew in the bottoms and on the uplands gave the people their chief sustenance.

In such surroundings the boy Wikis was born and grew up.  The people that he knew well were those of his own camp.  Once a year perhaps, for a few weeks, he saw the larger population of a great camp, but for the most part half a dozen families of the tribe, with the buffalo, the deer, the wolves, and the smaller animals and birds, were the companions with whom he lived and from whom he learned life’s lessons.

The incidents of this simple story are true.

The life of those days and the teachings received by the boy or the girl who was to take part in it have passed away and will not return.