Part 24 (2/2)

”I think so,” said Oliver, remembering what he had heard at school. He felt the hand of the Dog Chief on his shoulder, but when he looked up it was only the Museum attendant come to tell him it was closing time.

THE END

APPENDIX

GLOSSARY OF INDIAN AND SPANISH NAMES

THE BEGINNING OF THE TRAIL

The appendix is that part of a book in which you find the really important things, put there to keep them from interfering with the story. Without an appendix you might not discover that all of the important things in this book really _are_ true.

All the main traveled roads in the United States began as animal or Indian trails. There is no map that shows these roads as they originally were, but the changes are not so many as you might think. Railways have tunneled under pa.s.ses where the buffalo went over, hills have been cut away and swamps filled in, but the general direction and in many places the actual grades covered by the great continental highways remain the same.

THE BUFFALO COUNTRY

_Licks_ are places where deer and buffaloes went to lick the salt they needed out of the ground. They were once salt springs or lakes long dried up.

_Wallows_ were mudholes where the buffaloes covered themselves with mud as a protection from mosquitoes and flies. They would lie down and work themselves into the muddy water up to their eyes. Crossing the Great Plains, you can still see round green places that were wallows in the days of the buffalo.

The p.a.w.nees are a roving tribe, in the region of the Platte and Kansas Rivers. If they were just setting out on their journey when the children heard them they would sing:--

”Dark against the sky, yonder distant line Runs before us.

Trees we see, long the line of trees Bending, swaying in the wind.

”Bright with flas.h.i.+ng light, yonder distant line Runs before us.

Swiftly runs, swift the river runs, Winding, flowing through the land.”

But if they happened to be crossing the river at the time they would be singing to _Kawas_, their eagle G.o.d, to help them. They had a song for coming up on the other side, and one for the mesas, with long, flat-sounding lines, and a climbing song for the mountains.

You will find all these songs and some others in a book by Miss Fletcher in the public library.

TRAIL TALK

You will find the story of the Coyote and the Burning Mountain in my book _The Basket Woman_.

The Tenasas were the Tennessee Mountains. Little River is on the map.

Flint Ridge is a great outcrop of flint stone in Ohio, near the town of Zanesville. Sky-Blue-Water is Lake Superior.

Cahokia is the great mound near St. Louis, on the Illinois side of the river.

When the Lenni-Lenape speaks of a Telling of his Fathers about the mastodon or the mammoth, he was probably thinking of the story that is pictured on the Lenape stone, which seems to me to be the one told by Arrumpa. Several Indian tribes had stories of a large extinct animal which they called the Big Moose, or the Big Elk, because moose and elk were the largest animals they knew.

<script>