ed from the stake by a white trader, and the action was interpreted as a decree of heaven. It is probably a corruption of the well-known story of the rescue of the Itean woman by Petalesharoo, the son of the "Knife Chief." Like the Southern and Western Indians generally, as is truly remarked by Captain Mayne Reid,[1] "They possess more of that cold continence and chivalrous delicacy than characterize the Red Men of the forest." They are too treacherous to be used as soldiers. Like most pedestrian Indians, their arms and bodies are light and thin, and their legs are muscular and well developed. They are great in endurance. I have heard of a Pawnee, who, when thoroughly "stampeded" by his enemies, "loped" from Fort Laramie to Kearney—300 miles—making the distance as fast as the mail. This bad tribe is ever at war with their hereditary enemies the Sioux. They do not extend westward of Fort Kearney. The principal sub-tribe is the Arickaree, or Ree, called Pedani by the Dakotah, who attacked and conquered them. Their large villages, near the mouth of the Grand River, were destroyed by the expedition sent in 1825–26, under Colonel Leavenworth, to chastise the attack upon the trading party of General Ashley.
A more interesting people than the Pawnee is the Delaware, whose oldest tradition derives him from the region west of the Mississippi. Thence the tribe migrated to the Atlantic shores, where they took the title of Lenne Lenape, or men, and the neighboring races in respect called them "uncle." William Penn and his followers found this remnant of the great Algonquin confederacy in a depressed state: subjugated by the Five Nations, they had been compelled to take the name of "Iroquois Squaws." In those days they felt an awe of the white man, and looked upon him as a something godlike. Since their return to the West their spirit has revived, their war-path has reached through Utah to the Pacific Ocean, to Hudson's Bay on the north, and southward to the heart of Mexico. Their present abodes are principally near Fort Leavenworth upon the Missouri, and in the Choctaw territory near Fort Arbuckle, upon the eastern Colorado or Canadian River. They are familiar with the languages, manners, and customs of their pale-faced neighbors; they are so feared as rifle shots that a host of enemies will fly from a few of their warriors, and they mostly lead a vagrant life, the wandering Jews of the West, as traders, hunters, and trappers, among the other Indian tribes. For 185 years the Shawnees have been associated with them in intermarriage, yet they are declining in numbers; here and there some are lost, one by one, in travel or battle; they have now dwindled to about a hundred warriors, and the extinction of the tribe appears imminent. As hunters and guides, they are preferred to all others by the whites, and it is believed that they would make as formidable partisan soldiers as any on this conti-
- ↑ The Scalp-hunters, chap. xlii.
