Here they could look out to the
West they loved, strain their dim eyes over the prairie, where the
farmer's plow was tracing its furrow, to the Medicine Way of The Pale
Face that led across the plains and up the long bright river and over
the mountains to the place of the trapper's rendezvous.
He had known Jim Beckwourth, the mulatto who was chief of the Crows,
fought their battles and lived in their villages with a Crow wife. Joe
described him as "a powerful liar," but a man without fear. Under his
leadership the Crows had become a great nation and the frontiersmen
laid it to his door that no Crow had ever attacked a white man except
in self-defense. Some said he was still living in California. Joe
remembered him well--a tall man, strong and fleet-footed as an Indian,
with mighty muscles and a skin like bronze. He always wore round his
neck a charm of a perforated bullet set between two glass beads hanging
from a thread of sinew.
He had known Rose, another white chief of the Crows, an educated man
who kept his past secret and of whom it was said that the lonely places
and the Indian trails were safer for him than the populous ways of
towns.
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