else excites merely laughter.

21. See Appendix A.

22. Similarly the Crows, who have always been treated well by us, have
murdered and robbed any number of peaceful, unprotected travellers
during the past three decades, as I know personally.

23. It is precisely the same at the present day. I have known a party of
Sioux to steal the horses of a buffalo-hunting outfit, whereupon the
latter retaliated by stealing the horses of a party of harmless
Grosventres; and I knew a party of Cheyennes, whose horses had been
taken by white thieves, to, in revenge, assail a camp of perfectly
orderly cowboys. Most of the ranchmen along the Little Missouri in 1884,
were pretty good fellows, who would not wrong Indians, yet they
tolerated for a long time the presence of men who did not scruple to
boast that they stole horses from the latter; while our peaceful
neighbors, the Grosventres, likewise permitted two notorious red-skinned
horse thieves to use their reservation as a harbor of refuge, and a
starting-point from which to make forays against the cattlemen.

24. The expression "too horrible to mention" is to be taken literally,
not figuratively. It applies equally to the fate that has befallen every
white man or woman who has fallen into the power of hostile plains
Indians during the last ten or fifteen years. The nature of the wild
Indian has not changed. Not one man in a hundred, and not a single
woman, escapes torments which a civilized man cannot look another in the
face and so much as speak of. Impalement on charred stakes, finger-nails
split off backwards, finger-joints chewed off, eyes burned out--these
tortures can be mentioned, but there are others equally normal and