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Show A WESTERN FUNERAL. 259 gathered around their council fires, and the forest echoed with their whoop, when they started off in search of scalps. And they had no steam engine to freight home their trophies. How shameful! The Bureau ought to have attended to that matter. Who is he, anyhow? by what title must I address him? He certainly belongs to the royal family of the Sioux, Cheyennes or Arapahoes, who are responsible to no civil court of justice, who toil not, neither do they spin. Whoever he is, he has been checked for the "happy hunting ground," and he'll not be lonely, for the rest of his family will soon follow. Their glory has "faded. Sorry to say it, sorry to wound the hearts of those who talk so lovingly of the noble red man-but it's faded. CHAPTER LIII. A WESTERN FUNERAL. Mr. Charles Shackleford, of Gunnison, a gentleman of pleasing manner and remarkably fine conversational powers, told me the following pathetic little story: " She was the mildest-mannered Magdalen in the camp, where there were many rough and. desperate characters, both men and women. It was what might be called, on the frontier of civilization, a ' hurrah' town, where the reckless, desperate and bloody-minded men of the plains frequently came in for a ' racket,' and rode through the streets pistol in hand, uttering oaths never heard in the settlements east of the Missouri; oaths that expressed the concentrated essence of blasphemy, rank with the flavor of bar-room obscenity. |
