There was an inexpressible dignity in the strong face of the old chieftain, as he stood there on the prairie, with one moccasined foot thrown lightly forward, while the weight of his sinewy body rested solidly on the other foot. The stained feather which fluttered in his braided black hair, the red and yellow paint smeared on his cheeks, and the gaudy girdle of porcupine quills and beads seemed trivial and out of harmony with the eagle nose, straight, powerful mouth, and the general sense of reserved power, which expressed the born commander of men.

There he stood -- the mightiest personality of a dying people whose camp-fires were burning in America before Solomon built the temple in Jerusalem -- native America incarnate, with knife and tomahawk and pipe, facing a stripling writer from a New York newspaper, and telling the simple story of his retreating race. To measure the progress of civilized man, it is only necessary to meet a savage like Sitting Bull, to whom the names of Homer, Socrates, Moses, Galileo, Bacon, Shakespeare, Dante, Michael Angelo, Beethoven, Alexander, Cromwell, and Napoleon were meaningless sounds. Imagine a man born on the American continent who never heard of Columbus or Washington or Lincoln! Not a man whose ancestry was debased and stunned by ages of slavery, but the descendant of free people, the heir of a continent teeming with riches.

This man was born thousands of years after Athens and Alexandria and Rome were built; yet he had roamed over the rich prairies, and the soil, his greatest heritage, had never spoken to him of the treasures germinating in its depths. Listening for the sounds of approaching conflict, he had not heard the voices of the unborn wheat and corn that were yet to conquer him and his ways. He was able to move a whole nation to battle, but a compass or a watch or a telegraph instrument or a newspaper was a mystery that baffled his imagination. The scribblings of the correspondent, which he regarded with disdain, suggested nothing to his mind of the irresistible power of publicity, that conqueror of armies and dynasties and civilizations. To him it was mere foolishness.

But there was one thing which he had learned, a thing that linked him with the greatest minds of all the ages -- the value of human liberty. Before that simple prize the wonders of science, literature, and art shrank into insignificance. It has been my lot to meet and talk with most of the great men of my own time, and I have observed that after all was said about methods and policies, the supreme goal of all sane effort was freedom. The noblest minds in all human history have finally come to Sitting Bull's rude creed. The painted nomad, ignorant of Luther, Bruce, Hampden, Washington, Kosciuszko or Toussaint, knew the supreme lesson of history -- compared to which other human knowledge is unimportant -- that nothing can compensate men for the loss of liberty, and that everything else can be endured but that.

I had paddled down the muddy waters of the Missouri with Paul Boynton, the adventurous traveller, who spent his time floating along the rivers of the world in an inflated rubber suit. The great Sioux war was over, and I had sat in the peace council at Fort Yates, where three thousand surrendered Indians were camped on the plain, and heard the great fighting chiefs turn orators. The story of Custer's last charge and his death was on every tongue. When Sitting Bull marched across the British frontier and yielded his warriors as prisoners of war, he was told that President Garfield would receive him in the White House at Washington, and hear from his own lips the grievances of his people. But Garfield had fallen, and was in his grave. President Arthur refused to allow the savage who was responsible for the slaughter of Custer and his men to go to Washington. Sitting Bull was sullen and revengeful. Warned by signs of discontent and restlessness among the young fighting men, the military authorities removed the angry old chief and his family to Fort Randall, hundreds of miles farther down the Missouri. There I found him with army pickets guarding his little camp of thirty-two tepees, around which Indian braves, squaws, and almost naked children sprawled in the sunlight.

There was silence in the tepee. Sitting Bull laid his tomahawk and knife on the ground, and began to fill his long pipe with tobacco and killikinick, the dried scrapings of willow bark. No one spoke. The chief looked at the fire, and took no notice of us until he had puffed at his pipe for a few moments. Then the pipe was passed around, and as each man smoked, Sitting Bull watched his face closely. When the ceremony was ended, the old leader gazed at the pink and violet flames flickering among the broken fagots, and pursed his lips. The wrinkles on his forehead grew deeper, and a look of shrewdness came into his dark face. Aboriginal America was about to utter its thoughts to the millions of men and women who brought gunpowder and Christianity from the continents beyond the seas. The chief put his thumbs together, as though he were comparing them -- an odd trick that I have noticed in other Sioux politicians -- and began.

"I have lived a long time, and I have seen a great deal, and I have always had a reason for everything I have done," he said, in a deep, low voice -- still staring thoughtfully into the fire. The listening Indians nodded their heads. "Every act of my life has had an object in view, and no man can say that I have neglected facts or failed to think."

He took a long pull at his pipe, and as the smoke glided from his lips he watched it musingly.

"I am one of the last chiefs of the independent Sioux nation," he said; "and the place I hold among my people was held by my ancestors before me. If I had no place in the world, I would not be here, and the fact of my existence entitles me to exercise any influence I possess. I am satisfied that I was brought into this life for a purpose; otherwise, why am I here?"

O ye men of books! Trace back that thought to the oldest writers until your searchings end in the mists of Mesopotamia and Asia, and see if there be anything in the ancients or moderns with a more tidal sweep of logic than the utterance of this unlettered North American savage.

"This land belongs to us, for the Great Spirit gave it to us when he put us here. We were free to come and go, and to live in our own way. But white men, who belong to another land, have come upon us, and are forcing us to live according to their ideas. That is an injustice; we have never dreamed of making white men live as we live.

"White men like to dig in the ground for their food. My people prefer to hunt the buffalo as their fathers did. White men like to stay in one place. My people want to move their tepees here and there to the different hunting grounds. The life of white men is slavery. They are prisoners in towns or farms. The life my people want is a life of freedom. I have seen nothing that a white man has, houses or railways or clothing or food, that is as good as the right to move in the open country, and live in our own fashion. Why has our blood been shed by your soldiers?"

Sitting Bull drew a square on the ground with his thumb nail. The Indians craned their necks to see what he was doing.

"There!" he said. "Your soldiers made a mark like that in our country, and said that we must live there. They fed us well, and sent their doctors to heal our sick. They said that we should live without having to work. But they told us that we must go only so far in this direction, and only so far in that direction. They gave us meat, but they took away our liberty. The white men had many things that we wanted, but we could see that they did not have the one thing we liked best, -- freedom. I would rather live in a tepee and go without meat when game is scarce than give up my privileges as a free Indian, even though I could have all that white men have. We marched across the lines of our reservation, and the soldiers followed us. They attacked our village, and we killed them all. What would you do if your home was attacked? You would stand up like a brave man and defend it. That is our story. I have spoken."

"Have you a dollar?" he asked.

"I have."

"I would like to have it."

When the silver coin was produced the chief thrust it into the bosom of his shirt.

"Have you another dollar?"

"Certainly."

"I would like to have that, too."

I gave him a second coin, which also disappeared in his shirt.

"Tobacco?"

A bag of fragrant birdseye followed the money.

"Ugh!" said the old man.

When I got into my canoe to resume my voyage down the Missouri, the chief came to the water's edge to see me off. He was dressed with some show of rough splendor, and was accompanied by his two fighting nephews. As I looked back I could see him standing on the gravel shore, his countenance as void of emotion as a bronze mask. It was the face of old America, unreadable in victory or defeat.

A man like Sitting Bull brings one face to face with original human nature. There was cruelty and cunning in him, but like Lord Bacon, the greatest philosopher since Plato, he was the product of his ancestry and surroundings. Bacon confessed, as Lord Chief Justice of England, that he had accepted bribes, but he asked his country to judge him by the official usages of that time. Sitting Bull slew innocent men and women, but he could point to the moral standards of his race for justification. Like Phocion, who saved Greece from the Persians, the Sioux leader had fought for his race, but unlike Phocion, he had not sat at the feet of Plato and Diogenes. He was not poisoned and thrown on alien soil for burial when he counselled peace for safety's sake, but he drank of the hemlock of defeat, and was killed in a brawl by a policeman.

* * * * *

Before many days my little canoe reached Fort Hale, and the next day I rode with the post surgeon over the prairie to the Crow Creek Indian Agency. We pricked gayly along a narrow trail on nimble ponies, and the man of medicine led the way, occasionally bursting into song: --

"Oh Jean Baptiste! pourquoi?
Oh Jean Baptiste! pourquoi?
Oh Jean Baptiste! pourquoi you grease
My little dog's nose with tar?"

The surgeon was in high spirits, and made his shaggy pony prance while he talked about the prison-like life of a frontier fort. How often I have seen these men of science plodding along in the dull routine of garrison duty, and chafing against the narrow restraints of military discipline, only to stand some day on the firing line among the dead and dying, seeking to save while all others seek to destroy, and without hope of glory!

Presently we could see signs of the Crow Creek Agency in the distance, and on the trail ahead a lonely figure moved on foot across the prairie. As we drew near I was surprised to see a tall girlish figure furnished forth in a silk dress, jaunty French bonnet, high-heeled shoes, and brown kid gloves. A daintier miss never trod the soil of that savage wilderness. As she tripped on before us we wondered what could have brought her there.

When the surgeon spurred his animal to pass the stranger she turned her head. It was an Indian girl. The surgeon bared his head and reined in his pony.

"Why, Zeewee!" he said, "what a picture you make on the prairie! What are you doing out here alone?"

The girl smiled, and unconsciously put her little gloved hand to her bonnet to straighten it. It was a face of singular refinement, although not beautiful. The nose was straight, the mouth tenderly curved, the brow broad and comely, the eyes dark and expressive, the skin smooth and dusky, and the splendid black hair banded above the delicately veined temples. As her lips parted she showed teeth as white as snow. There was something profoundly sad in the expression of the fresh young countenance.

"I am working among my people," she said in a tremulous voice.

"Poor Zeewee! it must be hard on you," muttered the surgeon.

"It is the will of God," said the Indian girl, simply. "I have been chosen, and I must go on to the end."

We rode on in silence for a few moments, and when Zeewee was a dot in the distance behind us, I heard the story of a martyr of American civilization.

It was the policy of the government to take the young children of Indian chiefs to academies in the East and, after educating them, send them back among their savage people as object lessons. Zeewee was the daughter of Don't-Know-How, a friendly chief. I saw her father's tepee. The Indian agent had allowed him to carry on a petty trading business, and some military wag had provided the chief's doorway with a sign inscribed "D. K. How, Trader." In her early childhood Zeewee was taken from her parents and placed in the Hampton Institute, in far-away Virginia.

In time the young Indian girl forgot the surroundings of her childhood. The filthy tepee, the wild dances, the painted braves, and the fearful nights on the frozen ground gradually faded from her mind. She remembered only that her father was a man of importance among his people, and that her mother loved her and moaned when she was taken away.

Slowly the Sioux maiden became an accomplished young lady, with a smattering of Latin and music and art, and a love for the feminine things of civilization. She had romantic ideas about her race. As she read the story of Mexico, she dreamed that her people were like the gentle Aztecs. The tales of the Moors in Granada fired her imagination. Her heart thrilled with pride at the thought that the noble blood of Carthage or of the lost tribes of Israel might be flowing in her veins; for history was full of arguments to prove that the Carthaginians and the wandering Jews had reached the Western continent. Zeewee nursed this sentiment. She met and associated with educated white girls, and the spirit of civilization grew bright and strong in her soul. Every vestige of the aboriginal instinct died out. She became as the daughters of the white race.

Her father? What was he like? Tall and noble and gracious? Her mother and sisters and brothers? She tried to recall some impression of her home. Her father was a chief, a leader, a man of wisdom and authority. Her mother was the daughter of a chief. Her ancestors had distinguished themselves in battle and in council. Her kinsmen were all of chieftain blood. They would meet her in the ancestral home on the mighty prairies, and talk to her about the splendid deeds and lofty traditions of their tribe.

Zeewee graduated with her class at the Hampton Institute. The time had come for her to go to her people. Years of study and association had developed in her a grace and dignity of manner rare even among the daughters of white men. Through the kindness of her Eastern friends, she was able to dress herself in the latest fashion. For hours she stood before her mirror arranging her little fineries, and wondering whether she was attired in a manner becoming the child of an ancient line of chieftains. Then she went by railway to Dakota, and crossed the plain to Crow Creek.

They led her to the entrance of her father's tepee. She stooped and entered. One glance at the squalid group of savages crouching about the fire revealed the awful gulf that was fixed between her and her people. Her eyes filled with tears.

"Father! Mother!" she cried passionately. "Speak to me!"

A chorus of grunts expressed the astonishment of the family. The old chief eyed the gloved and bonneted girl suspiciously.

"My daughter weeps," he said. "Is she unhappy?"

"No! no! no!" wailed Zeewee, throwing herself upon her father's breast, "but I feel so strange here."

The wrinkled mother looked at her daughter, and shrank back into her blanket. Zeewee turned to her brothers and sisters. They drew away timidly from the soft-voiced visitor, and stared at her silken skirt and gloves.

With a sob the girl sank upon the earthen floor, stripped the gloves from her hands, tore the bonnet from her head, loosened her black hair, and shook it out upon her shoulders.

"Brothers! Sisters!" she said gently. "I have come back to my own people, to live with you and die with you. Christ be my helper."

That night she slept under a blanket with her youngest sister. They cried themselves to sleep in each other's arms -- one because she was civilized, and the other because she was not.