|
"I know what you young men have been
saying; one of you is good; the other is wicked," she said.
She laid down the pipe on the ground
and at once became a buffalo cow. The cow pawed the ground, stuck her
tail straight out behind her and then lifted the pipe from the ground
again in her hoofs; immediately she became a young woman again.
"I am come to give you this gift," she
said. "It is the peace pipe. Hereafter all treaties and ceremonies
shall be performed after smoking it. It shall bring peaceful thoughts
into your minds. You shall offer it to the Great Mystery and to mother
earth."
The two young men ran to the village
and told what they had seen and heard. All the village came out where
the young woman was.
She repeated to them what she had
already told the young men and added:
"When you set free the ghost (the
spirit of deceased persons) you must have a white buffalo cow skin."
She gave the pipe to the medicine men
of the village, turned again to a buffalo cow and fled away to the
land of buffaloes.
Legend of Standing Rock
A
Dakota
had married an Arikara woman, and by her had one child. By and by he
took another wife. The first wife was jealous and pouted. When time
came for the village to break camp she refused to move from her place
on the tent floor. The tent was taken down but she sat on the ground
with her babe on her back The rest of the camp with her husband went
on.
At
noon her husband halted the line. "Go back to your sister-in-law," he said
to his two brothers. "Tell her to come on and we will await you here. But
hasten, for I fear she may grow desperate and kill herself."
|
