Project Gutenberg's The Prairie Schooner, by William Francis Hooker
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Title: The Prairie Schooner
Author: William Francis Hooker
Release Date: August 14, 2012 [EBook #40497]
Language: English
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The Prairie Schooner
By William Francis Hooker
Copyright, 1918
By SAUL BROTHERS
Chicago
To My Wife
MAMIE TARBELL HOOKER
A Pioneer of the
Jim River (Dakota) Valley
[Illustration: Illustration and Patent Color Process by J. D. Johnsen]
CONTENTS.
Page
Introduction 11
I. Letters Pass Between Old Pards 15
II. Trains That Run Without Rails 27
III. Hunton and Clay--Bull-Train Magnates 43
IV. Guarding an Overland Freight Outfit 57
V. Rattlesnakes and Redskins 67
VI. Belated Grace for a Christmas Dinner 75
VII. The Fate of One-Eyed Ed. 85
VIII. Track-Layers Fought Redskins 99
IX. "Bill" Hickok, City Marshal 105
X. When Cheyenne Was Young 113
XI. The Lost Indian at Bedtick Creek 119
XII. A She-Bear and Her Cub 129
XIII. A Kick From a Playful Bullock--and a Joke 135
XIV. The Indian and the Trousers 143
XV. There's a Reason; This Is It! Conclusion 149
INTRODUCTION
When the Union Pacific Railroad was completed from Omaha, Nebraska, to
Ogden, Utah, it passed through a territory about as barren of business
as one can imagine. It apparently was a great Sahara, and in fact some
of the territory now growing bumper crops of alfalfa, grains and fruits,
was set down in school text-books in the 70's as the "Great American
Desert."
Its inhabitants were, outside of the stations on the railroad, largely
roaming bands of Indians, a few hundred soldiers at military posts, some
buffalo and other hunters, trappers, a few freighters, and many outlawed
white men.
The railroad had no short line feeders, and there was, in the period of
which I write, no need for them sufficient to warrant their
construction. There were military posts scattered along the North
Platte, and other rivers to the north, and the government had begun, as
part of its effort to reconcile the Red Man to the march of civilization
started by the Iron Horse, to establish agencies for the distribution of
food in payment to the tribes for lands upon which they claimed
sovereignty. These oases in the then great desert had to be reached with
thousands of tons of flour, bacon, sugar, etc., consequently large
private concerns were formed and contracts taken for the hauling by
ox-teams of the provisions sent to the soldiers as well as the Indians.
The ox was the most available and suitable power for this traffic for
the reason that he required the transportation of no subsistence in the
way of food, and was thoroughly acclimated. Usually he was a Texan--a
long horn--or a Mexican short horn with short stocky legs, although the
Texan was most generally used, and was fleet-footed and built almost on
the plan of a shad.
Both breeds were accustomed to no food other than the grasses of the
country, upon which they flourished. These included the succulent bunch
grass.
Oxen were used in teams of five, six and seven yokes and hauled large
canvas-covered wagons built for the purpose in Missouri, Wisconsin,
Illinois and Indiana. In the larger transportation outfits each team
hauled two wagons, a lead and a trailer, and frequently were loaded with
from 6,500 to 8,000 pounds of freight. These teams were driven by men
who were as tough and sturdy as the oxen.
Most of the freighting was done in the spring, summer and fall, although
several disastrous attempts were made to continue through the midwinter
season to relieve food shortages at the army posts.
It may seem strange, but it is nevertheless true, that Indians
frequently attacked the very wagon trains that were hauling food to
them, in Wyoming and Western Nebraska. Perhaps they were the original
anarchists; anyway, they often tried--seldom successfully--to destroy
the goose that laid the golden egg, but the course of civilization's
stream never was seriously turned, for it flowed rapidly onward, and
between 1870 and 1885, the country was quite thoroughly transformed from
a wild and uninhabited territory to one of civilization and great
commercial productivity.
Cattle ranches with their great herds came first, then sheep, and by
degrees the better portions of the lands, where the sweet grasses grew,
and even on the almost bare uplands when water was made available by
irrigation projects, were tilled. Settlements followed quickly--towns
with schools and churches; then branch railroads, the development of the
mines of gold, silver, coal, etc., all came in natural order. And
finally, at a comparatively recent date, rich fields of oil were
discovered and made to yield millions of gallons for the world's market
and millions in wealth.
It is difficult to realize that the now great territory was, in the day
of men still active, regarded as of little or no value--the home of
murderous, wandering tribes of savages in a climate and soil unfitted
for agriculture and containing little else of commercial value.
But science and enterprising men and governments have wrought almost a
miracle.
Go back with me to the days of the prairie schooner before the Wild West
was really discovered, and let me try to entertain you with just a
glimpse of things that are in such wonderful contrast to those of today.
The freight trains with ox-team power have vanished, never to return,
and with them most of the men who handled them.
The "color" of what follows is real, gathered when the Wild West _was_
wild; and I make no excuse for its lack of what an Enos R. Mills or a
Walter Pritchard Eaton would put in it, for they are naturalists while I
am merely a survivor of a period in the development and upbuilding of a
great section of the golden west.
In relating incidents to develop certain phases of pioneer life real
names of persons and localities have not always been used; and in some
of the narratives several incidents have been merged.
CHAPTER I
LETTERS PASS BETWEEN OLD PARDS.
_My Dear Friend_:
Can you put me in correspondence with any of the old boys we met when
the country was new, out in Wyoming? * * * Of the Medicine Bow range, or
Whipple, the man I gave the copper specimens to? * * *
Have you forgotten the importance you felt while walking up and down the
long line of bovines, swinging your "gad" and cursing like a mate on a
river boat? You looked bigger to me than a railroad president when you
secured that job, as you used to say, breaking on a bull-train. I should
say you were an engineer, but I suppose you know best. Those were happy
days. When I recall the fool things we did to satisfy a boy's desire for
adventure, I wonder that we are alive. How we avoided the scalping
knife; escaped having our necks broken, or being trampled to death under
the feet of herds of buffalo is a mystery to me. * * *
When the building of the Union Pacific road checked the buffaloes in
their passage from summer to winter feeding grounds, and they were
banked up along the line near Julesburg in thousands, I recall the
delight we took in watching them "get up and get." What clouds of dust
they would kick up when they got down to business! And such dust as the
Chalk Bluff would make never entered the eyes or lungs of man elsewhere.
Weren't we whales when we could divide or turn a herd? And how we would
turn tail-to, "spur and quirt" for our lives if the bunch did not show
signs of swerving from their course. How a cow-pony can carry a man
safely over such treacherous ground as the dog-towns is almost a
miracle.
O! to have my fill of antelope steak or buffalo "hump" broiled on a cone
of buffalo chips! Nothing better ever entered my mouth on the plains.
The soothing song of the lone night-herder of the bull-train as he
circles and beds his stock is not more conducive to sweeter slumbers
than we enjoyed by the rippling streams in the hills of Wyoming.
The difficulty we had in boiling beans until done in so high an
altitude; our hunt for a gun at old Dale Creek where "Shorty" Higgins
died suddenly; the fool act on my part when, afoot and alone, I
recovered the horse the Comanches had stolen from us. I wish we might
corral some of our old-time friends and go over the past before we leave
this land, "for when we die we will be a long time dead."
The wild horse that roamed the West, among which was the stallion who so
valiantly guarded his harem on the Laramie Plains, was a model for a
Landseer. The great herds of buffalo that looked like shadows cast on
the plains by clouds passing the sun and the myriads of passenger
pigeons, are among the things that man will never see again, and as read
from the chronicles of history a few years hence, will be classed with
the Jonah and the Whale story.
Old Man, when convenient, write me a long letter recalling some of the
old days, for--
"I'm growing fonder of my staff,
I'm growing dimmer in my eyes,
I'm growing fainter in my laugh,
I'm growing deeper in my sighs;
I'm growing careless in my dress,
I'm growing frugal with my gold,
I'm growing wise--I'm growing--yes,
I'm growing old."
Sincerely yours,
_VAN_.
* * * * *
The reply:
_My Dear Old Pard_:
Your note concerning the events of long ago out on the Laramie Plains
and the Harney flats shoots across my vision events in the Cache de La
Poudre (the Poodre), the Chugwater country, old Cheyenne, Sherman, Fort
Laramie, Fetterman, Camp Carlin, both Plattes, the Medicine Bow waters
and range, Allen's "Gold Room," McDaniel's hurdy-gurdy, the
dust-stirring, dust-laden buffalo east of Chalk Bluffs, the deer and
antelope of the whole Wyoming territory, the sage-hens, and I don't know
what not.
It makes me stop and lope back into the sagebrush. It makes me climb the
mountain sides and urge the bulls to fill their piñon yokes, tighten the
chains, and hurry along the four or five tons of bacon or flour or
shelled corn in gunny-sacks that Uncle Sam wants delivered somewhere
over the range, across the desert sweeps, through cactus-grown, prickly
pear sprinkled wastes, on through the dog-towns, in the heavy sand
sifting through the spokes, and falling off in a spiral fount from the
slow-turning hub.
Ah, yes, old pard, and as I whack my bulls in the train that runs
without rails to the top of a long divide, I look for three things:
water, smoke and Indians.
There were no railroads north of Cheyenne--nothing but the
"bull-trains." There away on the edge of the horizon, over the yellow
bunch grass, cured by the sun, is a strip of green. It is box-elder, and
underbrush. Standing out here and there like grim sentinels on guard are
the big, always dead and leafless cottonwoods, white as graveyard
ghosts, day or night. It seems to be only a flat surface haul to this
refreshing looking strip of green, and, as I have stopped the whole
wagon-train by making this observation, and the wagon boss is moving my
way on a big mule, I tap the off leader, who is thirty odd feet away,
with my long lash and yell:
"Whoa, haw, Brownie," but not too loud at first; just an encouraging
word or two, and then string 'em out. My leaders are light of feet and
built like running horses. The pointers--or middle yokes--come in
reluctantly, but I attend to that, and with the butt end of my stock,
jab the near wheeler in the ribs, and away we go.
But, old pard, inside of three minutes my strip of green is gone! In its
place is the quivering, broiling sun over the yellow bunch-grass; the
ashen stalks of the sage seem never to have had a drop of sap in
them--everything is dead. Even the jack-rabbit that stops for a look
seems bedraggled and forlorn, but I whistle, pick up a moss agate, throw
it in my jockey box, and jog along, for the surface is now hard as a
stone, though off ahead there I will unwind my lash and send its
stinging thongs to the backs of my noble beasts, touching only selected
spots where the hair has been worn away until the surface looks like the
head of the drum in a village band.
Yes, I know they used to think us bullwhackers were brutes, but they (an
occasional tenderfoot) only saw the surface. They had never been
initiated; they didn't know the secrets. It was only when the load just
had to be yanked to the top without doubling teams or dropping trailers,
that we used the undercut which sent the long V-shaped popper upon the
tender spots of the belly, and then, Pard, the thing looked worse
because the Comanche-like language we hurled with it was so unusual to
ears that had been trained east of the Missouri River. It sure was
picturesque language!
But we were all day reaching that green belt strung like a ribbon across
the face of central Wyoming, and from the time we first hove in sight of
it, until we pulled the pins from the steamy yokes, and dropped the
hickory bows at our feet, it appeared and disappeared so often that I
wonder that both man and beast did not go mad. However, inasmuch as this
was a daily programme for me for several years, I know that man can
stand a whole lot of hardship, if he only thinks so.
And then ring in the change from the desert heat of midsummer to trifles
like thirty below in winter along the same landscape, when you see the
ghostly cottonwoods and anticipate your arrival among them some hours
later. Won't there be a roaring fire? And beans? And bacon? And pones of
bread for everyone? Wet stockings piled on inverted yokes or held on
pieces of brush, are drying, we are nursing our chilblains and
discussing the incidents of the day's drive, and not a weakling in the
outfit. Every man has been frozen or soaked all day, but he's as happy
as a lark. Sleep? You bet! You know it; but if you and I tell our
friends around our comfortable firesides now or in the lobby of an
onyx-walled Waldorf-Astoria, Belmont or Biltmore, that we just kicked a
hole in the snow, rolled into our blankets and dreamed of being roasted
to death, they would look at your well-shaven face, my biled shirt, and
then at your highly polished shoes, then at my black derby, and, dammit,
I believe they might be justified in forming the opinion that neither
one of us had ever been deprived of breakfast food, or bath tubs, or a
manicure artist's services.* * *
You want to know if I can locate any of the old gang. Sure! Some sleep
in the sidehills along the swift-flowing waters of the North Platte, one
or two are parts of gravel beds down on the wild meadows--or what were
the wild meadows of hundreds of square miles between the North Platte
and the Poudre; but not a few, like you and I, stalk abroad on the face
of the earth--cheating first, as we did, tribes of Sioux, Arapahoe,
Cheyenne and the Comanches who swept up across Kansas and Nebraska;
escaping the blizzards, periods of starvation, cold, heat, fire, water,
whisky, and finally the surgeon's knife. I tell you, the world only
thinks it knows a thing or two about how the human body is made, and how
much it can stand. But to answer your questions:
Jim Bansom, the last time I knew of him, in 1875, was headed east with a
fine span of hosses and a fair-to-middlin' wagon.
Don't know where he went and don't know what he did with the hosses or
the wagon! 'Taint none o' my bizness, neither! In those days it wasn't
customary to be too gol-darned inquisitive about such things, unless
you owned the hosses or the wagon, or a bit, or a halter, or something
of that sort you happened to loan to the outfit; and then, of course,
you could take the trail if you wanted to.
* * * * *
Sam Smith, old U. P. conductor, walked into my office a while ago, and,
as he closed the door behind him, I said, "Hello, Sam; haven't seen you
since 1875, but you're the same Sam!" Then I told him my name.
And then Sam gasped and acted like maybe he might pull a gun, thinking
me an impostor; because when Sam saw me the last time, stretched out in
his caboose on the old mountain division of the U. P., and the train
sailing down the toboggan that slid us into Laramie City, past Tie
Siding and old Fort Saunders, my hair was black, and I had a different
look.
Maybe I looked bad. I guess I did, for I carried a gun and a belt of
forty rounds, and a butcher knife in a scabbard, just as we all did, for
it was the custom of the country; and I had long hair, too, and it was
matted and dirty, mixed with pitch that came from camp-fires in the
hills. No doubt I looked wretched, but, old Pard, I didn't even feel
that way. I felt good, and I was as harmless as a pigeon.
But I said something about a hatband of rattlers' rattles that I gave
his little girl at Cheyenne, as I rode up to his door aboard a cayuse,
and that settled it. We talked about snow-sheds, the Sherman hill, once
the highest railroad point in the world, and of old times in general.
But what's the use? When you come to New York, I'll meet you at the
Waldorf and we'll talk about it all night, and wish the buffalo were
still there, and the sagebrush, and the bull-trains, and the other
things undisturbed by civilization. So long....
_BILL._
New York, August, 1917.
[NOTE--The above letters are from the author's files. "Van" is a
multi-millionaire manufacturer living in a middle-western state.
For several years his pastime was buffalo hunting and "roughing it"
in the wild and woolly west.
The author, when a boy of 16, was developing a case of tuberculosis
of the lungs, and to escape the fate that had overtaken other
members of his family, took Horace Greeley's advice, went west, and
grew up with the country. He had been a clerk in a railroad office,
and still is in the railroad business in New York City, more than
forty years after the events related in the following chapters. He
is the only survivor of a family of fourteen, including all of his
own children, eight in number.]
CHAPTER II
TRAINS THAT RAN WITHOUT RAILS.
Before railroads were built in the country west of the Missouri River
there was, nevertheless, considerable doing in the transportation line.
And even after the Union Pacific was built from Omaha to Ogden to
connect with the Central Pacific, which carried the rails to the Golden
Gate, most of the transportation of the then great Wild West, in the
mountains, on the plains and the "Great American Desert," was done by
ox-teams. These were run in trains of from ten to fifty or sixty teams,
the teams consisting usually of from five to seven yokes of oxen and
lead and trail wagons built for the purpose.
These wagons were called prairie schooners, because they were supplied
with canvas coverings. The first of these, made in St. Louis, were
called "Murphys," and were provided with iron axles. Later many of them
were made in Indianapolis, Chicago, and Kenosha, Wis., the latter known
as the Bain. The Schuttler and the Bain wagons were almost as big and
substantial as a box car and were well painted and put together to stand
hard knocks on mountain "breaknecks" or in Bad Land sands.
The lead wagon would carry an average of 6,500 pounds, while the
trailer--fastened to the lead by a short tongue--had a capacity of
perhaps two tons. In a sandy place or on a mountain road, the
bullwhacker (teamster) would slacken his team, pull a coupling pin from
an iron half-circle arrangement on the axle of his lead wagon, drop his
trailer to one side of the road and proceed to the top of the hill, if
in the mountains, or to an "island" of hard ground in the desert, unhook
his wheelers and go back for the trailer. Sometimes a "bull outfit"
would spend a whole day doing this. Lead wagons were parked one at a
time and the trailers brought on later and hooked up. These parkings
were in the shape of an oval, called a corral, a narrow opening being
left only at each end.
Inside this corral, when it came time to yoke up, the cattle were driven
in by the herders, if the camp had been for over night or a long mid-day
stop. Then the bullwhackers, carrying the heavy piñon yokes over their
left shoulders, hickory bows in their right hands and iron or wooden
pins with leather strip fastened to them in their mouths, would seek out
their teams, yoking them together and leading them to their wagons.
When a "whacker" had his "wheelers," or pole oxen, in place, he would
bring on his "pointers," and the rest, including the leaders. The
wheelers were always the heavyweights, old and trained, and able to hold
back the load or their unruly teammates until the whackers could throw
on a brake or "rough lock," the last named a log chain fastened at one
end to the wagon, thrown through the wheel spokes in such a way as to be
between the ground and the wheel on the "near rear hind wheel" of the
lead wagon.
New cattle just being trained to yoke were always put in the center of
the team, where they were easily managed with the assistance of the
"leaders," which were always light weights and most always long-horns
from Texas--long horns, long legs and bodies, thin as a razorback hog.
These leaders were always the best broken oxen, and would respond to the
low-spoken word of "haw" or "gee," especially if the word were uttered
in the peculiar musical tone of the whacker which cannot be described in
print, not only because it is impossible to convey sound in that manner
but because the language that goes with the music--the request to gee or
haw--would not be pleasant reading. Alone, the leaders would trot like
horses.
The average person outside of Texas and the southwest and some of the
western states has a mental picture, perhaps, of the Texas steer of the
long-horn variety. Those who lived thirty or forty years ago, even in
the East, remember him as a member of the quadruped family consisting
largely of horn, for it was not an infrequent thing to see him in a
cattle car on a sidetrack. He was, as a matter of fact, also entitled to
a reputation for his legs, for they were unusually long. His body, too,
was slim, and he never was fat for the reason that while free to roam
the ranges at will he devoted most of his time to using his horns in
goring his mates and neglected to eat. He raced about from place to
place, whereas, if he had no horns he would have been a peaceful animal
and consequently much more valuable for the market.
The old-time Texas steer often was as fleet-footed as a Kentucky
racehorse of the thoroughbred variety, and it took a good horse to catch
him when he made up his mind to run.
Nevertheless, thousands of these Texas steers were broken to yoke, and
used in overland transportation; and once broken they were good workers,
even though their horns were always in the way, and the cause of a great
deal of trouble in a herd.
While I have no authority for the statement, I believe practical
dehorning began with the bullwhackers of the plains, for they frequently
bored holes in the horns which in a few weeks caused the horns to drop
off. Then it was noted that if the dehorned cattle were kept separate
from those with horns, the dehorned ones, even when working hard every
day, took on flesh and were better workers. Finally nearly all the
work-oxen were dehorned, and they were as meek and quiet as lambs.
The whacker always began his orders to his bulls in a low tone,
increasing it as the necessity for action presented itself, and ending
in a string of oaths that would make an old-time Mississippi steamboat
mate ashamed of his reputation. Frequently teams were stalled on a high
hill or in the sand, when it would be necessary to gee the team of seven
yokes at an almost right angle, with chains between each yoke slackened
and with "wheelers" filling their yokes. Then the whacker would walk out
half way to his leaders and soothingly coax them to come haw--toward
him--on a trot, until all the chains between the other yokes were
tightened. By this time, however, Mr. Whacker was back to his wheelers,
perhaps punching the near one in the ribs, and then throwing his
eighteen or twenty foot lash over the backs of any of the yokes that
were not clawing the sand properly. In this way the men often worked for
days at a time, making sometimes only a few rods by each repetition of
the operation. Then again, the wagon boss would order a doubling-up
process and two whackers and fourteen yokes of oxen would work on one
pair of wagons, taking them along perhaps a mile, and then returning,
repeat the process until the bad road was left behind.
This was transportation in the old days, and "trains" of this kind first
hauled the heavy traffic from Leavenworth and Nebraska City to the
Pacific and intermediate settlements in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming.
After the Union Pacific was built this bullwhacker transportation
increased, especially in the country between Utah and the Missouri
River, in both directions away from the railroad, for the government had
a line of forts on the North Platte River and Indian Agencies were
established in Western Nebraska, Wyoming and what is now South Dakota.
Two of these agencies, Red Cloud, on White River, and Spotted Tail,
forty miles to the north, were big traffic points. Train loads of bacon,
flour, sugar and other things were hauled to these agencies on
government contract, the provisions being in payment to the Sioux and
other tribes for the land they occupied near the North Platte River.
Along the Platte there were forts--two famous in their day--Fort Laramie
at the junction of the Platte and Laramie Rivers, and Fort Fetterman,
one hundred miles west of Fort Laramie, on the Platte at Lapariel Creek.
Soldiers here depended upon the "bull outfits" for their provisions,
nearly all being hauled in over mountain range and plain by contractors.
Those were wild and woolly days, and the man who lived the life of
out-of-doors was a rugged, devil-may-care, hungry, healthy, happy
fellow. He knew how to face a freezing blizzard, or a baking sun without
flinching; he knew how to take care of himself with a minimum of
discomfort under the most adverse circumstances. He was afraid of
nothing. It wouldn't do otherwise. He was there, usually beyond the arm
of any law other than ordinances made and provided by himself and
companions and enforced by the same law-givers. Stealing was a worse
crime than life-taking. There never was an excuse for the first, but
nearly always one could be trumped up for the latter. To take a man's
horse was worse than cold-blooded murder; to rob him of his gun or his
blankets was equally as bad a crime. But if he had been cheated in a
game of "freeze out," or called a name that reflected upon his origin it
was not uncommon for him to become judge and executioner then and there.
So men who engaged in this early day transportation of food and fodder
for soldiers and their mounts and for the followers of Sitting Bull, Old
Red Cloud and other chiefs, were careful in their social intercourse,
and when the harsh word was passed, as frequently was the case, it was
no uncommon thing for men to settle their score with pistols; and the
winner in these duels seldom, if ever, was punished. But a cold-blooded
murder--a wanton killing--was never tolerated. In a fight with pistols
it was always considered that the man who did the killing was justified.
Unlike the present day fliers, bull trains did not run on schedules,
although there was a pretense of regularity about the day's routine, and
it was about as follows:
At break of day the night herder who had been out with the bulls all
night--it is always daybreak to him whether three o'clock or
five--drives his herd into the corral, usually singing some refrain of
his own composition, but always having for its motive the same that
animates the pestiferous alarm clock set by a master to disturb the
slumber of a tired servant. However, a half hour before the herder
appears the cook and his helper, both bullwhackers, doing their turn of
a week, have been on the job with the coffee and bacon, and as soon as
the herder sounds his first note, the cook takes up the song, which is
perhaps:
Bacon in the pan,
Coffee in the pot;
Get up and get it--
Get it while it's hot.
And then, and it is always so, some of the lively stock, as it
approaches the corral, takes the notion that there is some nice sweet
buffalo bunch grass to the rear that looks better than a day's work, and
there is a bolt often approaching a stampede. Curses? You never heard
the like, for the wagon boss and an assistant are already in their
saddles helping the herder. If you tried to sleep just a minute longer
it would be impossible, therefore you roll out from your bed on the
ground, fold up your blankets, tie them with a strap and throw them on
your trail wagon.
Coffee and bacon are swallowed in haste, and if you are like the
majority, you grab a piece of bacon and a chunk of bread, bang them
together into a huge sandwich and put them in the jockey box of your
wagon for a lunch at eight or nine o'clock.
Yoking and stringing out the oxen is the next operation, and a short
one in a well regulated outfit. Twenty minutes, usually, from the time
the bulls are driven in, the lead team is moving, and when the "outfit,"
as every train is called, is well under way, the lead wagon is perhaps a
half mile from the last one, which is the mess wagon, containing the
provisions, cooking utensils, levers for raising a load of four or five
tons, the iron jacks, extra tires, coils of rope, pulleys, wheels, extra
spokes, bars of iron, and almost always a small forge--a regular
wrecking outfit.
In hot summer weather on fair roads a bull train would make four or five
miles before the sun was high enough to burn--usually nine o'clock.
Then, if the camp was to be a "wet" one--at a creek, river or
spring--there would be a "layover" until four o'clock in the afternoon,
during which time the boys could sleep under a wagon, wash their
clothes, or if in a creek or river bottom, shoulder a gun and look for
moccasin, lodge pole or bear tracks.
All day long, however, the men who were on the cook trick would make
bread in Dutch ovens. And let me tell you, no bull outfit ever stopped
for a long mid-day rest without putting on a huge kettle of beans, for
the army or white bean was the staple food in those days; and there was
always, on these long mid-day stops, plenty of soup.
Perhaps one of the boys in his meanderings up or down the creek would
bag a deer. If he wandered out upon the plain he was sure of an
antelope, if he was a good shot. The deer kept to the trees along the
rivers and the hills, while the antelopes' territory was the open plain,
hard to get at unless the plain were rolling, and the hunter could be in
the right place as regards the wind.
Sometimes there were poker games, usually freeze-out, which the men
played with plug tobacco cut up into small cubes. Others would spend
their time braiding whips or mending clothing.
The bullwhacker's whip not only made a tenderfoot open his eyes with
wonder, but it usually shocked him. It was something he had never seen
before, and if he had been told that a man of ordinary strength would be
able to wield it he would have been decidedly incredulous.
Differing from a cowboy's or herder's whip, the bullwhip lash was
attached to a stalk of hickory or white ash three feet long upon which
the whacker could firmly plant both hands. The lash at the butt, which
was attached to the stick by a soft strip of buckskin, formed in a loop
or swivel, frequently was more than an inch thick. These lashes were
from eighteen to more than twenty feet long and were graduated in
thickness from this great bulk to the tip, which was the thickness of a
lead pencil. The number of strands in a bullwhip were also graduated. At
the butt there were as many strands as the maker--usually the
bullwhacker--could weave, often fourteen. At the tip, this number was
reduced to six. The top, and down to six or eight feet from the end, the
whip was made of leather, often old boot tops. The rest was of tough
buckskin or elkskin. But on the very tip of the whip--the business
end--was a "popper" of buckskin cut in the shape of a long V, the bottom
end of the V running into a strand which was braided into the tip.
The bullwhacker, when using this instrument, first threw it out before
him upon the ground; then by the use of all his strength he swung it in
over his head, to the right, often whirling it several times before he
let it go upon the back of the bull he wanted to reach.
To the man who never saw this operation before, there was a shock, for
as the whip landed on the bull the popper made a roar like the report of
a cannon.
As a matter of fact the bull was uninjured, unless the bullwhacker was
careless and allowed his popper to strike a tender spot, the nose, an
eye or the belly.
It was almost a crime for a bullwhacker to cut a bull and draw the
blood, and he seldom did it unless his popper had been wet and then
dried. The spot usually aimed for was the hip, and bulls that had been
in service any length of time had a spot on the rump that was hairless,
resembling the head of a drum. But the spot was tough. The noise of the
popper, however, was what startled the team and caused it to "dig in."
Frequently in the summer the afternoon drive lasted until ten or eleven
o'clock, especially if there was a moon. You cannot imagine a more
impressive, weird, wild sight. The shadows, the rattle of the wagons,
perhaps the scream of a night bird or a wild cat--maybe the zip of an
arrow from a redskin's bow, or the report of a gun, all calculated to
keep even the hardened bullwhacker on his mettle. And for this the
bullwhacker got $75 to $100 a month and "grub." He usually spent his
money at the end of his trip much after the habit of the sailor who
rounds the Horn.
In the cold weather the hardships were many. There were, remember, no
bridges and the roads crossed numerous streams, all of which had to be
forded; and there was but one way to cross, and that was to wade and
guide a team.
Usually the heavy freighting was done before December, but often it was
necessary to fight through blizzards and zero weather. It was this kind
of work that tried the soul of even the hardy bullwhacker, and not
infrequently his hands, feet, ears or face were frozen. It was hard on
the cattle, too, although it was almost always possible to find plenty
of good feeding ground of buffalo grass, which grew in heavy bunches and
was very sweet in its dry state, for the wind usually kept places bare.
If not, the bulls would nose it out from under several inches of snow
and manage to get something approaching a meal. Otherwise, they went
hungry, for no feed of any kind was ever carried for them.
Indians, usually, were too lazy to hunt the white man in winter, so
there was seldom any trouble from this source after the first snowfall.
But when the grass was green it was different, especially in the
mountains or foothills. Redskins seldom fought a real battle in the
open. To the bullwhacker he was nearly always an invisible foe, shooting
his arrows or his gun from behind a rock, or from the top of a bluff,
well out of range himself. When the Indians were known to be following
an outfit it was common practice to keep a couple of horsemen outriders
on each side of the train where possible. Frequently bull trains were
obliged to corral and put up a fight, and usually the Indian lost.
CHAPTER III
HUNTON AND CLAY, BULL-TRAIN MAGNATES.
Among the bull-train magnates of the early 70's were Charley Clay, said
to be a relative of the famous statesman, and Jack Hunton. They were
pioneers of Wyoming who have no doubt been quite forgotten, though in
their day none in the then sparsely settled frontier territory was
better known. They were not only pioneer freighters, but among the very
first of the daring frontiersmen to go beyond the limits of
civilization, and into the stamping grounds of the warlike tribes of
Indians to establish homes. Both built ranches in the Chugwater country
along the trail leading from Cheyenne to Fort Laramie. Clay's log house
was directly under one of the famous landmarks of the territory--chimney
rock--a chalky butte formed, geologists say, by erosion. Hunton built
his ranch on the northwest end of the Chugwater at a point near Goshen's
Hole, a great basin, where the Laramie trail wheeled directly north to
Eagle's Nest, another butte. At Hunton's a trail less used branched off
to the northwest, across what was then considered a desert and reaching
Fort Fetterman, perhaps 125 miles away on the North Platte river at
Lapariel creek. This part of Wyoming is now, I understand, a vast
wheatfield. To a bullwhacker of the early 70's this is almost a miracle.
Both Hunton and Clay used their ranches to range their work cattle in
off seasons, although both had beef herds and lots of horses. These
ranch houses were protected from Indians by less than a dozen men at any
time; but these men were fighters and were known to be such by the
chiefs of the tribes that frequently roamed the territory south of the
Platte, although in a treaty with the Federal government they had
promised to stay north of the famous stream, the consideration being, on
the part of Uncle Sam, a contribution of hundreds of tons of flour,
bacon, tobacco and other things. Strictly speaking, this food was in
payment for land south of the Platte.
Both Hunton and Clay had a knack of dealing with these roaming bands,
however, that prevented any serious raids, although at one time, when
Clay had closed a contract with the government and found himself in
Cheyenne with his big bull outfit, consisting of a couple of hundred
head of oxen and thirty or forty men, word was brought to him that on
his return trip to his Chugwater quarters, a band of Sioux would attack
him. So he left Cheyenne one night, and taking a course almost due east
avoided the Laramie trail, and by a circuitous route reached the
Chugwater without having traveled a mile on a trail.
Hunton's and Clay's ranch houses were loaded with firearms, looked like
armories, and at the height of the shoulder in the log walls were fort
holes through which guns could be fired. These were used several times,
but none of the skirmishes approached in any degree the present-day
pictures one sees in the movies, and I doubt if they ever did, in the
West. In the first place, while the Sioux, Cheyenne and other redskins
were considered especially bloodthirsty, none of them was fond of
exposing his worthless carcass to a shower of bullets, even though
outnumbering the whites 100 to 1. The Indian of that day--of the day
that history was making on the frontier--was a most miserable coward
when dealing with frontiersmen of the Hunton or Clay calibre.
Of course, there were open battles with United States troops, but even
then only when, as in the case of Custer and his Seventh Cavalry, the
troops were outnumbered and trapped. Even Sitting Bull's band, which has
wrongly been represented by some historians as brave, were entitled to
no credit of that kind. Custer was trapped in a big bowl and his 300-odd
fighters surrounded on all sides by several thousand well mounted and
well-armed young bucks. The Custer and the earlier so-called Indian
battles both at old Fort Phil Kearney and earlier in Minnesota, were not
battles at all--simply massacres. There is no record of an even fight
between redskins and whites in the settlement of the country between the
Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains. The Modocs fought for months in
the lava beds, but seldom did a soldier see a Modoc. So it was with old
Geronomo and his Apache followers. They fought from cover, never in the
open unless overtaken and surrounded.
Nevertheless, the raiding bands of Ogalala Sioux that slipped over the
Platte in the season of good grass were a problem for these pioneer
ranchmen and transportation outfits, and it was not an uncommon thing
for a bullet or an arrow to reach a vital spot in a bullwhacker from
some hiding place just in range of the road. When this happened it was
the common practice for members of the outfit to mount their saddle
horses, with which every bull-train was well supplied, and give chase
unless the lead of the Indians was too great, and usually it was.
Once in a while, however, the Indian made a miscalculation, and the
bullwhacker would return to the temporarily corralled outfit with a
scrubby Indian pony, a few rawhide thongs, and an Indian's ear freshly
amputated for use as evidence at the first camp of bullwhackers or army
post that one more "Good Indian" had been put on the list.
This cutting off of ears was reprisal, for the Indians scalped their
white victims and mutilated their bodies when they had a chance. Hunton
and Clay hauled with their big outfits, at one time, about everything
that was sent to the northern line of forts by Uncle Sam. Clay's
contracts were largely confined to Port Laramie, although Hunton hauled
a good deal of the provisions to that post. Hunton and others supplied
Fort Fetterman, the principal route being from Medicine Bow station on
the Union Pacific across the mountain range of the same name.
It took several days to load the prairie schooners from the freight cars
on a sidetrack that was laid upon the sod; and while this work was going
on there was sometimes a good deal of drinking and many gun fights.
It was while a bull outfit was loading for one of the fall trips to
Fetterman that the first billiard table came to Medicine Bow. I think it
was the only one in the territory outside of Cheyenne and Laramie City,
both division points on the Union Pacific. There were no women in
Medicine Bow, good or bad, at the time and not more than 100 regular
residents, yet the town had a saloon because the bull outfits, Hunton's
and others, in their occasional trips, and a few adventurers who were
prospecting south and west of the "Bow," furnished ample patronage to
make the enterprise profitable. It was this saloonkeeper who conceived
the idea of importing a billiard table, and also a back bar and mirror.
The bullwhackers watched the installation of the new furniture, and that
night informed the saloonkeeper that as there were no women in the camp
it had been decided to have a stag dance in the saloon. He protested,
but it did no good. A few drinks in a dozen leaders was followed by a
deliberately aimed shot which shattered the mirror, after which the
operation of removing the billiard table began. It was a rough job, and
would have given a Brunswick-Balke man a chill. The table went out onto
the prairie in sections, and the sections were not always separated at
the regulation point. The green cover was ruined.
Then the dance began. The German saloonkeeper smiled his protests, but
when he became too much concerned about what was going on, someone would
snuff a light or plug a barrel of whisky with a bullet. So the night's
debauch continued, and it did not end until daybreak. The place was a
wreck, and the saloonkeeper was in despair when the wagon boss came
along with a roll of money as big around as a ship's cable, saying:
"What's the damage, Fritz?"
"Ach," he replied, "the table cost me $500; a barrel of whisky and
cigars, beer, my fine mirror--everything is gone?"
"Yes, I see, the whole bizness," said the boss.
"Well," said Fritz, "the boys spent $600 mit me, so I make it $600 more;
maybe I can repair the table."
So the bill was paid, the wagons were loaded, and the outfit sallied
forth across the plains, the bridgeless rivers, and the mountain passes
to Fetterman where there was a pay-day. Deductions pro-rata were made
from every man's wage to even up the score with Fritz, and every
bullwhacker paid his share willingly, saying it was cheap sport for the
price. There was no feeling against Fritz because Fritz had not shown
fight. If he had--well, most of the men in the outfit were wild and
woolly, and rough, but not killers. Still one or two could not be
trusted.
Hunton put up a log house, a forge and a charcoal kiln just outside the
south limit of the Fort Fetterman government reserve, a section five
miles square south of the Platte. Just before this plant was erected a
series of Indian depredations began; several men engaged in cord wood
chopping for a government contractor were murdered by small bands of
Sioux, and many saddle horses stolen. There were also several raids in
the Lapariel bottoms; and one day a small band of Sioux, well mounted,
forded the Platte almost in sight of the fort, stampeded a herd of mules
and drove them far into the Indian country before a company of soldiers
took up the chase.
A military telegraph line ran from Fort Fetterman to Fort D. A. Russell
at Cheyenne, and the northwestern end of the line was down most of the
time, the Indians taking the wire away to use in ear and nose rings and
for other purposes, although the line was destroyed many times, no
doubt, for pure cussedness. One time I traveled for fifty miles on
horseback along this telegraph line, and in places the wires were
connected with insulators which were mounted on buffalo horns. In many
places the wire was on the ground.
It was said at the time of the running off of the mules that the Fort
Fetterman commandant was unable to follow the Indians without orders
from Washington via Fort Russell. However, this was not confirmed.
Anyway, on this and many other occasions the army moved slowly and was
past understanding on the part of the few citizens in the country.
Nevertheless, the soldiers of those days, whenever in conflict with the
redskins, usually gave a good account of themselves.
Things got so warm one spring in the vicinity of Fort Fetterman that the
thirty or forty citizens camping outside the military reservation
organized a secret society known as the Buckskin Militia, and determined
to avenge the deaths of several men, Jesse Hammond, a woodchopper, and
others, if opportunity should present itself. The only qualification for
membership in the Buckskins was a willingness to take the oath, which
was as follows:
I, John Smith, do solemnly swear that I will shoot on sight any
male Indian, no matter whether he is attacking me or other white
men, stealing or attempting to steal my property or the property of
others, or whether he is approaching or moving from me.
Furthermore, I will answer any call from another member of this
band or any other good white citizen, for assistance in the
destruction of any male Indian found on the south side of the North
Platte river; and will join in any raid upon an Indian camp when
called upon by the Chief Buckskin. So help me God.
This oath was taken while standing on the stump of a cottonwood tree in
the Lapariel bottoms, the candidate being loaded down with as many log
chains as he could hold, and the ceremony, usually taken on a moonlight
night, was as weird a sight as one can imagine.
The raids from the north continued nearly all summer. Several more white
men were killed, one a lone prospector who thought there was mineral in
the hills southwest of Fort Fetterman and near old Fort Caspar.
[Illustration: "Whistled to Give His Quarry the Chance He Would Give a
Mad Dog, and No More."]
One of the Buckskins hunting antelope one day in the vicinity of La
Bonte Creek crossed the trail of a single tepee or family, and three
ponies. This he knew from the lodge pole tracks made by a horse dragging
the poles over the ground. The Buckskin took the trail, keeping well out
of sight, but finally cut off a lone Indian who had dismounted to drink
from a spring, allowing his young buck sons to go on. Buckskin whistled
to give his quarry the chance he would give a mad dog--and no more. Then
he put a bullet in his head. He remained on the spot from which he
fired, waiting to hear from the rest of the tepee, which he did in a few
minutes, although the young bucks kept out of sight. They fired a few
shots before Buckskin decided to make a dash, and when he did it was a
race of ten miles to a ford in the Platte. The young bucks escaped.
Buckskin returned to his "Good Indian," removed a lock of his hair, took
his gun and ammunition and a greasy card from the folds of his blanket
upon which some white man had written:
This is Cut Nose, a "Good"
Sioux Indian; but he is a
Murderer and Thief.
There was a big session of the Buckskin Militia a few nights later, and
great rejoicing. Cut Nose was a whole tribe of Indians in himself, and
many dark crimes had been laid at his door by the white men who were
engaged in freighting food to the Indian agencies and army posts.
It must be understood that there were no settlers or settlements or
families in this section of Wyoming at this time, therefore there were
never any of those horrible affairs common farther East a hundred years
or more ago. There were no women and children for these red devils to
kill, and year in and year out the fight was between bullwhackers, a few
ranchmen, not more than half a dozen, government woodchoppers, and a few
prospectors.
The professional hunters usually "stood in" with the red man, being
possessed of some kind of magic that was never fully explained. In those
days beaver, bear, buffalo, deer, antelope and other game abounded. The
hunter usually had a hut or "dug-out" near a beaver dam, and it usually
was well supplied with food and sometimes a squaw was the hunter's
companion. Her relatives were sure of good treatment, and I presume for
that reason the relatives were able to give the "squaw man" hunter
protection. Still hunters were murdered, but not often.
Finally, along in July, after the grass had lost its sap and turned
brown, one of the Buckskins saddled up his pinto horse one day, strapped
a blanket, a pone of bread and a piece of bacon to his saddle, and
giving free play to his Rowell spur, waved his hat and yelled as he
dashed away:
"Good-bye, boys; see you again in a few days. I'm goin' to put an end to
these raids."
His brother Buckskins thought he was crazy--some of them did. But one or
two winked and looked wise; and about sixty hours later, when some of
the "militia" had almost forgotten him, Buckskin rode up, unsaddled his
pinto, pitched him in the ribs and said: "There now, old boy, go up the
creek and enjoy yourself. Eat yourself to death, and I'll know where to
find you when I want you. No Indian will get you."
When the boys crowded around him he vouchsafed this much information:
"From a point twenty miles east of this spot to a spot twenty miles west
of Fort Laramie--on the north side of the Platte--as far as the eye can
reach in a northerly direction, and you know that's considerable
distance, there is just one charred mass--every blade of grass has been
burned."
There was no more trouble that season. No feed for the Indian ponies
within a hundred miles of the fort to the north of the river.
CHAPTER IV
GUARDING AN OVERLAND FREIGHT OUTFIT.
Driving seven yoke of oxen hauling two wagons attached by a short rig
similar to that used in coupling cars, along a desert road, is enough to
keep an able-bodied ox-train brakeman busy. But when, in addition to
keeping his wild "leaders" in the road and his "wheelers" filling their
yokes, he has to keep an eye on a distant bad land bluff or a roll in
the surface, he has his hands more than full.
This was the situation when the bull outfit, from Cheyenne to Spotted
Tail, was slowly moving along north of the Platte river in August,
1875--a time when Red Cloud and Spotted Tail agencies were nearly
deserted, and all the young bucks were chasing antelope and incidentally
collecting scalps of white men when they could find a white man alone
and unprepared to defend himself; or when they could outnumber a bull
outfit one hundred or two hundred to one and get its members in a
"pocket," which was not often.
At this particular time a young man who, a couple of years previous, had
never known anything less comfortable than a feather bed, or a job
harder than writing railroad way-bills, was one of two in the
cross-country freighter crew who had been assigned by Wagon-boss Watson
to mount a "pinto" pony and ride all day at least 1,000 yards away from
the trail and keep to the high places where he could see what was going
on, if anything, in the vicinity. He had been told to dismount and
examine any signs of life on the ground where it was bare, or in the
grass, and when found to fire one shot from his revolver to let the
bullwhackers know that they had "company" not far off; and if he saw one
Indian or a hundred to shoot not once but three times in rapid
succession and then gallop to the wagon train with details.
The movement across the desert-like country this day began at four a.
m., and continued until ten a. m. The featherbed youngster was well
equipped with an army Springfield of large calibre, forty rounds in his
belt, two Remington revolvers and a butcher knife with a five-inch blade
for the possibility of close quarters. He had a bottle of spring water
and a saddlebag full of sandwiches of bread and fried sowbelly and
plenty of chewing and smoking tobacco.
Maybe you think this youngster thought of his soft bed at home or a pot
shot from ambush that would leave his skeleton bleaching in a sandy
desert sun after it had been stripped of its flesh by wolves; or that he
wished someone else had been chosen to guard one side of the overland
train of flour, bacon, corn and sugar and its custodians, but that is
not so. It was one of the proudest days of his life and I know he will
never forget it. He was highly honored by Watson and he appreciated it,
for the reason that only two years before he had come to Wyoming a green
city boy and was then known in the parlance of the plains as a
"tenderfoot," which was a truthful description of any man or boy when he
first entered upon the life of the bullwhacker, the then popular master
of transportation between civilization and its outposts. He never
dreamed of death when he got his orders, because he was young and
foolish. Sometimes it is called bravery, but that isn't the right word.
It can't be described unless it is called blind or reckless
indifference. Perhaps that isn't it; anyway the youngster, as he mounted
and galloped away and waited on a neighboring knoll for the outfit to
string out along the sandy trail, hoped he wouldn't be disappointed. He
wanted an eventful day and he fairly prayed for it. "I hope," he
ruminated to himself half aloud, "that I cross a tepee trail, at least,
even if I don't get my eye on an Indian."
It wasn't long until he began to wonder, for it was still barely
daylight, if it wouldn't be possible for a buck of good aim to pick him
off, especially if the buck practiced the usual tactics of concealing
himself behind a sand-dune or a butte. He wasn't afraid--he didn't know
the word--but he wondered. For this reason he kept his pony moving,
reasoning that it is easier to hit a stationary target than a swiftly
whirling one. But the pony appeared to be a dead one even when a spur
was roughly rubbed upon his belly, until, as the train had gotten well
out of camp and the teams strung along for a mile, he found his pony to
be interested in something, for he insisted on frequent stops and moved
his ears back and forward and snorted lightly.
Finally it seemed next to impossible to get him to move, and Featherbed
was sure the pony had been owned by Indians at some time and was of the
trick variety, being trained to a brand of treachery that meant delivery
of his mount into the hands of the reds.
And while these things were passing through the youngster's brain his
only concern was that the train was leaving him, and that he was not
guarding it. He heard a coyote's mournful note, but that was a common
occurrence, although he wondered if it couldn't be possible that an
Indian was doing the howling. It sounded like an imitation.
The pony snorted some more, and then Featherbed, finding his blunt
pointed spurs were not getting him anywhere, unsheathed his
butcher-knife and pricked his cayuse on the back. He tried to buck, but
he wore a double cinch--one fore and one aft--and it kept him on all
fours.
Things were getting worse and the voices of the bullwhackers yelling at
their teams grew fainter and fainter as the outfit slowly but surely put
distance between Featherbed and his companion, when there was a sound
that resembled the dropping of a stick in the water preceded by a
distinct swish as if it had been thrown through the air like a
boomerang.
Then the pinto got busy. It was an arrow!
There were several more, and one of them clipped the pommel of the
saddle before Featherbed thought of his orders to fire once on sight of
disturbed grass or a moccasin track on bare ground; or, upon sighting an
Indian, to fire three times.
Then he let go with his Springfield in the supposed direction of the
enemy, and headed for the trail, which he readily found, and soon caught
up with the mess-wagon which always formed the rear guard with one
whacker, the night herder inside, and the extra herd horses tied behind.
Featherbed met Watson galloping toward the rear.
"What is it, boy?" he shouted.
"They got a piece of my Texas pommel," he replied, "but I don't know
where the arrow came from. I'll go back and see."
He wheeled his pony to go and would have been off to take up his station
a thousand yards from the trail had not Watson said, laughingly:
"You're crazy--wait a minute till I send word up ahead to corral."
"You (to the mess wagon driver) untie them hosses, saddle 'em up and
wait for Blucher Brown and Archer; they'll be back in a minute."
Featherbed, as the sun peeped over a rise in the land, waited
impatiently. So did the pony, for the miserable Indian-bred cuss had a
good nose that was keen to the smoky smell of an Indian, or to the odor
of another horse, especially of his own breed, and he was all animation
and ready to go.
When the party finally got away Watson, turning to Featherbed as they
galloped side by side along the high spots near the back trail, said:
"If yer not afraid, pull out ahead with that pony and lead the way."
Featherbed pressed the Rowell spur to the pony's side and he responded
like a real cow-pony, much to Featherbed's surprise, and before Watson
could gather his breath to call the youngster back he led them by 200
yards. Finally he did manage to yell between his laughter:
"Hold on, you danged idiot--I didn't mean--"
But he didn't finish the sentence, although he continued yelling, this
time expressing himself to the effect:
"My hoss has been creased in the neck--dismount, give me your hoss and
lead mine back to the outfit; we'll take care of these galoots."
Featherbed protested, but it was no use, and he returned and joined the
whackers who had corralled and gathered the bulls inside the wagons,
forming two half circles on a high spot near the trail. There were
several other horses in the outfit, so Featherbed quickly slipped the
boss' fine $200 rig on the back of a buckskin of the cow-puncher variety
and sped back to the scene of action.
But it was all over. The sneaking Indians had disappeared, and the only
evidence of their presence was a spot of crumpled grass behind a knoll
where several of them had lain in complete safety while they tried to
send Featherbed to the Happy Hunting Ground.
The sun was too high for the Indians, so they disappeared, skulking at
safe distance to wait for darkness and perhaps other prey.
Featherbed, after another shift of mounts and saddles and bridles, again
took his post 1,000 yards from the trail, smoked his pipe, munched his
sandwiches and drank the spring water.
At ten o'clock camp was struck for the mid-day stop close to a creek of
sweet cold water that ran through some small hills covered with stunted
pines, a few miles from a range of black mountains out of the bad lands
and sand.
Featherbed was here promoted to the position of assistant wagon boss,
presented with a big sorrel horse called "America" (because he was not
Indian-bred) and given the lead team to drive in the outfit. This meant
that, in co-operation with the "big boss," he would help select the
camps, govern the speed of the "train," look after the manifests, act
as check clerk in loading and unloading, and besides wear a red sash to
designate his official position.
Featherbed took his honors modestly, in fact he was surprised and
couldn't understand it until someone told him the "old man" was pleased
when he (Featherbed) took the wounded horse back to the train, saddled
up another and returned to help find where the arrows came from.
CHAPTER V
RATTLESNAKES AND REDSKINS.
The night-herder's song awoke me at four a. m.--the first streak of
day--and I didn't have time to pull on my boots before the bulls were
inside the corral; so, in bare feet, I yoked my fourteen head and then
proceeded to pull on the cowhides, roll up my blankets and throw them on
my trail wagon. Due to the haste--for nearly everyone else in the outfit
was ready to "pull out" in response to the assistant wagon boss'
order--I proceeded to pull on the left boot without the usual
precautions. My fingers were in the straps as I sat on the ground,[1]
and in another minute my toes would have been in the boot. But the
rattler that had spent the night in it stuck out his head. I shook him
out, first calling my pard to come with his whip.
[Footnote 1: This was in the center of a prairie dog town covering
perhaps twenty acres; and the "town" was inhabited not only by these
marmots but rabbits, owls and rattlesnakes, apparently living in perfect
peace and harmony in the same burrows.]
* * * * *
After the rattler was dead I plucked off eleven beautifully graduated
white rattles and a black button, later on adding them to a hatband of
several hundred which I had sewn together, using silk thread and a
cambric needle. The other boot was tenantless.
The blankets, in a neat roll secured by a heavy leather strap, were
thrown on top of the freight in the trailer, and away we went for a dry
camp in the bad lands, where we spent six hours of the middle of the day
hiding under our wagons to escape the hot rays of the sun.
A late afternoon start ended at nine p. m., in a moonlit camp on a creek
that ran swiftly through chalk-like bluffs--perhaps the headwaters of
the Niobrara river. In those days none but a geographer or a government
surveyor knew the names of many of the waterways, if they had names. It
had been a hard drive through deep sand most of the way, and after the
bulls had been relieved of their yokes and the chains that held the
teams together, all hands raced for the water, both for internal and
external purposes.
Our night camp was on a flat between the bluffs and a few yards from the
stream in a most inviting spot, the edge of the crooked channel being
lined with stunted and gnarled box-elder, while farther back were a few
dozen dead and gaunt cottonwoods. Some small bushes grew in clumps here
and there, but our camp commanded a good view, even in the night, of the
country for a mile in at least two directions--north and south.
Though tired, it was too nice a night even in this wilderness to go to
bed; for a youngster who had acquired two revolvers, a Winchester
rifle, a butcher knife and other weapons believed the crumpled grass he
had seen at the edge of the creek indicated the presence not far away of
others of the human family, and he intended to find out about it. He had
confided this suspicion to one other youth of the outfit, and as the
supper camp-fire died down to a bed of coals and a cool wind began to
fan the hot earth these boys stole out of camp, waded the creek, and
carefully examined the earth up and down its margin until they came upon
a distinct moccasin, pony and lodge pole trail. They followed it along
the bottoms for two miles to a jutting bluff where around the corner
they saw six tepees, near which were picketed several ponies.
All was silent as the boys, concealed in a safe spot, viewed the scene.
Then there was a sound, low at first, like the crooning of a mother to a
babe, which grew louder and louder, until finally there emerged from one
of the tepees a big buck who stood silently for a full minute,
listening. He wore nothing but a breech-clout, and over his shoulder
hung a buckskin strap upon which was attached the arrows for the big bow
held in his hand. He did wear a bonnet and it consisted principally of
feathers that looked exactly like some of the creations worn by women of
the present day.
When he had located the sound he moved toward the hiding boys but
stopped at the nearest tepee. The crooning grew to a lamentation. Then
other tepees showed signs of life, and in a few moments bucks, squaws
and papooses were running hither and thither in a bewildering way. But
the boys remained silent, for there was no sign of a movement of camp
and not an indication that there was an outside alarm. Then what could
it be? What was all this fuss about? The lamentations became louder and
louder and the excitement apparently greater.
Finally a number of squaws who had gone to the creek bottom appeared in
the center of the little camp. They carried bundles of green willows,
dozens of large hard-head boulders and rawhide receptacles filled with
water; also a bundle of dry faggots.
After the stones had been piled in a neat heap a fire was built upon
them which was allowed to burn briskly for half an hour. Then the coals
and ashes were brushed off and a tent-like covering put over a quickly
woven basket-like structure that had been built over the stones. Then
the water was dashed upon the stones and the steam began to ascend.
Presently out from a tepee came a squaw with a bundle which she gently
shoved under the elkskin covered cauldron of steam.
"Say," said one of the boys, "are you on?"
"Sure enough," the other whispered, "they are giving that kid a Turkish
bath."
And that's what they were doing; but it wasn't Turkish-just Injun.
Returning to camp the boys proceeded to slip into their blankets
quietly, say nothing about what they had seen, and go to sleep. They
believed the straggling band of Arapahoes were not on the war-path and
had work for the "medicine-man"--the big buck they first saw come out of
his tepee.
You have no idea how cautiously the boys went about getting the blankets
off the wagon so as not to disturb the boss, a man they feared. So they
moved noiselessly.
One threw his roll of blankets from the top of the trailer and the other
caught the bundle and proceeded to flatten it out into a comfortable bed
when he heard a familiar noise, and forgetting that they were to be
silent, the youth on the ground yelled:
"Look out--a rattler!"
It woke up the whole camp. The snake had occupied the blankets from four
a. m., at least, until this time--midnight. Perhaps he had slept with
the boy until four a. m.; I think he did; anyway, he had rolled him up
and put him where found.
CHAPTER VI
BELATED GRACE FOR A CHRISTMAS DINNER.
After fighting through a ten-hour blizzard that swept across the plains
from the Elk Mountain country our wagon-train reached the foothills of
the Medicine Bow range, where there was shelter for the work cattle
along a swift running stream. The snow was piled in great drifts
everywhere except upon exposed high spots, and it seemed impossible for
us to proceed farther, for we knew that along the government trail just
beyond, and 1,000 feet higher, that the drifts would be so deep that a
long camp where we had stopped would be necessary.
Ten men were tolled off by the wagon-boss to chop down young quaking
aspen trees, the bark and small twigs of which furnished appetizing
fodder for the bulls. Another gang climbed a sidehill and with axes
felled a group of stunted pines for the side walls of a cabin; still
others were sent into a "burnt and down" piece of timber to gather well
seasoned dead pitch pine for firewood.
The storm lasted until six o'clock in the evening, then continued as an
old-fashioned heavy snowfall with no wind, increasing the level of the
snow to the tops of the wheels of our corraled wagons. Apparently they
were doomed to stay where they were until spring.
Next morning there was a let-up. Then the blizzard began again in all
its fury--only such a blizzard as one can see in but one other place on
earth, judging from Dana's description of his experience in going around
the Horn. The cattle, with almost human intelligence, 200 head of them,
crowded toward the big bonfires of pitch, and with long faces looked
mournfully upon the scene. They seemed to know, as we did, that the
prospects were not bright for our cavalcade. Certainly there was no
grass in sight now, not even on the round-topped knolls bordering our
little valley, for the night fall of snow was heavy and damp, and
finally, when the thermometer registered a few degrees below zero, the
grass was sealed against the tough noses and even the hoofs of the
hungry bulls. An attempt was made by a scouting party to find a clear
feeding place on the back trail, but a day's investigation resulted in
failure. Not a blade of grass could be found--all sealed with a heavy
crust that would, in most places, carry a horse and rider.
The storm continued, after an eight-hour let-up, the temperature rising.
Two feet more fell on top of the crust, then came another freeze and a
new crust. After twenty-four hours another blizzard from the north,
consisting of sleet and snow and some rain, was like a sandstorm in
summer on the plains below. It was fierce, nearly freezing and blinding
both men and cattle. The poor bulls were more forlorn than ever. They
gnawed the very wood of the aspens, and there wasn't enough of that.
On the last crust of all this snow and sleet it was finally found
possible to take the oxen farther along into the mountains, where four
men drove them. Others went ahead with axes and for two weeks cut aspens
and sought out hidden protected places in the valleys where there were a
few blades of grass and some succulent underbrush.
One day, when the sun was shining brightly on the white mantle and the
distant peaks of the majestic mountains of blue stood out like a
painting, Nate Williams, wagon-boss, spoke:
"Do you know," he said to the fellows who were carving the carcass of a
faithful old bullock, "that tomorrow is Christmas?" None had thought of
it.
"And," he continued, "do you know we are liable to stay where we are
until the Fourth of July, if we don't get a move on?"
There were no suggestions.
"Furthermore," added Williams, "we haven't much else to eat but
beef--there are just five 100-pound sacks of flour in the mess wagon--no
bacon nor canned goods. Its a case of shoveling a road to Crane's Neck."
Crane's Neck was a mountain twist in the road, a mile from camp. If the
road could be cleared to that point there would be fair hauling for five
miles in the range to another stretch that had been filled in places
with from ten to twenty feet of snow, while one spot was covered by a
slide from a mountain to a depth of forty feet and for a considerable
distance along the trail.
For three hours plans were discussed, and it was finally determined to
go to work with shovels and picks, but not until after Christmas. Our
caravan included a blacksmith's forge, also a regular wrecking outfit,
and in a short time big wooden shovels were made from blocks of pine
with handles stoutly attached with iron bands.
The cook was a youth of twenty and had all the enthusiasm of the
adventurer. He had spent a year on a whaler and knew what it meant to
drift in the ice north of Point Barrow. This present situation, he said,
was a picnic; so was the one in the Arctic. It couldn't be so bad that
he wished to be snuggled away in a feather bed somewhere east of the
Missouri River. That would be too ordinary.
"If I could sit down to a table at the best hotel in the land," he said,
"I'd prefer to eat the dinner that I'm going to cook for you fellows
tomorrow."
Williams sneered. "Yes," he said, "we put old Tex (a long-horn bull) out
of his starving misery and the boys have found his liver to be O. K.
Maybe you can give us a liver pie."
"I'll do better than that," said the boy; "I'll not only give you a beef
stew, but a pudding that you can't buy outside of London or
Liverpool--a plum duff--and a cake. Old Tex will also be on the menu in
several places, for his tenderloin looks good, and there are a few
steaks which, when properly treated with a maul on the top of a stump,
will be as good as you will get in a 'Frisco water front lodging, and
better than any of you fellows have had since we hit the drifts."
I have eaten meals that mother used to cook, I've been famished during a
sea voyage, and devoured a Norwegian sailor's pea soup; I've
participated in several real banquets in New York; I've dined at
Delmonico's and at Sherry's, at Young's in Boston, and I've feasted in a
circus cook tent; but my Christmas dinner in the foothills of Wyoming in
1874, under the circumstances I have but faintly described, still is a
fond memory and holds the record as the best meal I ever ate. It was as
follows:
MENU
Marrowbone Soup--"Tex" Water Cress
Beef Stew--"Tex"
Hamburg Steak--"Tex"
Planked Porterhouse Steak--"Tex"
Tenderloin Steak-"Tex" Roast Beef--"Tex"
Corn Bread Wheat Bread
English Plum Pudding--Hard and Soft Sauce
Raisins Cake Coffee Tea
(No butter or milk) (Lots of salt and pepper)
The corn bread was made from meal milled by the cook from shelled corn
in the cargo. The "plums" were raisins, of which the cook had a few
pounds. He used wheat flour, baking powder and grease saved from the
final ration of the bacon which gave out a week before Christmas. The
hard sauce was made with sugar and grease and a flavoring extract. The
soft or liquid sauce contained a "remedy" requisitioned from a
homeopathic quantity found in the wagon-boss' medicine chest--a few
spoonfuls of brandy. The watercress was found two miles away at a
spring. The boys called it "pepper grass." There it was fresh and green,
protected by spring water which never freezes, and in some places it was
peeping out from the edge of the snow at the brookside.
And now about whisky. There were sixty men in this camp, and in one of
the big wagons were three barrels of whisky, but it belonged to the post
trader at Fort Fetterman, and it was a tradition not even broken on this
exceptional passage from Medicine Bow on the U. P. to Fort Fetterman on
the North Platte that a consignment of hard liquor was as safe in a bull
train as it would be anywhere on earth, and that it would reach its
destination untouched. Few men drank intoxicants on these trips. It was
a crime to be found with whisky, punishable by banishment from camp, and
that might have meant death. But at both ends of the journey--that's
another story.
The plainsman and mountaineer, the bullwhacker and the stage-driver,
when chilled, drank water. Whisky caused him to perspire, and that was
bad. He did not often use it when on duty.
One of the peculiar things about this Christmas dinner is the fact that
there were no mountain grouse, no sage hen, no antelope, deer, nor elk
for the menu. The truth is the storm drove everything of the kind in
another direction--the direction in which we were slowly moving--and
some time later, when we emerged upon the other side of the range with
our ox-power so greatly reduced that we made less than a mile of
progress a day, the herds of elk stampeded a dozen times past our camps,
and the "fool grouse" sat a dozen in a group upon the pine boughs in the
mountains and refused to move, allowing us to kill them, if so disposed,
one at a time; but we did it only once, just to prove that it could be
done. (Colonel Roosevelt, please note!)
It took us a couple of weeks to shovel our way out, and while the sun
shone in the middle of the day hardly a flake of the snow melted. The
air was at times biting cold, but invigorating, and every man, including
the boss and the cook and even the night herder, fell to the work with a
will that finally meant victory. In places we operated in the drifts as
you see the excavators in a city cellar or subway operate, digging down
to the surface and then benching as the open-ground miners or cellar
excavators do, the men below tossing the blocks of snow up to the bench
above and they in turn passing it to the top of the drift.
Once or twice, in narrow passages, it was necessary to build several
benches. In one place we began to tunnel, but the plan was given up, for
our wagons, the regulation prairie schooners, would require a passage
big enough for a railroad furniture car to pass through.
After the high plateau was reached--the land that represented the
watershed of the Platte Valley--it was clear sailing, and while
food--wild game--was plentiful, and we ate lots of it, the memory of our
Christmas dinner remained to remind us after all that in the midst of
greatest hardships and suffering we often find something to be thankful
for, something to bring us to our senses when we grumble or complain of
our ill-luck or misfortunes.
Had I been as appreciative when I partook of this mountain dinner as I
am today for the blessings of Divine Providence, I would have been able
to say, in relating this story, that we properly gave thanks to Him who
is responsible for all our blessings and who chasteneth us for our
wickedness; but I was not properly appreciative, neither were my rough
but honest companions. Therefore, I take this opportunity to say grace
more than forty years late:
_Thank God for that snowbound Christmas dinner._
CHAPTER VII
THE FATE OF ONE-EYED ED.
From the cross-tree of a telegraph pole hung the body of a man when the
9:30 Union Pacific Overland Express stopped for a "slow" order across a
bridge that a band of Comanche Indians had tried to burn.
A Massachusetts woman enroute to 'Frisco stuck her head out of a car
window and exclaimed, "How awfully terrible!"
Yes, it was.
Ed Preston was a one-eyed man. I don't know how he lost the other one,
but I do know that he was a dead shot with the one eye that he slanted
along the barrel of his pistol or buffalo rifle, the latter a sawed-off
Springfield and the first mentioned an old-time army Remington.
Preston's marksmanship cost him his life. They hung Preston, the boys
did, because he killed a man just for the meanness of it, or, as one of
them said, because he was spoiling for trouble.
One day as we were camped on the north bank of the North Platte near the
eastern line of Wyoming, Preston, full of liquor, lurched up to a bunch
of bullwhackers and asked if anyone present thought he was a "dead
shot." Of course, all hands admitted that his reputation was
unquestioned.
"But you never saw me shoot," he said, "so what the ---- do you know
about it?" Then he pulled his gun and backed off, saying, as he pointed
to a heap of discarded tomato cans:
"Hey, you Charley, heave one o' them cans in the air--hurry up."
Observing his apparent quarrelsome attitude, Charley Snow, a youthful
member of the outfit, obeyed without protest. Snow had been assigned by
Martin, the wagon-boss, to help the cook and the cook had made him
responsible for the proper boiling of a pot of beans. Snow left the
beans and threw a can as far away from himself as he could, and before
it hit the ground it was perforated by a bullet.
"Now throw one straight up in the air," commanded Preston, and Snow
obeyed. Preston put two shots into that "on the wing." Snow attempted to
resume his duties at the mess fire, but Preston's shooting had drawn a
dozen or more of the men of the outfit to the scene, and he was in the
humor to show off; therefore as Snow was the youngest and possibly the
most inoffensive man in the party, Preston decided to eliminate the bean
question by ordering Snow, with a flourish of his gun, to remove the
beans from the fire. This done, he continued:
"Now you throw the cans and be lively about it."
Snow did as ordered. One, two, three, ten cans went into the air.
Preston missed none. Finally the boy threw, at Preston's command, two at
a time and both were plugged before they came down. Then as Snow picked
up another one Preston shot it out of his hand, and he tried to quit and
return to the bean kettle, whereupon Preston bored a hole through Snow's
sombrero without cutting off a hair or bruising his scalp, although it
was plain to see that while Snow was no fresh tenderfoot from the effete
East, but a seasoned young bullwhacker and plainsman, he was more than
uneasy. The boy said afterward that while he had a whole lot of
confidence in Preston's marksmanship he knew he had drunk at least a
pint of whisky--the worst of the squirrel variety at that--for had he
not taken the last swig out of a flask, thrown it almost at Snow and
sent its splinters in every direction by a shot from his Remington?
Sober, said Snow, Preston would not have been so bad, but drunk--he
objected to further participation in the William Tell business and he
entered his protest. When he discovered that the chambers of Preston's
revolver were temporarily empty, Snow quietly took a rifle from its
leather fastenings on the side of a prairie schooner. His move looked
ominous to his tormentor.
Preston was a coward, as were all of that class of killers in those
days. He was an engineer of a bull team of seven yokes and a good man at
his business, but a bully, a braggart and a coward, whose victims
usually were known to be peaceful and who were unarmed or unprepared to
defend themselves. He was not the heroic figure of the almost forgotten
wild west--the brave and big-hearted fellow who fought sometimes for his
rights or what he considered his rights. Preston was just a plain
murderer, who had taken a place among rough but honest frontiersmen,
chased from an orderly community somewhere in God's country--then east
of the Missouri, now anywhere from the Atlantic to the Pacific--because
of some dark crime he had committed, no doubt.
All day long we had been fording the North Platte at this point--Sidney
crossing--a distance of at least a half a mile, including a small island
of sand and a few bushes. It was the last trainload of provisions for
the season we were taking north to the government's beneficiaries--the
Ogalala Sioux and the Cheyennes. We had seventy teams, each of seven
yokes, and two wagons, and as the Platte is a swift-running stream at
this point and there is quicksand between the south shore and the
island, it was necessary to "jack up" on blocks some of our loads on the
wagons and double and treble teams, sometimes using as many as
twenty-five yokes of oxen on one wagon and a half dozen men, belly deep
in the mush ice, punching the bulls. The water was in places up to the
tops of the wheels. It was a sun-up to sun-down job from corral to
corral.
Someone had whisky, but it was not apparent until late in the afternoon,
when the target shooting incidents began. The boys were a sober lot--the
good, honest kind, and not a desperado among them, barring One-Eyed Ed.
Others there were, sure enough, who might be considered hardly fit for
even the most humble society, for they looked like pirates--all of
them--hair long, clothes weather-beaten and rough, faces unshaven and
grizzled, and language or topics of conversation not what would be
called cultured by any means. Yet there was in this outfit a
predominance of good, honest hearts, most of them measuring life from a
standard never understood if ever known in "God's Country." These
sailors of prairie schooners, these pioneer transportation men of the
virile, virgin West, knew little law or order or justice, as we know
them; they frequently violated what is known as the law, but they didn't
know it. They had but one degree of murder. It wasn't murder for them to
fight and kill with pistols. It was the custom. Murder was something
else. It was to kill a man who was not "heeled" or when his back was
turned, or to mount another man's horse and ride away. This was murder
in the first degree--the same as if the owner of the horse had been shot
to death while asleep. In those days some things were as necessary, as
indispensable as life--a horse, a saddle, a pair of blankets, a gun and
ammunition and a butcher knife--perhaps a small bag of salt. The last,
however, would be termed a luxury, although nearly every man in those
days had a little salt stored away in a weather-proof pocket or saddle
bag for the sage hen, antelope, deer, or buffalo beef he might have for
dinner or breakfast.
But let me tell you how Preston spent the rest of his day. It was early
in the afternoon when he perforated Snow's sombrero, but it was sun-down
when he shot and killed Tom Sash, the boss herder, a splendid Texan, who
had charge of an Indian contract beef herd which had come up the trail
from the Lone Star state to the Platte Valley guided by a half dozen
range men in charge of Sash, and were being grazed along the Platte
bottoms previous to being doled out as per agreement with Uncle Sam to
the clouted redskins at the White River Agency at Red Cloud.
All during the previous summer, as the wagon trains passed to and from
Sidney and the northern forts and agencies, Sash had told the wagon
bosses not to go hungry for lack of veal. "We are anxious to fatten
these cattle," he would say, "and you are welcome to a calf or two any
time you want it." Sash was all right and the bullwhackers couldn't sing
his praises loud enough.
It was at the close of Snow's engagement with Preston that the wagon
boss told Preston to try his hand on some Indian veal. So Preston
disappeared down the river, returning at suppertime with the admission
that he had not only veal but "yearling steak." And he had some of it
with him.
The beans had been boiled and eaten, the tin dishes and cups, pots and
kettles and iron ovens dumped into the mess wagon, and two crews of men
were at work jacking up wagons and greasing axle skeins, when the space
at the north mouth of the corral was suddenly filled by as fine a
horseman as ever galloped over the plains. It was Sash, dressed in the
costume of the real cowboy of the long-horn cattle day--sombrero, chaps,
Rowell spurs, a Mexican lariat properly adjusted over the horn of his
elaborate double-cinched cutting-out saddle--everything was perfection.
He was astride a fine big black American horse--not a regulation cow
pony--a shiny, deep bay charger with a white left ankle half way to the
knee from the fetlock, and a spot of white the size of a hand on the
face.
He came on a gallop and stopped so short at the corral mouth that, had
he not known his business, he would have been thrown over the chains.
But that was the style of riding. Plunge ahead to the object or point
desired--then stop short. He waved his hat to Martin, our wagon boss, to
come to the corral chains.
"Someone from your outfit," shouted Sash, "has been out in one of our
herds and shot a half dozen yearlings and two three-year-old steers.
Aren't you satisfied with veal? Say, old man, who did this mean trick?"
The acts of a coward are preceded by a queer train of thought, the
kingpin of which is fear. Preston knew his disreputable work of
butchering among the herd of cattle had been discovered. He knew that
Sash, a Texan, was a man of action, and that Sash was fortified with the
right on his side, and if justice were meted out it would be some kind
of punishment. The revolver in his holster was close to his hand and
fear--cowardly fear--overpowered his weak mind.
Martin had no time to reply, and the first indication that the coward
was to act upon the impulse that would move him was the cry from a
bullwhacker:
"Don't shoot--don't."
Sash, who was looking straight over his horse's head, turned at hearing
this just in time to receive a bullet in the hollow spot under his left
ear. It passed clean through his head. Both arms flew into the air, his
horse sprang forward, and Sash laid upon the ground flat on his back,
with arms spread out from his body--dead. His face was ashen white, eyes
and mouth closed, both fists clinched.
It was young Snow who tied the black charger to a wagon wheel, replacing
the bridle with a halter. The horse whinnied, pawed the dirt, and for a
time spun around as far as the halter strap would allow, and looked at
his prostrate master with what seemed to be almost human intelligence;
in fact, his body was soon in a white lather, necessitating a rub-down
and then a blanket. He trembled like a leaf and snorted and pawed the
earth for an hour.
Sash's camp was on the south bank of the Platte. There Preston was
delivered by Wagon Boss Martin and a delegation of the bull outfit
fellows after he had tried to escape.
That night, together with a negro boy, Snow stood guard over Sash's body
to protect it from the coyotes, for they were numerous, close at hand
and howled mournfully until break of day.
None touched the body, as it had been determined to follow what was
believed to be the law, for this time the outfit was only fifty miles
from where at least a pretense of regularity was observed.
A rider was dispatched to Sidney, then a scattered lot of board shanties
on the south side of the Union Pacific Railroad track.
The second night there came to the bullwhacker camp two men in a light
road wagon. They took the body away.
At the same time a dozen bullwhackers and nearly all the men from the
cow camp rode away to the south. Preston, silent as the Sphynx, sat
astride a horse, his hands tied behind him. They told him he was going
to Sidnev to have a trial. He smiled, but said nothing. It was just an
effort to appear brave. His life had been one of crime. He was a pest
of the plains, of the trails, of the camps--and he was on the way to the
end of a rope. He knew it, and did not plead for mercy or ask for
quarter; he did not in the long ride across the sand hills utter a word
of regret for what he had done. He was heartless, cruel, brutal, even in
the valley of the shadow. And he was silent even as death itself. He
showed no fear as we would describe fear.
Entering Sidney the posse and the prisoner took the center one of three
coulees that ran down into the town, all three meeting at the level. It
was here that One-Eyed Ed met the court that was to try him, together
with the populace. The court consisted of fifty horsemen, half of whom
rode down the east coulee, the other half down the other, meeting the
prisoner and his escort as abruptly as one meets a person sometimes in
whirling around the corner of a city block.
One long yi, yi, yi, yi, ye! was the "hear ye" of the plainsman court
crier--the signal understood by all the horsemen, and especially those
comprising the posse just emerging from the center coulee. As if by
magic the escort faded away and the prisoner, bareheaded, long hair
waving in the wind, his hands securely tied, sat upright--alone.
Then from the east and west coulees dashed horsemen led by Jim Redding
swinging his lariat over and over and over his head until he was in the
right spot to spin it out. Preston's horse stood like a piece of
statuary, and to give the man on his back his proper meed of credit let
it be recorded that he had the appearance of a man bravely facing death,
for he sat erect and made no effort to dismount, which he might have
done, for he had not been fastened to the saddle, as that would have
made impossible the program mapped out to the minutest detail.
When Redding spun his lariat for Preston's head--after he had ridden
past him two or three times while the horsemen lined up like a company
of cavalry and looked on--it landed around his shoulders. Redding
planted a spur into his cow pony, there was a jump and Preston's body
shot up and away from his mount and to the ground.
[Illustration: Copyright by American Colortype Co., Chicago
Track-Layers Fought Redskins--Chapter VIII.]
CHAPTER VIII
TRACK-LAYERS FOUGHT REDSKINS.
When the Union Pacific Railroad was being built the Indians were wild
and hostile. The appearance of the locomotive was unwelcome. Surveyors,
track-layers, bridge-builders and others if not properly guarded by
details of United States troops were attacked from ambush and often
killed.
It was indeed an adventurous calling to be a railroader in those days,
no matter in what capacity; for if it wasn't Indians it was something
else that made it so in the then wilderness. Towns were built in a day
along the South Platte River and the populations were first made up
largely by the scum of the earth, consisting of criminals of all kinds
from all quarters of the globe, either engaged in gambling, highway
robbery or running saloons that were the toughest ever known in America.
Dance halls and dives followed the work of railroad building from Omaha
to Ogden, and if the earth could speak it would tell a story of murder
that would make one shudder. Hundreds of men were shot either in brawls
or by robbers and their bodies buried in unmarked graves.
At Julesburg alone, the story was told, after the temporary terminus
was moved on west 100 miles, there were 417 graves in one sidehill, and
among the lot not one grave in the so-called cemetery was filled by a
man who died a natural death. This may be an exaggeration--perhaps it
is--but it was not an uncommon thing for a man to be shot and killed in
a brawl while a dance was in progress without for a moment stopping the
festivities.
But the "noble" Indian, so often represented in heroic portraits--and
always called a "brave" by writers who never saw an Indian of that
period--was not there, at least not numerously. He was a sneaking
sniper, hiding behind a sand hill or concealed in a clump of bushes in a
creek or river bottom, with a good chance to get away if attacked. He
seldom came out into the open to fight even a lone surveying party, but
waited for the cover of night, hid behind a rock and took a pot shot and
then rode his horse at top speed to a safe distance. He was a miserable
coward, and dirty. Perhaps the next day he would come meekly into some
camp where there were several hundred men, begging for sugar or bacon.
Artists have painted him in all his glory in sight of his enemy
discharging his arrows or his gun. Don't believe it. He didn't do it
more than a half dozen times, and when he outnumbered the white from 50
or 100 to 1. It is too bad, I know, to destroy such beautiful fiction;
but it is necessary in order to keep these chronicles straight.
However, it is the truth that a crew engaged in track-laying in the
vicinity of North Platte was one day almost overwhelmed by a band of
Comanches that came up from the south following a herd of buffalo across
the Republican River. There were less than fifty men in the gang,
including a locomotive engineer, fireman, conductor, foreman and
track-layers, among the rest two Chinese cooks. The Indians had come
upon the crew unexpectedly, for the buffalo herd, in passing near at
hand, kicked up such a cloud of dust that the crew was unseen until it
was too late for the Comanches to retreat without a fight.
The buffaloes rushed on past the right-of-way of the road, and when the
Indians followed the first they knew of the locomotive was when the
engineer sounded his whistle to bring the scattered crew to the shelter
afforded by a train of flat cars and the engine. The country all about
was flat. The Indians scattered in a circle and at a distance of perhaps
500 yards began to shoot. The crew was well supplied with guns and
ammunition and the battle lasted for half an hour, resulting in the
death of one Indian and the wounding of not one white man. Still it had
all the elements of a movie show, and would have made a fine reel. In
another hour track-laying proceeded as usual.
Outside of a few clashes of this kind the U. P. went its glorious way
without open battle with so-called redskins. Indians look good in
pictures, and they are picturesque--in pictures and paintings; but when
you were near them in those days you found them nearly always
good-for-nothing, insect-infested, diseased, hungry and cowardly, with
less nerve than a regular tramp.
When the U. P. was building it should be remembered the Indians had been
seeing the pioneer going across the plains with wagons for many years.
The pony express rider, the bullwhacker and the California and Utah
emigrant had been his almost daily companion; therefore he had learned
to be circumspect. Those hardy people had shot straight and to kill, and
by the time track-laying began the Indian was about as cautious as a
mountain sheep. He knew the range of the white man's gun, the fleetness
of his big American horse, and he governed himself accordingly, devoting
all his time, when doing anything at all, to impede the progress of
railroad building, to pure and unadulterated murder from ambush.
CHAPTER IX
"BILL" HICKOK, CITY MARSHAL.
"Wild Bill" Hickok, who had been city marshal at Abilene, Kan., blew
into Cheyenne in 1874 along with Texas Charley and a few more "bad men."
Things were booming in the Wyoming metropolis. Gold had been discovered
in the Black Hills, and the crowds of fortune-seekers from every point
of the compass had begun to flock in. Men were there from South Africa,
Brazil, California and Australia, intermingling with the New Englander,
the Middle Westerners, the cowboys and bullwhackers and others attracted
by the reports of fabulous discoveries. Cheyenne was the chief
outfitting point for a trip into the hills, although thousands tramped
through the sands of the Bad Lands to the new Eldorado via Fort Pierre.
It meant big work for the small police force of Cheyenne, for there
were, besides the "killers" of the "Wild Bill" order, garroters and
other crooks from near and far to look after. Gambling didn't bother the
authorities at all, and such characters as "Canada Bill," the most
famous of all the confidence men, were, as a matter of fact, able to
ply their trade almost unmolested.
"Canada Bill" had the appearance of a Methodist preacher of that period,
wearing a black broadcloth, long-tailed coat, trousers of the same
material, a black felt hat, "biled" shirt and black bow tie. He carried
an old-fashioned satchel made of oil cloth, a pattern of which is seen
nowadays only on the vaudeville stage. "Bill" was certainly an
innocent-looking individual--solemn-faced and perfectly
harmless--apparently. He spent most of his time on the U. P. passenger
trains between Omaha and Cheyenne and is said to have swindled travelers
out of an aggregate of $100,000 at three-card monte, a form of swindling
in great vogue at that time. Cheyenne was his headquarters and he was
almost as well known as any man in the town; but he followed his
profession practically undisturbed for several years, and I doubt if he
ever spent a day in jail. Has victims included some men who prided
themselves on their shrewdness.
"Wild Bill" Hickok was perhaps the best known "character" in Cheyenne in
the 70's. He, too, was a ministerial-looking person, but was not a
confidence operator. He was just a plain gambler, and not a very good
one, but he managed to escape the halter every time he put a notch in
his gun. "Bill" killed no one in Cheyenne; in fact, his days there were
quiet and prosy. His killings were all done in Kansas at the time the K.
P. was being built from the Missouri to Denver. When in Cheyenne he was
on his last legs--had begun, as they say nowadays, to slow up.
Nevertheless, he was feared by a great many, owing to his reputation,
although among certain classes it was generally understood that he had
lost his nerve. This was demonstrated while the Black Hills excitement
was at its height. "Bill" was more than six feet tall, straight and
thin. He carried two big revolvers in his belt and they protruded
sometimes from the side of his long broadcloth coat. He also carried a
bowie knife. But for all this and his reputation, he weakened one night
when an undersized little California _buccaro_ challenged him to walk
into the street and fight a duel at twenty paces. "Bill" laid down,
saying his eyes had gone back on him and that his shooting days were
over.
Shortly after this incident the Cheyenne authorities decided to rid the
town of a few of the worst criminals, so they tacked a notice on
telegraph poles containing a list of a dozen or more names of men,
headed by "Wild Bill," giving them twenty-four hours' time to get out of
town. When "Bill" saw the notice he smiled, and with his bowie knife cut
the notice into ribbons, and he stayed until he got ready to leave some
months later. He went to Custer City, then to Deadwood, where he met his
death at the hands of an avenger, who shot him in the back as he sat in
a poker game. His murderer claimed "Bill" had killed his brother in
Kansas and said he had followed him for two years, waiting for a chance
to kill him. "Bill" had a rule of life that he violated the night he
died, and that was never to sit with his back to a door or window. On
the fatal night he sat with his back to a half-open door into which the
avenger crept.
"Wild Bill" was a "road agent" (a highwayman) long before the Black
Hills stampede and frequently entertained a crowd with descriptions of
the raids he and his pals made upon the Mormon emigrants when they were
enroute from Nauvoo, Ill., to Salt Lake. According to his own stories he
was a heartless brute. Many deeds, however, that have been laid at his
door, and others that he bragged about, were never committed. It has
been estimated that he murdered all the way from fifteen to thirty men,
but most of these were killed while he was marshal.
One story that used to be told in Cheyenne, but which was not
authenticated, was that on one occasion at Abilene he entered a
restaurant for breakfast and ordered ham and eggs "turned over." The
waiter returned with the eggs fried on one side and "Bill" angrily said:
"I told you to have them eggs turned over!"
Whereupon the waiter playfully gave the dish a flip and turned them
over. This so angered "Bill" that he shot the waiter dead, and then
finished his meal, the poor waiter's body lying at his feet.
There was so much garroting of men who came to Cheyenne to join the
rush into the hills that some of the wiser ones slipped outside the town
at night and slept on the prairie, while others, armed to the teeth,
either walked the streets or formed companies with guards for
protection. It was a condition of affairs that gave the authorities more
than they could handle at the start. However, after the first few months
of excitement Cheyenne began to be good, and soon the civilization and
order of older communities was apparent on every hand.
The railroad shortened the distance between the frontier and "God's
Country," and before one could realize it Cheyenne was as orderly and
well behaved as Worcester, Mass. So it is today. "Wild Bill," "Texas
Jack," "Canada Bill" and the thieves and gamblers, with their guns and
daggers, are forgotten; and if some of them could come back and tramp
the streets again they would be as great curiosities as they would be on
Broadway, New York, or State Street, Chicago--and they would land in
jail or get out of town unless they walked a chalk-mark.
Cheyenne has long been in "God's country," although at the time
discussed it was a long way over the line.
CHAPTER X
WHEN CHEYENNE WAS YOUNG.
Let us suppose this is the year 1872, and that we are taking a trip
across the continent on the first railroad from the Missouri River to
the Golden Gate. We have passed through western Nebraska and its
uninhabited hills and plains and we are entering Cheyenne, on a vast
plain, yet situated at the foot of a range of the Rocky Mountains known
as the lower Black Hills. We are in sight of Long's and other Colorado
peaks of the Rockies and while apparently on a wide prairie for several
hours we have nevertheless been climbing a steep grade all the way from
Sidney, the last division point.
Cheyenne is (in '72, remember) a city of boards, logs and canvas, but is
beginning to shake off the very first things of a "camp," and is
entering the brick age, with good prospects of acquiring fame as a
substantial city.
But there are some hundreds of things here that are strange to the eyes
of an Eastern man. For example, in all his life he has never seen a man,
outside a military encampment, with a revolver strapped in a holster to
a belt around his waist. Perhaps he has never seen a faro game in his
life, and chuck-a-luck is as mysterious to him as the lingo of the
broad-hatted men who recommend it to the fortune-seeker instead of a
gold mine or honest toil of any kind. He has never seen, much less heard
of, a hurdy-gurdy where the men and the scarlet women "waltz to the bar"
to the tune of the "Arkansaw Traveler."
He used to see his Uncle Cyrus plow with a slow-plodding team of oxen
among the cobble stones of a Vermont farm; but this is the first time in
his life that he ever saw seven yokes of oxen hitched together in front
of two big wagons and every team pacing a gait that would bring praise
from the judge's stand at a county fair.
He starts down the main street and he sees "The Gold Room" in big
letters on a big wooden building. "This is where they keep it," he
muses, and he goes in. It is where they sell it--"forty-rod," "squirrel"
and the rest. But that is not all we see in the "Gold Room," run by Jack
Allen. We also see a woman called Madam Moustache dealing the game of
"twenty-one," at which "Wild Bill" Hickok, Texas Jack and a lot more
celebrities are "sitting in." Then in another corner is a faro game. Men
here are so eager to get their money on the cards that some of them are
standing on the back rungs of chairs and reaching over sitting players
to put stacks of golden twenties on the table, either "calling the turn"
or betting that the nine-spot or some other card will win or lose as
the dealer slips the paste-boards out of his silver box.
It is night, of course, and after a while, when the gambling begins to
drag, the tables are shoved a little closer to the wall and the big
floor is given up to dancing, even though through it all--dancing and
gambling--a stage performance is going on. Some painted female person of
uncertain age, but positive reputation, is either shouting personalities
at characters in the crowd or bellowing and butchering a popular song in
a male voice. Smoke is thick and not fragrant to the nostrils of the
new-comer--the tenderfoot. The "Gold Room" roof is also occupied--that
is, the inside part of it--with boxes crowded with men and women, the
women being known as "beer jerkers." In the early hours of morning it is
difficult to find a sober man or woman.
The same thing is going on in "McDaniels' Variety," opposite Tim Dyer's
Tin Restaurant. McDaniels, bald-headed and also smooth of voice, is
circulating around among his top-booted guests like a pastor among his
flock, and you wonder that such a fine-looking, well-spoken man is not
in a pulpit instead of a dive.
But this is some of Cheyenne in 1872 to 1875. Go to Cheyenne today--and
what do you find? Nothing like this, that's certain. It is doubtful if
you will round up more than a handful of men who remember there ever was
such a place as Allen's "Gold Room" or the McDaniels' Variety, or even
Tim Dyer's Tin Restaurant--tin because the plates and cups were tin
when the big place was first opened. But see Cheyenne today. There isn't
a city 200 years old on the Atlantic coast that has more civilization, a
finer lot of railroad men, more culture and good order to the square
yard.
Cheyenne had a bad reputation, but it soon reformed when the natural
resources of Wyoming began to be developed, and today, while we who
pioneered it there so many years ago spoke of it as a "desert
metropolis," are witnessing every little while either in agricultural or
horticultural shows its progress in wheatfield and orchard.
CHAPTER XI
THE LOST INDIAN AT BEDTICK CREEK.
This Indian was lost--something that has rarely happened. No Indian
could use a compass if he had one, and he wouldn't if he could--not the
real Indian of the days of General Custer, Buffalo Bill and a few
others. Indian instinct beats any mechanical contrivance man has
invented for white sailors, hunters, explorers and lumber cruisers.
But the full-blood of this story was lost and was bleating like a sheep
away from its flock, and just as timid and gentle. A lost Indian, and a
proud, high cheek-boned, breech-clouted, bronzed specimen, too; six feet
tall in his moccasins--hungry, unarmed, footsore, tribeless.
He came into the camp of the wagon train at Bedtick Creek not far from
the site of the deserted and famous overland stage station run by Jules
Slade, whose life was saved by his wife, who rode 200 miles on a horse
from Julesburg to a gold camp in Montana just in time to stop the
lynching being conducted by the Vigilantes.
And the day the Lost Indian was found was Christmas, a time when every
man--plainsman and mountaineer, far from civilization and living in the
open, as well as those toasting their shins at comfortable firesides in
snug homes in "God's country"--has a sense of something mysteriously
elevating in his soul.
Everyone in the frost-bitten bunch of overland freighters knew his
program for the day was to have no change so far as the bill of fare of
bacon, beans and venison was concerned, and everyone thought it was
pretty good; but there was to be no Christmas tree or happy children--no
church services or anything else--everyone was contented, nevertheless,
and surely full of the spirit of the day, though far out of reach of
anything that would give the slightest flavor to a proper celebration,
even informally.
The breakfast had been disposed of, the tin dishes washed and plans made
for a full day's rest for man and beast, for it was also Sunday, and the
wagon boss, old Ethrop, while loaded down with revolvers and bowie
knifes, was of a religious turn and was known as "The Parson."
Far away to the south, across a rolling plain, was the blue-white
outlines of Laramie Peak. A long way this side, according to the
eagle-eye of Farley, driver of the lead team, something was winding a
crooked course toward camp. It was a mere dark object reflected against
the snow-covered surface, but when viewed through a field glass was
plainly discernible--it was a man, all agreed; but with the glass in
Farley's hands it was a buck Indian.
So the boys watched and waited for an hour, and finally the Lost Indian
was within hailing distance and stopped, circled and began to close in.
Farley waved him to come on, and as insurance of friendliness went
through the ceremony of placing a rifle in its sling on the side of a
prairie schooner. Then the Lost Indian came forward at a trot and landed
at the camp-fire.
Between grunts, motions and words on the part of the Lost Indian, and as
many from several plainsmen, none of which seemed to be clearer than
Hottentot, this was, in simple language, the story told by the Lost
Indian at Bedtick Creek:
"Five moons ago, while at White River, where the Great Father has begun
to issue rations of beef on the foot to every head of a Sioux tepee. I
gave the Mountain Fox seventeen beaver pelts, a bale of buckskins,
twelve obsidian arrow points, one lame calico pony, a pipestone
peace-pipe, some kinnickinnic and an iron oven, found after the soldiers
left a camp at Clear Creek, and eleven bone buttons for the hand of his
second oldest daughter. This was all of my fortune, except one saddle
pony, a pack pony, one lodge-pole tepee and poles, four buffalo robes, a
coil of telegraph wire [stolen from the Overland], several hair-braided
halters, a lariat and my private store of scalps, none of which I took
myself, but which had been inherited from my father, a sub-chief known
as the Hawk, a brave man whose bones are now dry in an elevated grave
near the fast-running creek known to the whites as Ten, but which in
Sioux is Wickachimminy. This, with my bows and arrows and a Spencer
rifle, for which I had no ammunition, with my moccasins, a breech-clout
and jerked meat to last one moon, was all I had--not much, but
enough--and I was happy with my bride.
"After the sun had risen and set three times Mountain Fox came to my
tepee and said I must give him still another horse, two blankets (which
I did not have and could not get), and which he said I had promised.
"In our Sioux nation we never kill--that is, we do not kill Sioux. No
Sioux has yet killed a Sioux, and few Sioux have ever called another of
our tribe a liar. I called him a liar. He made a sign of anger and a
loud noise of distress. My bride, on his command, left the tepee with
him, telling me that under Sioux law, which I knew to be right, that the
contract had not been filled until one moon had elapsed and all members
of both families had smoked in celebration. What did I do? I rode away
in the night toward the tracks where the Iron Horse runs, twenty days
away, going and coming, to get from a white man's corral a horse and
perhaps the blankets. This was while the grass was still green.
"I found the horse and the blankets and a gun; also food in cans. But I
found in a large bottle what I had heard of, but never tasted before.
After the first sun had set I stopped at Dry Canyon, which is never dry,
but full of roaring water, and there I drank nearly all from the bottle.
What I did then I only remember as a dream, but I saw in my dream my
bride and I wept. My pony and the horse I found in the white man's
corral at the trail of the Iron Horse, with the blankets and the food in
cans, and I--Big Jaw--waded Dry Canyon Creek, which I say was wet, for
nearly a day and left no trail. I drank more of the white man's poison
and then camped without a fire.
"When the next sun came up I was ill and drank lots of water. Then came
six men from the corral at the trail of the Iron Horse, and they bound
my hands with small chains, tied me to my pony and took me back to the
trail of the Iron Horse, where I was kept in a log house with iron
windows until one night it burned, and I was taken out by the white man
in charge, who, three moons ago, blindfolded me, put me on a horse and
took me to another corral on the trail of the Iron Horse and locked me
in a large tepee made of stone, where they fed me well and gave me
medicine.
"Then I was, one moon ago, put to work in a forest to chop trees, and I
ran away.
"Have you seen my bride--she of the hair as black as a starless night
and teeth as white as the wing of a dove?
"Oh, white man, tell me, have you seen her? I am a lost sheep--the trail
is covered to my eyes, with which I have wept almost constantly all the
moons I have been away. Have you seen her I seek? I am hungry, not in my
stomach, but in my breast and in my head; I must feast or die!"
Then he wept like a child.
"Crazy," said Rawhide Robinson.
"As a loon," added Parker, the night herder.
"Give him a pull at the Parson's bottle in the medicine chest,"
suggested the Kid, as he gave the fire a stir under a pot of bean soup.
"No," said the Parson, as he rode up on a mule and was told the
story--"no liquor, boys. Feed him up and well let him trail back with us
to Cheyenne and to the asylum. Poor cuss, he loved the squaw and he's
clean daffy, but hasn't a bit of Injun left in him."
And so the Lost Indian, with a broken heart, brain tortured, went back
to the asylum--a child of the plains who bought his wife, but loved her
for all that. For the Sioux, while selling their daughters, never sold
them unless there was real evidence of true love.
And while Big Jaw stole to make good his bargain, wasn't his deed an act
of old-time knighthood after all?
Moreover, his undoing was not so much because of his own delinquency as
it was that of the white man's invention--whisky--that brought about
his downfall.
A thief, yes; a red-skinned, uncivilized wild man of the plains and the
mountains. But can we classify him with the civilized white man who
commits a crime?
If the Lost Indian did not recover and win his bride in civilization's
regulation way, perhaps it is just as well; and let us hope he is an
angel in the Happy Hunting Ground.
CHAPTER XII
A SHE-BEAR AND HER CUB.
Before my feet were thoroughly toughened--that is to say, when I was
still to some extent a tenderfoot--I joined, single-handed, in an
undertaking which had more chances for failure than almost anything that
can be imagined. It wasn't a trip to the moon, neither was it an attempt
to wipe out the then powerful Sioux nation, but it was worse than either
of these.
On Wagon-hound creek, one summer day, when our outfit was in camp for
several hours, I strolled away from camp alone. It was early summer,
probably July, and everything was green and fresh. Three miles from camp
I came upon signs of life--the limb of a wild plum tree broken and
hanging to the ground. The first impression was that there were prowling
Indians in the neighborhood. The grass had also been trampled. The plums
were only half ripe, and after gathering a few, I dropped over an
embankment into the creek bottom, where I saw a large track in the soft
silt; it was almost the shape of a human hand. There was a smaller one
of the same character. These I followed, clutching a small "pop-gun" of
the Derringer variety. After turning several curves of the creek I
suddenly came upon my quarry--a big she-bear and a cub. The former
snorted and made for me, and, sensibly pocketing my revolver, I lifted
myself out of the creek bottom by grasping a convenient overhanging root
of a tree; but almost simultaneously the she-bear was beside me.
Then began as pretty a race as you ever witnessed. It is a pity none saw
it.
Fortunately I had only a few nights before been a silent listener to
several camp-fire yarns of old-timers, one of which contained some
advice about a man who finds himself in the predicament I now was in.
Before me was a bald hill rising perhaps 200 or 300 feet, covered with
sage and other brush. Up I flew. My feet were like wings. But Mrs. Bear,
though heavy, was able to keep within ten feet of my heels until I
reached the top. Then as I almost felt her warm breath I wheeled and ran
down hill. This was tactics I had heard at the camp-fire and it saved
me, too, for Mrs. Bear, being set up heavier behind than in front, and
having long hind legs and short front ones, was obliged to come down
slowly and sidewise at that.
Her cub had stayed at the bottom of the hill, whining, and as I reached
him I gave him a kick in the jaw and there was some more zig-zagging,
fast running and heart palpitation, although I felt somewhat relieved
when, looking over my shoulder, I saw Mother Bear licking her cub's
face.
Later on I sneaked into camp and tried to keep my secret; but I looked
and acted queerly, and finally told the story. In ten minutes five of us
were on the way to the site of my encounter, all mounted.
We soon discovered Mrs. Bear and her cub, and the boss insisted that I
should have the first shot at her with a Winchester. I took good aim and
fired, but saw the dirt fly a rod behind the old lady. It was a bad
miss. Then "Sailor Jack" Walton sent a bullet into her heart and the
rest of us lariated and captured the baby, which we took to Fort Laramie
and gave to an army officer's wife.
CHAPTER XIII
A KICK FROM A PLAYFUL BULLOCK--AND A JOKE.
Near Horse Creek lived a ranchman of the name of McDonald, a pioneer,
and I believe a religious and perfectly sane and honest Scotchman,
although I am not sure of his nativity; however, he had all the good
qualities of that race. One June morning I joined a bull outfit owned by
him and drove a team attached to the naked gears of two wagons into the
virgin parks on Laramie Peak, along the streams and upon the sidehills
of which grew the straightest aspen and small pine trees in all the
territory. No ax had ever desecrated this beautiful forest. The trip was
for the purpose of cutting some of these poles and building, while on
the mountain, two dozen hay racks upon which was to be hauled to an army
post the contract hay cut in the wild meadows. I was still something of
a tenderfoot, for I knew nothing of this kind of work, and I soon
discovered that I was regarded--much to my chagrin--as only a half-hand.
I complained to other drivers when McDonald indicated that he thought me
a burden because I had to learn how to use an adz and because I had
mishandled my team on a winding new trail we broke in the hills.
One of the bulls, just before leaving the plain below, had playfully
reached me with one of his heavy but unshod hind hoofs and keeled me
over into a bed of prickly pears. For hours a kindly bullwhacker helped
me pluck the sharp and brittle brads from my back. McDonald took a
dislike to me, and naturally I lost any admiration I might have had for
him. And here is where I made a fatal mistake. I shouldn't have noticed
it; instead I took every opportunity offered to annoy him. One day,
while in camp, at the instigation of an older man, I remarked that we
were to have a change for supper.
"And what will it be?" queried McDonald.
"Bacon and coffee," I replied.
"But we had that for breakfast," said he.
"I know," said I, "but it was coffee and bacon--now it's bacon and
coffee!"
The fact is there was no game in the hills, at least we got none. I knew
McDonald wouldn't like the joke, but I never believed it would be taken
as a personal affront. He was, as a matter of fact, a bountiful
provider, but expected to find plenty of grouse, venison, etc., on the
trip and had therefore provided only flour, bacon and coffee.
I met McDonald fifteen years later in the Middle West on a railroad
train. He remembered me and hadn't forgotten the wound I inflicted by my
alleged wit, for he said:
"Yes, I remember you, and you were a poor stick!"
I sincerely hope the last twenty-five and more years has softened his
heart--if he lives--as it has softened mine, for I have only kindly
thoughts of him, and even hold no grudge against the bull that reduced
my efficiency by the playful caress he gave me with his hoof.
* * * * *
If you have ever tried to hoof it up a wild mountain stream running
through towering cliffs of shale, without a trail, you can well imagine
the task a bull-train outfit would have in working its way through the
same maze of trees, rocks and rushing waters, winding from bluff to
bluff. But these tasks were common undertakings for the men engaged in
the business of freighting. "Corduroy" bridges consisting of gravel and
poles had to be built, trees chopped down, fallen and dead trees
removed, brush cleared away or used at the fording places.
A pioneer trip of this kind, and a fair example, was one which took our
outfit from Cheyenne to the headwaters of the Cache de la Poudre river
in what was known as the North Park, some years before Centennial Peak,
one of Colorado's principal mountains, was of enough consequence to be
christened by the government.
Cheyenne was passing from the camp to the substantial town stage and
lumber was needed for building purposes. The North and Middle Park
regions were virgin forests, untouched by the woodman's ax, and the
earth and its precious store of gold hardly scratched by prospectors.
There were no mines, no ranchmen, nothing but nature undisturbed; lakes
of sweet, cold water, groves of white pines and other trees, wild and
untenanted except by blacktail deer, bear, cougar and other animals. The
Greeley colony, however, had been established many miles to the east in
the valley of the Poudre. This was the first great American irrigating
project and a few settlers had begun to till the soil.
Beyond Fort Collins and Livermore the country was as new as an
unexplored country could be. Trout leaped at play along the narrow but
fast-running streams, and if a sportsman had ever cast his lines in
these places he must have been a red man or some daring white hunter who
preceded the stage of development now under way and who left no record
of his doings.
It took several weeks to chop and dig a road through this wilderness and
set up in an open space a couple of sawmill outfits we had with us. Then
it required a couple of months of chopping, hauling and sawing of logs,
and loading of the green and heavy lumber upon our Murphy wagons. The
lumber was unloaded in Cheyenne a month later; some of it was quite dry,
but in much smaller quantities than would have been delivered had the
owners been willing to wait for it to dry where cut.
But Cheyenne was in a hurry, and the boomers couldn't wait, consequently
many of the green joists in the new buildings shrunk and there were
several collapses.
CHAPTER XIV
THE INDIAN AND THE TROUSERS.
When the first clothing was issued to the Sioux and Cheyenne Indians at
Red Cloud Agency the scene was better than a circus. If I am not
mistaken Carl Schurz was secretary of the interior, and after a
conference with some of the big chiefs it was decided to attempt to
abolish the breech-clout. The "Great Father" at Washington, represented
by members of Congress and some of the Pennsylvania Quakers and others,
discovered that Uncle Sam had a warehouse full of discarded or out of
date army coats and trousers, and it was decided to give these to
certain tribes of Indians as part payment for lands that were needed for
white settlement.
The Indians were gathered by hundreds from far and wide the day of issue
at Red Cloud, and Agent McGillicuddy addressed them in their own tongue,
telling them the light blue trousers and coats were the same kind worn
by the brave men who fought heroic battles for their Great Father. His
words were received in silence, and after he had finished several chiefs
held a pow-wow, after which one of their number presented himself at the
delivery window of the big warehouse and received a coat and a pair of
trousers. Several white men helped him to adjust the trousers and coat,
and when he was fully rigged he started to walk toward his group of
red-skinned and breech-clouted companions.
As though the stage had been set and every player had learned his part,
the show began. The up to this time silent Indians jumped into the air
and made a demonstration of guying that would be a credit to any
baseball crowd that ever sat in the bleachers at the Polo Grounds. They
danced and cavorted, they yelled and keeled over, and laughed. The
squaws and papooses thought it the greatest joke, and participated in
the hilarity. Finally the buck who wore the first suit managed to get it
off and resumed his breech-clout.
This first attempt was a failure; but Mr. McGillicuddy was a resourceful
man and was implicitly trusted, especially by the leading men of the
Sioux nation, and he finally tried another plan which after a year or
two succeeded to some extent. He engaged several bucks to help him at
the agency warehouse, paying them in extra amounts of sugar, tobacco and
bacon, but insisted that while they were on duty they must be dressed in
the white man's garb, and finally he had a large number of bucks who
were willing to forego the jibes of their friends for the extra
allowances.
Sooner or later these Indians began to circulate around among others of
the tribe in a lordly manner, and in the end it was not necessary to
bribe any of them, except the youngsters of Sitting Bull's band, to wear
clothing.
At first the Indians insisted in cutting out entirely the seat of the
trousers.
When the first beef on the hoof was issued at Red Cloud, a four-year-old
steer was allotted twice a month to the head of each tepee in the tribe.
It was "cut out" from the herd by a cowboy and turned over to the
Indians forming the tepee, or family, to do with as they pleased, and
what they pleased to do would not have the approval of a humane society.
Always the animal was as wild as a buffalo, and if he did not
immediately start a small stampede on his own account a few
bloodcurdling yells from the Indians did the business. Selecting the
easiest path of escape the frightened steer made a dash, followed by the
bucks on their saddleless ponies. Some of the Indians had long spears,
all had bows and arrows, and some had guns, ranging in make from an old
Spencer rifle to a modern Winchester, although there were few of these.
Most of their weapons were bows and arrows and spears. The latter were
thrown with great accuracy, and fatal thrusts were never made until the
steer had become exhausted. The arrows were also used, perhaps for an
hour, as weapons of torture and shot with no other purpose into the
fleshy part of the steer than to increase his speed. The Indians could
have killed their steer at any time by a shot placed under the shoulder.
But the idea was to torture the beast and perhaps encourage him to turn
and fight for his life, which he often did when surrounded in a ravine.
This was Indian sport, and was indulged in for some time before the
Agency authorities required the government's wards to use civilized
methods.
Usually when a steer had been chased up hill and down vale for an hour,
or until it was worn out, the Indians planned to round up the chase
close to their tepee where a final shot with arrow or bullet put an end
to the animal's misery. Then the squaws swarmed about the carcass with
their skinning knives. The hide, always badly damaged by the spears and
arrows, was removed in a workmanlike manner and carefully put away for
tanning later on. The flesh of the steer was taken away and the feast
began in a few minutes. Much of the meat was dried or "jerked."
CHAPTER XV
THERE'S A REASON: THIS IS IT!--CONCLUSION.
And now let me answer questions that have no doubt arisen in the minds
of the readers who have waded through these chapters. "Why isn't this
record presented in the regulation way--as a novel with a love story
running through it;" or, "What is the moral?"
Let me ask such readers to follow me a little farther.
On March 22d, 1873, a description of a certain boy who left his
Wisconsin home to buffet with the world on his own responsibility would
have read as follows:
Age, 16 years, 6 mos. and 7 days. Weight 109 pounds; black hair,
black eyes, smooth, pale face; well dressed; had, after paying for
one handbag, a Derringer revolver (pop-gun) and a few knick-knacks,
$85.00 in cash (a large sum for a youth of his age in those days).
Carried trip pass from Milwaukee to Council Bluffs, Iowa, via the
Chicago & Northwestern Railway, personally given to him by Marvin
Hughitt, then superintendent; also letter of introduction from E.
J. Cuyler, to S. H. H. Clark, general manager of the Union Pacific
Railroad at Omaha, recommending him as a worthy boy looking for a
railroad office job, also requesting transportation favors.
This description takes no account of a deep-seated cough, occasional
flashes of red in the pale face, and a fear expressed by friends that
he was taking a desperate means of escaping the fate that had overtaken
his dear mother but four months previously. It takes no account of his
life up to the time of his departure on the long journey, not yet ended;
though in the natural order of worldly things, the day is near at hand.
I might add that he had been a "call boy" at a big railroad terminal,
had advanced to a desk as a way-bill clerk, and when advised to seek a
dry climate and there live out-of-doors, was earning a man's wage.
We will pass over briefly an encounter with one of the best men that
ever lived--S. H. H. Clark--in his office at Omaha. When asked for a
pass to Sherman, Wyoming, he said gruffly:
"Haven't you got any money?"
This was the reply:
"Yes, sir, and I'll pay my fare, too, if you don't want to give me a
pass."
"Well," he said, turning to look out of a window, "maybe I'll give you
an order for a half-fare ticket," which brought forth this:
"I don't want to be impolite, Mr. Clark, because you are a friend of
good friends of mine--Mr. Hughitt and Mr. Cuyler--but I must say you
don't know me as well as you might--I'm no half-fare fellow. Good-bye."
And then Mr. Clark laughed, and said he was not in earnest and gave the
pass freely and willingly.
There was a nice chat after that between the pale-faced youth and the
big railroader, during which The Boy discovered that Mr. Clark liked his
nerve but questioned his physical ability to stand the rough knocks that
were coming.
Later, after a season in a division railroad office The Boy, carried
away with the spirit of adventure that was everywhere about him, and
carrying out a plan he had made to live in the open, went to Cheyenne,
signed up with a bull-train, and began the life of out-of-doors. The
"train" was loaded and ready to leave Camp Carlin, at Fort Russell, for
Fort Laramie on the North Platte, but it was for a while impossible to
employ men enough to drive the teams. There had been an outbreak among
the Sioux, and things looked dark when The Boy asked for a job driving
bulls; and when he was hired by Nate Williams, the Missourian wagon
boss, it was almost a joke to Nate, who said afterward that he took one
chance in a million when he employed The Boy and took him to camp. Both
The Boy and Nate won on the long shot.
A year later The Boy was driving a lead team, looked after the
manifests, kept the accounts, and shirked no duty, fair weather or foul.
All this time the pale and flushed cheeks were giving place to bronze,
the thin arms and skinny legs were toughening and filling out, and the
cough had disappeared--weight after first year, 155.
Before leaving Camp Carlin on this first trip The Boy had time to write
home and receive a reply. He told a relative what he had done, and the
reply was a stinging rebuke and almost a final farewell, for the
relative said nothing good could possibly result from quitting a job
with a railroad paying $100 a month and taking one as a teamster at the
same figure--"and you nothing but a sickly boy." But the relative was
wrong, although excusable.
And now, after all the evidence is in, we find that the "sickly"
youngster is still in the land of the living, past three score years,
and with some prospects of another score!
The letter left a sore spot, and The Boy foolishly decided that he was
cut off. So he did not write again for nearly two years.
The middle of the second winter found him at Fort Fetterman, living in a
dug-out in the embankment of a creek bottom, waiting for the springtime
when he could again use his stout lungs in shouting at his bulls, but
his strong arms were not idle the while, for he chopped cottonwood, box
elder and pine logs for the Fetterman commissary.
In those days there was naught but military law, and the civilians were
under more or less surveillance, and it was customary for them to report
at given periods to the sergeant who sat in the adjutant's adobe office
in the fort.
On one of those occasions The Boy's attention was directed to a
bulletin board upon which was tacked a card carrying the caption in big
black types:
"INFORMATION WANTED"
Under this was The Boy's name, a detailed description of him when he
left Cheyenne, and the statement that "anyone knowing his whereabouts
will confer a favor upon his anxious father and sister and receive a
reward if word is sent to Thomas Jefferson, a friend of the family at
Sherman, Wyoming Territory," to whom an appeal had been made. It was
stated in the notice that he "weighs about 100 pounds, has black hair,
black eyes, and is pale and sickly."
At this time The Boy weighed nearly 170, was brown as a berry, had
muscles of an athlete, and in no wise resembled the description. He had
no difficulty in convincing the sergeant that while the name was similar
to his own it evidently was the description of a tenderfoot, and he was
no tenderfoot--not then.
* * * * *
If I could pay any greater tribute than this to life in the open I would
do it; and if there were a possible love story in this record I would
ignore it because, while it might entertain and please some tastes, it
would not answer the main purpose of these tales, namely:
To demonstrate that as long as there is life there is hope, especially
if the spark of life is properly fanned in a salubrious, glorious and
vigorous climate.
"As long as there is life there is hope!" But after all is it not truer
to say "As long as there is hope there is life?"
Hope is the centerpiece of the familiar trio--Faith, Hope and
Charity--and not the least one of these virtues. It is practical to be
hopeful and to order our lives in the spirit of hopefulness; the world
will be better for our hopefulness, especially in these depressing
times. Moreover, it is a Christian duty to be hopeful.
"Hope," says the Rev. Julian K. Smyth, head of the Swedenborgian church
in the United States, "is an affection of the will, and the will is ever
in the desire to act; thus hope is not only a lively virtue, but a
heroic and even a practical one."
It is a good rule of life never to be discouraged no matter what the
misfortune, disappointment or mistake. Life will have been a success to
one who lives in hopefulness, for life will have been lived happily
through many human failures and errors. Life in the world of the flesh
is a battle which, if well fought--if we have faith in the Divine
Providence--means a victory over what we call Death, for Death is in
truth not the End, but the--
BEGINNING.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Prairie Schooner, by William Francis Hooker
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