"Listen! Listen! The gray-eyed people are coming nearer and nearer. They are building an iron road. They are coming nearer every day. There will be a time when you will mix with these people. That is when the Gray Eyes are going to get you to drink hot, black water, which you will drink whenever you eat. Then your teeth will become soft.

     They willmget you to smoke at a young age so that your eyes will run tears on windy days, and your eyesight will be poor. Your joints will crack when you want to move slowly and softly.

     You will sleep on soft beds and will not like to rise early. When you begin to wear heavy clothes and sleep under heavy covers, then you will grow lazy. Then there will be no more singing heard in the valleys as you walk.

     When you begin to eat with iron sticks, your tones will grow louder. You will speak louder and talk over ypur parents. You will grow disobedient. You mix with those gray-eyed people, and you will learn their ways; you will break up your homes, and murder and steal."

     Such things have come true, and I have to compare my generation with the old generation. We are not as good as they were; we are not as healthy as they were.

     How did these old men know what was coming?

That is what I would like to know.

 

 

 

     I am an old woman now. The buffaloes and black-tail deer are gone, and our Indian ways are almost gone. Sometimes I find it hard to believe that I ever lived them.

     My little son grew up in the white man's school. He can read books, and he owns cattle and has a farm. He is a leader amoung out Hidatsa people, helping teach them to follow the white man's road.

     He is kind to me. We no longer live in an earth lodge, but in a house with chimneys, and my son's wife cooks by a stove.

     But for me, I cannot forget our old ways.

     Often in summer I rise at daybreak and steal out to the corn fields, and as I hoe the corn I sing to it, as we did when I was young. No one cares for our corn songs now.

     Sometimes in the evening I sit, looking out on the big Missouri. The sun sets, and dusk steals over the water. In the shadows I seem again to see our Indian village, with smoke curling upward from the earth lodges, and in the river's roar I hear the yells of the warriors, and the laughter of little children as of old.

     It is but an old woman's dream. Then I see but shadows and hear only the roar of the river, and tears come into my eyes. Our Indian life, I know, is gone.