A half-century of conflict. France and England in North America. Part ...

26 SEARCH FOR THE PACIFIC. [1742.them the Little Foxes, and on the fifteenth andseventeenth two villages of another unrecognizablehorde, named Pioya.From La V^rendrye's time toour own, this name "villages " has always been givento the encampments of the wandering people of theplains.All these nomadic communities joined them,and they moved together southward, till they reachedat last the lodges of the long-sought Horse Indians.They found them in the extremity of distress andterror.Their camp resounded with howls and waitings;and not without cause, for the Snakes, orShoshones, — a formidable people living farther westward,— had lately destroyed most of their tribe.The Snakes were the terror of that country. Thebrothers were told that the year before they haddestroyed seventeen villages, killing the warriorsand old women, and carrying off the young womenand children as slaves.None of the Horse Indians had ever seen thePacific; but they knew a people called Gens deI'Arc, or Bow Indians, who, as they said,had tradednot far from it. To the Bow Indians, therefore, thebrothers resolved to go, and by dint of gifts andpromises they persuaded their hosts to show themthe way.After marching southwestward for severaldays, they saw the distant prairie covered with thepointed buffalo-sldn lodges of a great Indian camp.It was that of the Bow Indians, who may have beenone of the bands of the western Sioux, — the predominantrace in this region. Few or none of them