tribe’s life. The lore, which sprang up as an indigenous growth of the wide-stretching prairie and the wilderness where the wild Pawnee warrior hunted free, finds scanty nurture in the uncongenial soil of fields tilled by Pawnee followers of the plow. With the new modes of living come new views of life, new motives, new sympathies—in a word, civilization. To earn a living by toil, to wrest subsistence from the earth, this is the problem confronting the Pawnees to-day, the task which is engaging the sinew and purpose of the tribe. In the transition stage, the memory of the old days, of old manners and rites and ceremonies and of old heroes, is with the elders of the race, those ancient braves whose lives bridge the past and the present. When I visited the Agency last March, it was to write down from the lips of these old men such material as I could collect. When they shall die much of the unwritten lore will perish too, for with them will cease that sympathetic and perfect credence, which alone gives to folk-lore vitality and lastingness. What is written in this volume then belongs distinctly to the wild Indian.

The task that I have set for myself is that of a recorder. No attempt has been made to give a literary color to the hero stories and folk-tales here written out. I have scrupulously avoided putting into them anything of my own. The stories are told to the reader as they were told to me. They are not elaborated. I have tried to show how Indians think and speak, rather than to make their stories more entertaining by dressing them up to suit the civilized taste. My object in giving these narratives in their present shape is to make a book which shall be true to life, and shall faithfully reflect the Pawnee character, as the story tellers have themselves painted it. In a very few cases I have added some words explaining matters so well understood by those familiar with the Indians as to need no explanation. If these tales have any ethnological value, it will be enhanced by their being given in the precise form in which they were told by those to whom they have been handed down from generation to generation; but quite apart from this is another point which is entitled to consideration.

The entire ignorance concerning Indians, which prevails among the general public, can be dispelled only by letting that public understand something of the ways of life of the wild Indian, something of the subjects about which he thinks and talks, as well as of how he looks at these subjects, and what he has to say about them.

The late Mrs. Jackson’s charming story, “Ramona,” did much to bring the more intelligent class of readers in touch with the Indians, and to awaken sympathy for them by pointing out the unnumbered wrongs perpetrated on this race by the Government. Mrs. Jackson’s book was a story, a novel; wonderfully well told and full of truth and feeling; but while it may have been a relation of facts, it did not profess to treat of actual persons. It is looked upon by many readers as a mere romance. It is a book about which I was once asked, skeptically, “Did you ever see any Indians like those?” In the Pawnee stories here set down there is no romance nor coloring. The Indians themselves are talking, and whatever the faults and weak points of these tales—and some of them are sufficiently obvious—they at least give the reader a true conception of Indians as they have actually lived. They are stories of Indians by Indians. There is about them nothing of the white man; and the intelligent person, who is sufficiently interested in the subject to read this book through, will gain from it a new insight into Indian character.

The Indian of Cooper—with his bravery, his endurance, his acuteness, his high qualities of honesty, generosity, courtesy and hospitality—has been laughed at for half a century. Yet every man who has mingled much with the Indians in their homes has known individuals who might have sat for the portraits which Cooper drew of some of his aboriginal heroes. There are good men among Indians, just as among the whites. The prevalent notion of the Indian has been formed from the worst class of this people, the lazy, filthy beggars who haunt the settlements of the West, who to their own vices have added new ones picked up from their surroundings, and who are hopelessly degraded. These are not typical Indians, and it is unjust to judge a whole race from such degenerate specimens. There is still another notion of the Indian fondly cherished by many worthy people, whose sympathies have been wrought upon by the cruelty and injustice with which we have treated this race. These good people look upon all Indians as simple children of nature, who would do no wrong if they had not been contaminated by contact with vicious whites. It is unnecessary to say that this notion of the Indian is also incorrect.

The Indian is neither a fiend nor a saint. There are good ones and bad ones. As a rule, perhaps they try to act up to their ideas of what is right, but the standard of a race of barbarians cannot be the same as that of a civilized people, and in judging of their character we must make allowances for this difference. The standard of right and wrong among civilized people is a growth, the product of the experience of thousands of years. The Indian races have not been through a like experience. They have regarded as virtues some things which seem to us the worst of crimes. The Indian differs from the white man in education and manner of life, and so, of course, in his modes of thought. He has not been taught the lesson of self-control, which his surroundings oblige each civilized man to begin to learn as a child. He has known until recent times no law save that of strength. He has been taught that war is the noblest of pursuits—the only one worthy of man. And that war has consisted in making forays upon his enemies, taking their possessions, and, if possible, their lives and their scalps. His warfare consisted in surprises rather than open combat. A scalp taken was a trophy of victory, and the scalp of a woman was almost as eagerly sought as that of a brave or of a chief. It was an evidence of injury inflicted on the enemy. To steal horses from the enemy was an achievement creditable and also profitable.

We commonly speak of the raids of war parties as horse stealing expeditions, but this is wholly misleading, because to the civilized understanding the phrase horse stealing carries with it an idea of dishonesty. No such meaning attaches to the Indian equivalent of this phrase. They take horses by stratagem or secretly, by the usual, and to them legitimate, methods of warfare. To speak of their stealing horses, using that verb in the sense which we commonly give it, would be like saying that an army stole the cannon which it captured in an engagement with the enemy. Captured horses were the legitimate spoils of war. The wealth of the Indians was in their horses. They had no fortified places, no ships of war, no cannon, no works of art. Their only valuable possessions were their horses. These were the only property that could be carried off. Therefore, when an expedition was made against a hostile tribe, scalps and horses were naturally its object. Horses, being their only valuable possessions, constituted their medium of exchange, so far as they had any. Did a man wish to purchase an ornament, or an article of dress which took his fancy, he gave a horse for it. If he bought a wife he paid for her in horses. The most valuable present that could be made was a good horse; and horses were often given by the well-to-do to their friends and relations who had been sick or unfortunate. On the other hand, when, as was