One evening, about sunset, the village was deserted.  We met old men, warriors, squaws, and children in gay attire, trooping off to the encampment, with faces of anticipation; and, arriving here, they seated themselves in a semicircle.  Smoke occupied the center, with his warriors on either hand; the young men and boys next succeeded, and the squaws and children formed the horns of the crescent.  The biscuit and coffee were most promptly dispatched, the emigrants staring open-mouthed at their savage guests.  With each new emigrant party that arrived at Fort Laramie this scene was renewed; and every day the Indians grew more rapacious and presumptuous.  One evening they broke to pieces, out of mere wantonness, the cups from which they had been feasted; and this so exasperated the emigrants that many of them seized their rifles and could scarcely be restrained from firing on the insolent mob of Indians.  Before we left the country this dangerous spirit on the part of the Dakota had mounted to a yet higher pitch.  They began openly to threaten the emigrants with destruction, and actually fired upon one or two parties of whites.  A military force and military law are urgently called for in that perilous region; and unless troops are speedily stationed at Fort Laramie, or elsewhere in the neighborhood, both the emigrants and other travelers will be exposed to most imminent risks.

The Ogallalla, the Brules, and other western bands of the Dakota, are thorough savages, unchanged by any contact with civilization.  Not one of them can speak a European tongue, or has ever visited an American settlement.  Until within a year or two, when the emigrants began to pass through their country on the way to Oregon, they had seen no whites except the handful employed about the Fur Company’s posts.  They esteemed them a wise people, inferior only to themselves, living in leather lodges, like their own, and subsisting on buffalo.  But when the swarm of Meneaska, with their oxen and wagons, began to invade them, their astonishment was unbounded.  They could scarcely believe that the earth contained such a multitude of white men.  Their wonder is now giving way to indignation; and the result, unless vigilantly guarded against, may be lamentable in the extreme.

But to glance at the interior of a lodge.  Shaw and I used often to visit them.  Indeed, we spent most of our evenings in the Indian village; Shaw’s assumption of the medical character giving us a fair pretext.  As a sample of the rest I will describe one of these visits.  The sun had just set, and the horses were driven into the corral.  The Prairie Cock, a noted beau, came in at the gate with a bevy of young girls, with whom he began to dance in the area, leading them round and round in a circle, while he jerked up from his chest a succession of monotonous sounds, to which they kept time in a rueful chant.  Outside the gate boys and young men were idly frolicking; and close by, looking grimly upon them, stood a warrior