THE WINDING STORY-- SAGES TALE OF ORGIES -- THE NEW DAWN

"The story winds as winds the river," and memory and history goes back along the Red Cloud Trail, when it did not bear the distinction of the common translation of the name, "Marpiya Luta." It was used, however, by the trapper and the trader, and the country of North Sioux county, then unorganized, was alive with dangers similar to those that marked the close of Indian wars. The benevolent assimilation of all that the Indian possessed was in progress. The red man was drugged with the sweetened fire-water, and fought and robbed and murdered to get more.

When the Indian fought the emigrants and stages and pony express along the Great White Medicine Road, they were fighting for their own as they viewed it. The signal fires that burned at night on the hills the length of the North Platte Valley, the signal smokes that curled upward from the hills by day, the firearrows that marked lurid streaks across the dark skies of the terrible wilderness, the silence of the night, the sudden pandemonium- of sound, the whirlwind of activity, leaving death in its wake, the disappearing shadows, and then again the silence. That was the part of the Indian life that homeseekers, goldseekers, and early patriots of the west found.

But brutal commercialism found another side. Life, morality, soul, all the finer Instincts of man, were subordinated and submerged in the one great purpose of greed. The stories of Sage in Rock Mountain Travels, include events in the history of the Panhandle of Nebraska. Sage went out over the route later designated as the Red Cloud Trail, with a party of the traders, and his is a harrowing recital of the drama of life on the Running Water and White River in 1845.