She saw them coming, and as soon as they started she began again:—­

“Spirit of death, set me free!  Heart, thou art desolate.  Farewell, O sun.  Vain are the plains of the earth, its flowers, and purling streams.  I loved you all once—­but now no longer love.  Thee I woo, kind Death!  Wa-shu-pa calls me hence.  In life we were one.  We’ll bask together in the Spirit Land.  Short is my pass to thee.  Wa-shu-pa, I come!”

Concluding her song, she threw herself forward, just as the foremost warriors arrived at the summit, in time to catch at her robe as she pitched down, leaving the garment in their hands; in another instant she was a mangled mass at the base of the cruel mountain.

In the winter of 1835 Ash Hollow was the scene of a fierce and bloody battle between the Pawnees and Sioux, hereditary enemies.  The affray commenced very early in the morning, and continued until nearly dark.  It was a closely fought battle.  Every inch of ground was hotly contested.  The arrows fell in showers, bullets whistled the death song of many a warrior on both sides, and the yells of the combating savages filled the wintry air.  At length all the ammunition was completely exhausted on both sides, but still the battle raged.  War-clubs, tomahawks, and scalping-knives rattled in the deadly personal conflict, and terrible war-whoops resounded, as now one side then the other gained some slight advantage.

As darkness drew over the scene, the Pawnees abandoned the field to the victorious Sioux, leaving more than sixty of their best warriors dead on the bloody sod.  But the Sioux had not escaped a terrible loss.  Forty-five of their bravest fighters were lying dead, and the defeated party of Pawnees were pursued but a very little distance when the chase was abandoned and they returned to their village at the forks of the Platte.

It is alleged that this disaster so humiliated the Pawnees that they at once abandoned their town.  They moved down the Platte more than four hundred miles, and at the same time also abandoned their town on the Republican Fork of the Kansas River, and rarely ever ventured up the river as far as the scene of their great defeat, unless in very large parties.

For twenty years afterward the evidences of the terrible battle could be seen in the bleached bones scattered all over the vicinity of the conflict.

Many of the Indian tribes of the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains have a tradition of a flood, but as they differ only in the matter of detail, a single one is presented here, that of the Sioux.  It was told around the camp-fire, on General Carr’s expedition against the hostile bands of that nation, in 1869, when Colonel W. F. Cody (Buffalo Bill) was chief of scouts.

One day some of the men brought into camp a large bone, which the surgeons pronounced to be the femur, or thigh-bone of a man.  Some Indian prisoners, who had been captured a short time before, were sent for and asked to give their opinion of this find.  As soon as they saw it, they, too, said it was the thigh-bone of a man.