The opening days of the big payment were warm with the lazy warmth of the mellow, golden hours of late October. The untilled hills of the reservation thrust themselves up into the autumn glare, unashamed of their poverty of soil. The Agency building nestled forlornly in a creek valley surrounded by the yellow, wrinkled hills.
In the early morning a lazy string of vehicles began to pour into the Agency from the dozen or more roads that outraged the compass with their crazy windings, and seamed the bronze face of the prairie with ugly scars. Carts, buggies, waggons, carriages, some of glaring newness, weighted down to the axles with squaws, papooses and the inevitable mortgage; others in an epileptic stage of decay, with the weary air of having borne the weight of outlawed paper for many moons; ponies, long-haired, and emaciated with many unconsoling feeds of post and halter, carrying at once upon their sawlike backs their sweating, heavy masters, and (heavier than these) the seeming consciousness of long-dishonoured promissory notes; these constituted the grotesque Republican procession that streamed into Little Omaha, as the Agency is called, on that morning in October.
It was as a tribal exodus. The entire tribe of twelve hundred odd men, women, and children was leaving its shacks and tepees that morning, in search of the minted eagles of the Government, just as, of old, they moved in a hungry body upon the trail of the bison.
As the vanguard of this grand but dilapidated army of the primitive world closed in upon the Agency, it was met by the vanguard of the greater commercial army of civilisation, and a wordy skirmish ensued. These were the inevitable collectors who hang about an Indian payment like a crowd of crows scenting a carcass. One might have heard such a conversation as this above the tumult of the meeting races:
“Well, Big Bear, goin’ to pay that note to-day?”
“I say [voice raised a key], are you goin’ to pay that note—_muska zhinga, wabugazee_ [money, note]?”
“Damn your black hide, Big Bear, you can talk as good as I can! I say, [voice raised to a shriek] if you don’t pay that note, I’ll come over to your place and take every dodgasted, straw-bellied _shonga_ [pony] you’ve got!”