Buchanan County bulletin. [volume] (Independence, Iowa) 1869-1891, 1872-12-06
INDIAN MATHEMATICS.
How Squatting Eear Played It on His
Comrades and How He was Planted.
[By Max Adcler.

How Squatting Eear Playod It on His
Comrades and How He was Planted.
[By Max Adelerl
During recent visit of a party
of Indians to the East, one of their
number, Squatting Bear, was OBJ
served to behave himself in very
remarkable and mysterious manner.
He separated himself from his com
panions Oh one occasion for several
hours, and was then seen returning
dragging q huge Saratoga trunk
behind him through the streets with
string. When he reached his
lodgings with the trunk the other
Indians were puzzled. Some of
them believed the trunk to be q
model for new kind of wigwam
with a Mansard roof, while others
conceived the idea that it was a
patent-tub ofsome peculiar sort, and
that Squatting Bear, in moment
of mental alteration, had been
seized with an inexplicablc and un-
precedented desire to wash hims elf.
The souls of the savages burned
with fiery Indignation, as they con-
templated the possibility IF this
revolutionary, enervating and de-
moralizing practice of the pale faces
by the noble red man. But when
they questioned Squatting Bear and
demonstrated with him, that incom
prehensible brave merely placed his
copper colored finger upon his burnt
lumber nose and winked solcmnly
with his right eye.
In the tribe, the brave who killed
the largest number Of enemies in
any given year, and secured the
usual trophies Of victory, was en-
TITLED to occupy the position of
chief. Squatting Bear was known
to have ardent aspirations for the
office, and he worked hard to win it.
For a whilc-a!ter his return he was
always foremost in every fight; and
when the scalps were counted
around the camp fire, he Invariably
had secured the greatest number.
Gradually, however, certain of the
braves were impressed with the
notion that Squatting's trophies
sometimes did not bear very cor
rect proportion to the ferocity Of
the contest or to the number of the
slain. Several times, after a brief
skirmish in which ten OF fifteen
were killed, Squatting would come
siding home with as many scalps
as there were dead men; at the same
time the other warriors would to.
ge,her have nearly as many more.
The braves thought it was queer,
but they did not give the subject
very serious attention until after
the massacre of a certain band of
emigrants which had passed by the
camp of the tribe. There were Just
twenty persons in the company, and
after the butchery several Indians
took the trouble to count the bodies
and keep tally with a butcher knife
upon the side Of a chip. That night,
when the scalps were numbered,
each brave had one or two apiece,
but Squatting Bear handed out ex-
actly torty-seven of the most beauti-
ful punches Of human hair that were
ever seen west Of the Mississippi.
The braves looked cross-cycd at
at each other and cleared their
throats. Two Of their number stole
out to the battle field again for the
purpose of counting the bodies, and
of ascertaining if this had been
menagerie with few double headed
persons in the party.
Yes, there lay exactly twenty
corpses; and, to make matters
worse, one Of them was a baldhead
ed man, who, for additional security
to his scalp, had run skate strap
over his head and buckled it under
his chin.
When they returned the entire
camp devoted itself to meditation
and calculation. Twenty men killed
and forty seven scalps in the posses
sion ola single brave, without count
ing those secured by other parti-
cipants in the contest! The more
the warriors pondered over this
fact the more perplexing it became.
a brave, while eating his supper,
and rejecting upon this problem,
would suddenly imagine he saw his
way clear, and he would stop, with
his mouth full Of baked dog, and fix
lis eyes upon the wall and think
desperately hard. But the solution
invariablc eludcd him. Then all of
them would glide behind their wig
vans and perform abstruse mathc-
atical calculations upon their fingers
jam the points into the sand and do
hard sums out Of their aboriginal
arithmetic. And they would tear
around through the Indian rule of
three, and struggle fingers; and
they would get sticks and so through
their own kind of vulgar fractions,
and wrestle with something they
believed to be Il multiplication table.
But in vain. Forty scalps off
twenty heads! 1t seemed impossi-
bic.
They tried it with Algebra, aud
let the number OF heads equal C and
the number of scalps equal y, and
they multiplied a into q and sub
tracted every letter of the alphabet
in succession from the result until
their brains reeled, but still the
mystery remained unsolved.
At last secret council was held,
and it was determined that Squat
ting Bear must have some powerful
and wonderful charm which enabled
him to perform such miracles, and
all hands agreed to investigate the
matter upon the first opportunity.
So the next week there was another
fight, in which four persons were
killed, and that night Squatting ac-
tually had the audacity to rush out
1877 scalps, and to ask those benign
ted savages, sitting around their
fire, to believe that he had snatched
all that hair from those tour heads.
1t was too much-much too much;
they seized him and drove white