to dance as we do not ours, and the book was not there. You took me to where they worship the Great Spirit with candles and the book was not there. You showed me images of the good spirits and the pictures of the good land beyond, but the book was not among them to tell us the way. I am going back the long and sad trail to my people in the dark land. You make my feet heavy with gifts and my moccasins will grow old in carrying them, yet the book is not among them. When I tell my poor blind people after one more snow, in the big council, that I did not bring the book, no word will be spoken by our old men or by our young braves. One by one they will rise up and go out in silence. My people will die in darkness, and they will go a long path to other hunting grounds. No white man will go with them, and no White Man's Book to make the way plain. I have no more words."
The return of these Indians to their country is another matter about which there is great uncertainty. The orthodox version, as given by the latest writer on the subject,(6) is that they returned by the American Fur Company steamboat in the spring of 1832 as far as to the mouth of the Yellowstone whence they made their way home; that George Catlin, who was a passenger on the same boat, painted their pictures and that these are now numbers 207 and 208 in his well-known gallery of Indian paintings; and that the tribe at home agreed to go on their annual buffalo hunt to the Judith Basin on the Upper Missouri earlier than usual in the summer of 1832, in order to meet them. It can only be said of this version that it is extremely doubtful. No steamboat had ever yet ascended the Missouri anywhere near the mouth of the Yellowstone, and there had been no trading post built farther up than this point when the deputation left home in 1831. They could not, therefore, have expected a steamboat as far as the Yellowstone or any other craft beyond that point, and any pre-arranged plan to meet the Indians, based upon such a voyage, would
(6) By Mrs. Eva Emery Dye, in The Conquest.