On winter evenings in an Indian camp, “storytelling was the most popular amusement next to dancing.” Richard Irving Dodge visited many camps in his years on the western plains. And many times he joined the crowd in a lodge (teepee) to listen to stories.
“A good story-teller was a man of importance among the Plains Indians,” said Dodge. “These stories are as marvelous as the imagination of the inventor can create, bumbling gods and men, fabulous monsters and living animals, the possible and impossible, in the most heterogeneous confusion. There is little point or wit in them, and scarcely any dramatic power, except the narrator be telling of some personal event, when he also acts the scene with all possible exaggeration.”
From: Our Wild Indians: Thirty-three Years of Personal Experience Among the Red Men of the Great West by Richard Irving Dodge, A.D. Worthington and Company, Hartford, CT, 1882, page 336.
