Book excerpt: Excerpt from Twenty-First Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1899-1900 The second act, a buffalo dance, was one of the best on this eventful night. Several men wearing helmets representing buffalo heads, with lateral horns and shaggy sheepskins. And wool painted black hanging down their backs, entered the room. They carried zigzag slats of wood, symbolic of lightning, and performed a characteristic dance to the beat of a drum. These buffalo personations were accompanied by a masked man and boy representing eagles, who danced before them, uttering calls in imitation of birds. The same buffalo dance, but more complicated, was celebrated earlier in the winter in the public plaza of W'alpi, at which time the men were accompanied by girls dressed as Buffalo maids who did not appear in the second act in the kivas. No representation of the eagles was seen in this public dance. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.