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Round-up of the Allard-Pablo herd of Buffalo, Flathead Reservation

gether to dance. In this celebration is embodied the spirit of the tribe, their pride, their hates and loves. But this dance had a peculiar significance. It was, perhaps, the last that the people would hold. Another year the white man will occupy the land, and the free, roving life and its habits will be gone.

It was a scene never to be forgotten. Sharply outlined against the intense blue. above and the tender green below, silent figures on horseback, gay with buckskin, beads and blankets, rode out of the filmy distance into the setting sun and took their places around the musicians on the grass. There were among them the most distinguished men of the tribe. Joe La Mousse, a descendant of Ignace, the Iroquois, grown to an honored old age, watched the younger generation with the simple dignity which became one of his years and rank. He possessed the richest war dress of all, strung with elks' teeth and resplendent with the feathers of the war eagle. He, with Charlot, met the Nez Perces and repudiated their bloody campaign. Francois and Kai-Kai-She, the judge, both patriarchs, and Chief Antoine Moise, Callup-Squal-She, "Crane with a ring around his neck," who followed Charlot to Washington on his mission of protest, moved and mingled in the bright patch-work of groups upon the green. But towering above the rest of the assembly, regal to the point of austerity, was a man, aged but still erect, as though his strength of pride would never let his shoulders stoop beneath the conquering years. He wore his blanket folded closely around him, and fanned himself with an eagle's wing, the emblem of the warrior. One eye was hidden beneath a white film which shut out its sight forever, but the other, coal-black and piercing, met the stranger gaze for gaze, never flinching, never turning aside. It was Charlot. Though an exile, his head was still unbent, his pride unbroken.

Beneath a clump of cottonwood trees, around the tom-tom, a drum made of deer hide stretched over a hollowed section of green tree, sat the four musicians, beating the time of the chant with sticks bound in strips of cloth. Of these players one was blind, another aged, and the remaining two, in holiday attire, with painted lips

and cheeks, were braves. One of these, seated a trifle higher than his companions, who leaned indolently over the tom-tom, plying his sticks with careless grace, possessed a peculiar magnetism which marked him a leader.

Of all that gathering, this Michel Kaiser was the one perfect full-blood specimen of a brave. It was he who, with suppressed energy, flung back his head as he gave the shrill cry and quickened the beat of the tom-tom until louder and louder, faster and faster swelled the chant:

"Come O! ye people! Come and dance!"

Suddenly a brave, painted grotesquely, dressed in splendid colors, with a curious contrivance fastened about his waist, and standing out behind like a tail, bounded into the ring, his hurrying feet beating to the tintinnabulation of sleigh bells attached to his legs. Michel Kaiser and the young man who sat beside him at the tomtom, gave up their places to others, and after disappearing for a moment came forth freed from encumbering blankets, transformed with paint and ornament. A fourth dancer joined them, and the awebegetting war dance began. The movement was one of restrained force. With bent heads and bodies inclined forward, one arm hanging limp and the other resting easily at the back, they tripped along until a war-whoop like an electric shock sent them springing into the air with faces turned upward and clenched fists lifted toward the sky.

This war dance explained many things. It was a portrayal of the glorious deeds of the warriors, a recitation of victorious achievement, a picture of battle, of striking the body of a fallen enemy-one of the greatest tests of valor. The act of striking was considered a far more gallant feat than the taking of a scalp. After a foe was shot and had fallen, a brave seeking distinction, dashed forth from his own band into the open field, and under the deadly rain of the enemy's arrows, struck with his hand the body of the dead or wounded warrior. In doing this he not only courted the desperate danger of that present moment, but brought upon his head the relentless vengeance of the family, the followers and the tribe of the

fallen foe vengeance of a kind that can wait for years without growing cold. By such inspiring examples, the young men were stirred to emulation. The dance showed, too, how in the past the storm clouds of war gathered slowly until, with lightning flash and thunder blast, the warriors lashed themselves to the white heat of frenzy at which they mocked death. The whole thing seemed to be a marshaling of the passions, a blood-fire as irresistible and sweeping as those floods of flame that lay the forests low.

when the ghostly voices of warrior ancestors, of forest dwellers and huntsmen, came echoing out of the past? Their spirit was aroused and the festival would last until the passion was quenched and their veins were cooled.

The next dance was started by a squaw. It was called the "choosing dance," from the fact that either a man or a woman chose a partner for the figure. The ceremony of invitation was simple. The one who desired to invite another, grasped the individual's arm and said briefly:

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was bestowed, and not infrequently blankets and the most cherished bead-work belts and hat-bands. Custom makes the acceptance of these favors compulsory. Even the pale-faced visitors were asked to take part, and the Indians laughed like pleased children to welcome them to the dance. One very old squaw, Mrs. "Nine Pipes," took her blanket from her body and her 'kerchief from her head to give to her white partner, and a brave, having chosen a pale-faced lady for the figure, and being depleted in fortune by his generosity at a former festival, borrowed fifty cents from a richer companion to bestow upon her. It was all done in the best of faith and friendliness, with childlike good will and pleasure in the doing.

Then the next number was called; those who had been honored with invitations and gifts returned the compliment. After this was done, the Master of the Dance, Michel Kaiser, stepped into the center of the circle, saying in the deep gutturals of the Selish tongue, with all the pomp of one who makes a proclamation, something which may be broadly rendered into these English words:

"This brave, Jerome, chose for his partner, Mary, and gave to her a belt of beads, and Mary chose for her partner, Jerome, and gave to him a silken scarf."

Around the circumference of the great ring he moved, crying aloud the names of the braves and maids who had joined together in the dance, and holding up to view the presents they had exchanged.

The next in order was a dance of the chase by the four young men who had performed the war dance. In this, the hunter and the beast pursued, were impersonated, and the pantomime carried out every detail of the fleeing prey and the crafty huntsman who relentlessly drove him to earth.

The fourth measure was the scalp dance, given by the squaws, a rite anciently practiced by the female members. of families whose lords had returned victorious from battle, bearing as trophies the scalps of enemies they had slain. It was considered an indignity and a matter of just reproach to husband or brother, if a squaw were unable to take part in this dance. The scalps captured in war were first displayed outside the lodges of the

warriors whose spoil they were, and after a time, when they began to mortify or "break down," as the Indians say, the triumphant squaws gathered them together, threw them into the dust and stamped on them, heaping upon them every insult, and in the weird ceremony of that ghoulish dance, consigning them to eternal darkness, for no brave without his scalp could enter the Happy Hunting Ground. The chant changed in this figure. The voices of the women rose in a piercing falsetto, broken by a rapid utterance of the single syllable "la la," repeated an incredible length of time. The effect was singularly savage and strange, emphasizing the barbarous joy of the vengeful women. As the war dance was the call to battle, this was the aftermath. In pleasing contrast to this cruel rite was the marriage dance, celebrated by both belles and braves. The young squaws, in their gayest attire, ornamented with the best samples of their bead work and painted bright vermillion about the lips and cheeks, formed a chain around the tomtom, singing shrilly. Then a brave with a party of his friends stepped within the circle, bearing in his hand a stick, generally a small branch of pine or other native tree. He approached the object of his love, and laid the branch on her shoulder. If she rejected his suit she pushed it aside, and he, with his followers, retired in humiliation and chagrin. It often happened that more than one youth desired the hand of the same maiden, and the place of the rejected lover was taken. immediately by a rival who made his prayer. If the maid looked with favor upon him she inclined her head, laying her cheek upon the branch. This was at once the betrothal and the marriage. At the close of the festivities the lover bore her to his lodge, and they were considered man and wife.

After these figures had been repeated many times and twilight stole down with purple shadows over valley and hill, the music and the dancing ceased and the Indians held their feast. The fare was simple enough-canned salmon and crackers, wild berries and a drink made by the squaws, called "Indian ice-cream"-but they laughed over it and chatted as gaily as though the old times of bison banquets

were come again. Yet amid the merrymakers there were those who did not share in the mirth. They were some of the older men; those with gray locks, wrinkled cheeks and hunted eyes.

I went to one of the younger women, the daughter of Francois, whose convent education gave her a fair command of English, and asked her how the Indians felt about the opening of the reservation. She shook her head regretfully, and her glance sought out her father, Francois, toothless, white-haired, yet laughing with a group of the dancers."

They rose

There was no bitterness in her expression or her tone-only infinite regret. The Indians began to stir. from the earth like ghosts from their graves, for the light was gone from the sunset skies and night was at hand. Through the evening calm, the monotonous chant shrilled weirdly, and the tomtom vibrated with the regularity of a pulse-beat. And as that strange, unearthly measure swelled, then died in the engulfing night, it seemed as though the ancestral voices of these doomed children of the wild joined with them in a lament

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