Low Bow, his son. preached a sermon, calling on "Wakan-tunga" the Great Spirit for help. All the Indians" cried like children, and the whites helped prepare a burial scaffold.
After all the chaos of early years, we wonder that there is anything left of the red men ; but time and another generation accomplish marvelous changes. There was a change in the few years that followed the visit of Sage. It was effervescing at that time.
When he and his friends built their cabin by the curiously shaped rocks on White river, then called "the Devil's Teapot," they encountered a nest of thirty-six torpid rattlesnakes. They heated water and scalded them to death in the presence of several Indians. This unusual proceeding struck the Indians with apprehension, as they had a sort of reverence for the serpent. For Standing Bear, the chief, it was the slaying of the dragons. It broke the chains of a mentality, theretofore bound down by custom and precedent.
Sometime later, an Indian stole Sage's bed, and while he was looking for it, the noble red man was trading it for liquor. Standing Bear apprehended the culprit, took his bows and arrows. He broke and shot away the arrows and broke and burned the bows, and then he sent the victim, dubbed a squaw, t> his tent, bellowing like a calf.
In the soul of Standing Bear, the "new day" was breaking. And the highly intelligent Indian, the farmer and the cattle raiser of the Pine Ridge, may some day know that the destruction of the serpents in White river, started the new thought, which, when the fires of the fourteen years of war burned out, left his race a new people, and his tribe with new ideals, and a destiny in common with the progress of the years.