SECOND CHAPTERWINTER CAMP
SECOND CHAPTER
The medicine men of the two tribes had laid out the plan of our new village when they made camp in the spring. There was to be an open circle in the center, with the lodges of the chiefs and principal men opening upon it; and in the center of the circle was to stand the Mandans’ sacred corral. This corral was very holy. Around it were held solemn dances, when young men fasted and cut their flesh to win favor of the gods.
The early planning of the village by our medicine men made it possible for a woman to choose a site and begin building her earth lodge. Few lodges, however, were built the first summer. My mothers did not even begin building theirs; but they got ready the timbers with which to frame it.
Going often into the woods with their dogs to gather firewood, they kept a sharp lookout for trees that would make good beams or posts; these they felled later, and let lie to cure. For rafters, they cut long poles; and from cottonwood trunks they split puncheons for the sloping walls. In olden days puncheons were split with wedges of buffalo horn. A core of hard ash wood was driven into the hollow horn to straighten it and make it solid.
Autumn came; my mothers harvested their rather scanty crops; and, with the moon of Yellow Leaves, we struck tents and went into winter camp. My tribe usually built their winter village down in the thick woods along the Missouri, out of reach of the cold prairie winds. It was of earth lodges, like those of our summer village, but smaller and more rudely put together. We made camp this winter not very far from Like-a-Fishhook Point.
My father’s lodge, or, better, my mothers’ lodge,—for an earth lodge belonged to the women who built it—was more carefully constructed than most winter lodges were. Earth was heaped thick on the roof to keep in the warmth; and against the sloping walls without were leaned thorny rosebushes, to keep the dogs from climbing up and digging holes in the roof. The fireplace was a round, shallow pit, with edges plastered smooth with mud. Around the walls stood the family beds, six of them, covered each with an old tent skin on a frame of poles.
A winter lodge was never very warm; and, if there were old people or children in the family, a second, or “twin lodge,” was often built. This was a small lodge with roof peaked like a tepee, but covered with bark and earth. A covered passage led from it to the main lodge.
The twin lodge had two uses. In it the grandparents or other feeble or sickly members of the family could sit, snug and warm, on the coldest day; and the children of the household used it as a playhouse.
I can just remember playing in our twin lodge, and making little feasts with bits of boiled tongue or dried berries that my mothers gave me. I did not often get to go out of doors; for I was not a strong little girl, and, as the winter was a hard one, my mothers were at pains to see that I was kept warm. I had a tiny robe, made of a buffalo-calf skin, that I drew over my little buckskin dress; and short girls’ leggings over my ankles. In the twin lodge, as in the larger earth lodge, the smoke hole let in plenty of fresh air.
My mothers had a scant store of corn and beans, and some strings of dried squashes; and they had put by two or three sacks of dried prairie turnips. A mess of these turnips was boiled now and then and was very good. Once, I remember, we had a pudding, dried prairie turnips pounded to a meal and boiled with dried June berries. Such a pudding was sweet, and we children were fond of it.
To eke out our store of corn and keep the pot boiling, my father hunted much of the time.To hunt deer he left the lodge before daybreak, on snowshoes, if the snow was deep. He had a flintlock gun, a smoothbore with a short barrel. The wooden stock was studded with brass nails. For shot he used slugs, bits of lead which he cut from a bar, and chewed to make round like bullets. Powder and shot were hard to get in those days.
Buffaloes were not much hunted in winter, when they were likely to be poor in flesh; but my father and his friends made one hunt before midwinter set in. Buffaloes were hunted with bow and arrows, from horseback. Only a fleet pony could overtake a buffalo, and there were not many such owned in the tribe. We thought a man rich who had a good buffalo horse.
My father stabled his horses at night in our lodge, in a little corral fenced off against the wall. “I do not want the Sioux to steal them,” he used to say. In the morning, after breakfast, he drove them out upon the prairie, to pasture, but brought them in again before sunset. In very cold weather my mothers cut down young cottonwoods and let our horses browse on the tender branches.
Early in the spring our people returned to Like-a-Fishhook Point and took up again the labor of clearing and planting fields. Each familyhad its own field, laid out in the timbered bottom lands along the Missouri, if possible, in a rather open place where there were no large trees to fell.
Felling trees and grubbing out bushes were done with iron tools, axes and heavy hoes, gotten of the traders. I have heard that in old times my tribe used stone axes, but I never saw them myself. Our family field was larger than any owned by our neighbors; and my mothers were at pains to add to it, for they had many mouths to feed. My grandmother, Turtle, helped them, rising at the first sound of the birds to follow my mothers to the field.
Turtle was old-fashioned in her ways and did not take kindly to iron tools. “I am an Indian,” she would say, “I use the ways my fathers used.” Instead of grubbing out weeds and bushes, she pried them from the ground with a wooden digging stick. I think she was as skillful with this as were my mothers with their hoes of iron.
Digging sticks are even yet used by old Hidatsa women for digging wild turnips. The best kind is made of a stout ash sapling, slightly bent and trimmed at the root end to a three-cornered point. To harden the point, it is oiledwith marrow fat, and a bunch of dry grass is tied around it and fired. The charring makes the point almost as hard as iron.
Turtle, I think, was the last woman in the tribe to use an old-fashioned, bone-bladed hoe. Two other old women owned such hoes, but no longer used them in the fields. Turtle’s hoe was made of the shoulder bone of a buffalo set in a light-wood handle, the blade firmly bound in place with thongs. The handle was rather short, and so my grandmother stooped as she worked among her corn hills.
She used to keep the hoe under her bed. As I grew a bit older my playmates and I thought it a curious old tool, and sometimes we tried to take it out and look at it, when Turtle would cry, “Nah, nah![4]Go away! Let that hoe alone; you will break it!”
[4]Näh
We children were a little afraid of Turtle.