Story Of The Peace Pipe
Two young men were out strolling one night talking of love affairs. They
passed around a hill and came to a little ravine or coulee. Suddenly
they saw coming up from the ravine a beautiful woman. She was painted
and her dress was of the very finest material.
"What a beautiful girl!" said one of the young men. "Already I love her.
I will steal her and make her my wife."
"No," said the other.
The young woman approached and held out a pipe which she first offered
to the sky, then to the earth and then advanced, holding it out in her
extended hands.
"I know what you young men have been saying; one of you is good; the
other is wicked," she said.
She laid down the pipe on the ground and at once became a buffalo cow.
The cow pawed the ground, stuck her tail straight out behind her and
then lifted the pipe from the ground again in her hoofs; immediately she
became a young woman again.
"I am come to give you this gift," she said. "It is the peace pipe.
Hereafter all treaties and ceremonies shall be performed after smoking
it. It shall bring peaceful thoughts into your minds. You shall offer it
to the Great Mystery and to mother earth."
The two young men ran to the village and told what they had seen and
heard. All the village came out where the young woman was.
She repeated to them what she had already told the young men and added:
"When you set free the ghost (the spirit of deceased persons) you must
have a white buffalo cow skin."
She gave the pipe to the medicine men of the village, turned again to a
buffalo cow and fled away to the land of buffaloes.
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