gings. The woman was comely, and beautifully dressed. Her dress of the mountain-sheepskin tastefully ornamented with quills and beads, and her hair plaited in large braids that hung down on her breast.”
In 1837 the agent for the “Sioux, Cheyennes, and Poncas” reports that “all these Indians live exclusively by the chase;” and that seems to be the sum and substance of his information about them. He adds, also, that these remote wandering tribes have a great fear of the border tribes, and wish to avoid them. In 1838 the Cheyennes are reported as carrying on trade at a post on the Arkansas River near the Santa Fe road, but still depending on the chase.
Tn 1842 they are spoken of as a “wandering tribe on the Platte;” and in the same year, Mr. D, D, Mitchell, Supt. of Indian Affairs, with bis head-quarters at St. Louis, writes: “Generations will pass away before this territory” [the territory in which the wild tribes of the Upper Mississippi were then wandering] “becomes much more circumscribed; for if we draw a line running north and south, so as to cross the Missouri about the mouth of the Vermilion River, we shall designate the limits beyond which civilized men are never likely to settle. At this point the Creator seems to have said to the tides of emigration that are annually rolling toward the West, ‘Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther.’ At all events, if they go beyond this, they will never stop on the east side of the Rocky Mountains. The utter destitution of timber, the sterility of sandy soil, together with the coldness and dryness of the climate, furnish obstacles which not even Yankee enterprise is likely to overcome. A beneficent Creator seems to have intended this dreary region as an asylum for the Indians, when the force of circumstances shall have driven them from the last acre of the fertile soil which they once possessed. Here no inducements are offered to the ever-restless Saxon breed to erect their huts. * * * The time may arrive when the whole of the Western Indians will be
