. Many of the white men were themselves lawless and brutal,
and prone to commit outrages on the Indians. Unfortunately, each race
tended to hold all the members of the other race responsible for the
misdeeds of a few, so that the crime of the miscreant, red or white,
who committed the original outrage too often invited retaliation upon
entirely innocent people, and this action would in its turn arouse
bitter feeling which found vent in still more indiscriminate
retaliation. The first year I was on the Little Missouri some Sioux
bucks ran off all the horses of a buffalo-hunter's outfit. One of the
buffalo-hunters tried to get even by stealing the horses of a Cheyenne
hunting party, and when pursued made for a cow camp, with, as a result,
a long-range skirmish between the cowboys and the Cheyennes. One of the
latter was wounded; but this particular wounded man seemed to have
more sense than the other participants in the chain of wrong-doing, and
discriminated among the whites. He came into our camp and had his wound
dressed.

A year later I was at a desolate little mud road ranch on the Deadwood
trail. It was kept by a very capable and very forceful woman, with sound
ideas of justice and abundantly well able to hold her own. Her husband
was a worthless devil, who finally got drunk on some whisky he obtained
from an outfit of Missouri bull-whackers--that is, freighters, driving
ox wagons. Under the stimulus of the whisky he picked a quarrel with his
wife and attempted to beat her. She knocked him down with a stove-lid
lifter, and the admiring bull-whackers bore him off, leaving the lady
in full possession of the ranch. When I visited her she had a man named
Crow Joe working for her, a slab-sided, shifty-eyed person who later,
as I heard my foreman explain, "skipped the country with a bunch of
horses." The mistress of the ranch made first-class buckskin shirts of
great durability. The one she made for me, and which I used for years,
was used by one of my sons in Arizona a couple of winters ago. I had
ridden down into the country after some lost horses, and visited the
ranch to get her to make me the buckskin shirt in question. There
were, at the moment, three Indians there, Sioux, well behaved and
self-respecting, and she explained to me that they had been resting
there waiting for dinner, and that a white man had come along and tried
to run off their horses. The Indians were on the lookout, however, and,
running out, they