ening them however, with certain death if again caught in any
hostile act.

On the 10th of May the party arrived at the Omaha (pronounced Omawhaw)
village, about eight hundred and thirty miles above the mouth of the
Missouri, and encamped in its neighborhood. The village was situated
under a hill on the bank of the river, and consisted of about eighty
lodges. These were of a circular and conical form, and about sixteen
feet in diameter; being mere tents of dressed buffalo skins, sewed
together and stretched on long poles, inclined towards each other so as
to cross at about half their height. Thus the naked tops of the poles
diverge in such a manner that, if they were covered with skins like the
lower ends, the tent would be shaped like an hour-glass, and present the
appearance of one cone inverted on the apex of another.

The forms of Indian lodges are worthy of attention, each tribe having
a different mode of shaping and arranging them, so that it is easy to
tell, on seeing a lodge or an encampment at a distance, to what tribe
the inhabitants belong. The exterior of the Omaha lodges have often a
gay and fanciful appearance, being painted with undulating bands of
red or yellow, or decorated with rude figures of horses, deer, and
buffaloes, and with human faces, painted like full moons, four and five
feet broad.

The Omahas were once one of the numerous and powerful tribes of the
prairies, vying in warlike might and prowess with the Sioux, the
Pawnees, the Sauks, the Konsas, and the Iatans. Their wars with the
Sioux, however, had thinned their ranks, and the small-pox in 1802 had
swept off two thirds of their number. At the time of Mr. Hunt's visit
they still boasted about two hundred warriors and hunters, but they are
now fast melting away, and before long, will be numbered among those
extinguished nations of the west that exist but in tradition.

In his correspondence with Mr. Astor, from this point of his journey,
Mr. Hunt gives a sad account of the Indian tribes bordering on the
river. They were in continual war with each other, and their wars were
of the most harassing kind; consisting, not merely of main conflicts and
expeditions of moment, involving the sackings, burnings, and massacres
of towns and villages, but of individual acts of treachery, murder, and
cold-blooded cruelty; or of vaunting and foolhardy exploits of single
warriors, either to avenge some personal wrong, or gain the vainglorious
trophy of a