0 00= C-, 41 L1 N;~w '~ d 4w tv 'Qc - K 4-bw N - 7f i.4 422 Cs Ný ' V.' (~ ~ I r *' - Lo-' 'rjj1~ -. S -~S.t-~ -~ C sow5 do% '01 a fo FRONTIER DAYS 77, -9 11.M. IV / I 2.4 DE M! 1i Vr. Edited Oliver 4L K f. v GROSSET PUBLISHERS & DUNLAP NEW YORK COPYRIGHT, 1928, BY MACRAE-SMITH COMPANY Manufactured in the United States of America by H. Wolff Book Mfg. Co., Inc., New York CONTENTS Contents Illustrations THE PIONEER THE AMERICAN Ax SOME OLD SCOUTS AND THEIR DEEDS THE OLD-TIME FUR TRADE THE OREGON TRAIL KIT CARSON KIT CARSON TENNESSEE'S PARTNER THE ANTELOPE WAITING FOR THE BUFFALO AN EARLY HERO OF THE PACIFIC THE TALL NMEN THE LAND OF GOLD THE INDIAN THE INDIAN: His HOME THE BLACKFEET DEFY THE CROWS VARIOUS INDIAN WAYS FOUR DAYS IN A MIEDICINE LODGE BUFFALO BILL AND YELLOW HAND HUNTING THE BUFFALO CHIPS FROM AN INDIAN WORKSHOP DIGGING IN ON BEECHER'S ISLAND PRAIRIE BATTLEFIELDS THE BAD IMEDICINE M'AN MAKING BUFFALO ROBES SITTING BULL THE BIGHORN ORIGIN OF THE MIEDICINE PIPE PIKE'S PEAK OR BUST 5 PAGE 5 7 -By -By -By -By -By -By -By -By -By -By -By -By Emerson Hough David Lansing Albert Bushnell Hart Arthur Guiterman Colonel Henry Inman Arthur Guiterman Bret Harte General Randolph B. Marcy J. S. Campion T. Somerville Arthur Guiterman Edwin L. Sabin 13 I6 23 30 33 44 46 55 57 63 76 79 -By George Bird Grinnell -By Edwin L. Sahin -By Colonel Homer Wheeler -By Walter McClintock -By Edwin L. Sabin -By Harlan B. Kauffman -By Benjamin P. Avery -By Edwin L. Sabin -By George Bird Grinnell -By Hamlin Garland -By Robert A. Gibbs -By William F. Cody ("Buffalo Bill") -By General Randolph B. M arcy -By George Bird Grinnell -By Edwin L. Sabin 131 144 152 157 162 170 I75 182 195 202 212 215 219 222 225 0 ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOR THE SOLUTARY' INDIAN BY His SKILL AND CUNNIN.G WON His LIVING FROM THE WILDERNESS Frontispiece FACING PAGU WtHEN CORNERED, THE PIONEER BECAME A DESPERATE ADVERSARY, AND FOUGHT LIKE AN ENRAGED TIGER FOR HIS Ho,%rE AND LOVED ONES 46 GoLD I I127 POINTS OF VANTAGE ALONG WATER COURSES WVERE NMANNED BY INDIAN BRAVES W\HO X\ARNED THEIR ENCAMPMENTS OF INVADING WHITES SUNSET BROUGHT QUIET AND CONTENTMENT, FOR THE INDIAN RARELY XENTURED FORTH AFTER DARK X\HITE TRADERS DID A THRIVING AND PROFITABLE BUSINESS XVITH FRIENDLY INDIANS, WVHO WXERE FASCINATED BY THE VARIETY OF THEIR WARES 142 191 206 "They will take, they uill hold, By the spade in the mold, By the seed in the soil By the sw'eat and the toil, B\ the plow in the loam. By the School and the Home." -ARTHUR GUITERMAN PART I THE PIONEER THE AMERICAN AX By EMERSON HOUGH ASK you to look at this splendid tool, the American ax, Inot more an implement of labor than an instrument of civilization. If you can not use it, you are not American. If you do not understand it, you can not understand America. This tool is so simple and so perfect that it has scarcely seen change in the course of aa hundred years. It lacks decoration, as do the tools and the weapons of all strong people. It has no fantastic line, no deviations from simplicity of outline, no ornamentations, no irregularities. It is simple, severe, perfect. Its beauty is the beauty of utility. In the shaft of the ax there is a curve. This curve is there for a reason, a reason of usefulness. The simple swelling head is made thus not for motives of beauty, but for the purpose of effectiveness. The shaft, an even yard in length, polished, curved, of a formation that shall give the greatest strength to a down-right blow in combination with the greatest security to the hand-grasp, has been made thus for a century of American life. This shaft is made of hickory, the sternest of American woods, the one most capable of withstanding the hardest use. It has always been made thus and of this material. The metal head or blade of the American ax is to-day as it has always been. The makers of axes will tell you that they scarcely know of any other model. The f ace of the blade is of the most highly tempered steel for a third or half of its extent. The blade 13 14 '4 FRONTIER DAYS crushing or directing blow. The weight of the ax-head is about four pounds, that is to say from three and one-half to five pounds. With the ax one can do many things. With it the early American blazed his way through the trackless forests. With it he felled the wood whereby was f ed the home fire, or the blaze by which he kept his distant and solitary bivouac. With it he built his home, framing a fortress capable of withstanding all the weaponry of his time. With it he not only made the walls, but fabricated the floors and roof for his little castle. He built chairs, tables, beds, therewith. By its means he hewed out his homestead f rom the heart of the primeval forest, and fenced it round about, Without it he had been lost. At times it served him not only as tool, but as weapon; nor did more terrible weapon ever fit the hand of man. Against its downright blow welded by a sinewy arm the steel casques of the Crusaders had proved indeed poor fending. Even the early womankind of America had acquaintance with this weapon. There is record of a woman of early Kentucky who with an ax once despatched five Indians, who assailed the cabin where for the time she had been left alone. It was a tremendous thing, this ax of the early American. It cleared away paths over hundreds of miles, or marked the portages FRONTIER DAYS is between the heads of the Western waterways, which the early government declared should be held as public pathways forever. In time it became an agent of desolation and destruction, as well as an agent of upbuilding and construction. Misguided, it leveled all too soon and wastefully the magnificent forests of this country, whose superior was never seen on any portion of the earth. Stern, simple. severe, tremendous, wasteful-truly this was the typical American implement. 1Y' u cr/ SOME OLD SCOUTS AND THEIR DEEDS By DAVID LANSING *N 1874, a little army column moved from Fort Dodge, I Kansas, against the Cheyennes, Arapahoes, Comanches ~ ~ and Kiowas, whose combined war-path was making a devastating swath. One detachment, under Lieutenant Frank Baldwin, consisted of a body of trailers, guides Sand scouts, and twenty-five frontiersmen, who were expert shots and plainsmen. With them was a party of friendly Delaware Indians. The column-infantry, cavalry and artillery-moved south a hundred miles, to Camp Supply. Then, guided by one of the greatest scouts of his time, Ben Clark, the march was laid across the Staked Plain, or El Llano Estacado, toward the Adobe Wall in the Texas Panhandle. This column marched at the rate of twenty-five miles a day, suffering such hardship and privation as men have been seldom called to endure. There was no water in the beds of the streams, and the few stagnant pools were so full of gypsum that the men could not drink coffee made of it. They were crossing a desert waste in which the heat rose to one hundred and ten in the shade day after day, without a cloud to break it. After the trail of the Indian marauders was struck, the infantry and cavalry marched sixty-five miles in two days. Early one morning, Baldwin's detachment of scouts entered a gap in the bluff which skirted the Staked Plain. Two hundred and fifty Indians charged from the bluffs on both sides of the little advance p~arty. The frontiersmen dropped to earth, and the figyht FRONTIER DAYS 17 Much later, at a desk in a stately office of the War Department Building in Washington, there was to sit a grizzled soldier of dignified aspect, destined to wear the stars of a lieutenant-general on his shoulder-straps. But on that fierce morning in this blazing hell of a country, he was a captain of cavalry, as fresh for a fight as if he were not physically worn to a stand-still. As his troop flung itself into line, Captain A. R. Chaffee made one of his little battlespeeches, and then shouted as he charged: "If any man is killed, I'll make him a corporal on the spot." The Indians broke at the charge, and retreated twenty miles, over which they were hotly followed. It was as rough country as mortal men ever tried to fight in. Through hills, buttes, ravines and cahlons, across the dr" bed of the Red River, the pursuit continued without faltering. The men suffered tortures, and many of them, during this chase, opened veins in their arms to moisten their black and swollen lips with their own blood. The scouts were doing their duty, side by side with the troopers. A wagon train returning from Camp Supply with stores for this column was surrounded by more than two hundred warriors. The escort of troopers would not abandon its previous convoy, and could 18 x8 FRONTIER DAYS not fight a way through. A young scout, named Schmalski, dashed at night, on horseback, out through the close line of besiegers, and was chased for several miles. He was near capture, when his horse ran into a herd of buff alo, and he escaped in the tumult and darkness. A little later, his horse stepped in a hole, threw him, and he lost his rifle. He went on all night, wore out his only horse, and pressed on, unarmed and on foot. By day he lay hidden in the brush, and trudged through the hostile country at night, without food or water, until he reached Camp Supply, where Colonel Lewis at once organized a relief column. A little later, a detachment of six men was carrying dispatches f rom a command near Red River to Camp Supply. Of the six, tw'o wvere scouts, Amos Chapman and William Dixon. The others were cavalrymen. Far from any refuge they were surrounded by nearly two hundred Indians. They sought shelter in a buffalo wallow, and prepared to hold their ground. The attack oame at six o'clock in the morning, and the long, long day stretched before them. In the first rush, four of these six men were wounded, Private Smith mortally so. The other hurts were severe. They were hemmed in on all sides in an open plain, and were outnumbered almost twenty to one. One of the scouts, while a severe fire was being poured in at them at close range, succeeded in throwing up a scanty entrenchment with his bowie knife and his bare hands. His comrades held the Kiowas and Comanches off until this little help was ready as a refuge, and they moved into the trench, the wounded walking with brave and painful effort. Although Private Smith was wounded unto death, he sat upright in the trench to conceal his crippled condition from the foe. From early morning until night, this handful of five men was under an almost constant fire, often at such short range that they could bring their pistols into play. Thus they fought for their own lives and defended their dying comrade, without food, and for drink only a little muddy rainwater mixed with their own blood. They killed more thkan a doz7en Indians and wounded above a score. FRONTIER DAYS i9 and two scouts were of those who had been fighting and marching for weeks amid the most dreadful privations. They were worn to skin and bone, but their souls were as "big as all outdoors," and they flinched at no odds under Heaven. By such men as these was this nation made. The name of Custer recalls that scout whose sombre fame is hung upon so unique a distinction, that its mention recalls the horror of the tragedy of the Little Big Horn. For this Curley, an Upsaroka Crow Indian scout, was the only survivor of the Seventh Cavalry force, nearly three hundred strong, who died around their leader, General George Armstrong Custer, in June, 1876. Curley alone lived to struggle, half crazed, from that bloody field, and reach General Terry with an incoherent tale of the obliteration of Custer's command. And for years, or until Indians who had been with the attacking force had become tamed and willing to talk of that awful day, Curley's story was the only record of the last fight of Custer. The story of the "last stand" is a familiar one. But the scene was once sketched in a few bold strokes by Walt Whitman in trying to describe the heroic canvas by John Mulvany, called "Custer's Last Rally," and his words are worth a place here as a setting for Curley's part in the drama. "Forty or fifty figures," wrote Walt Whitman, "perhaps more, in full finish and detail, life-size, in the mid-ground, with three times that number or more through the rest of the picture, swarms upon swarms of savage Sioux in their war-bonnets, mostly on ponies, driving through the background, through the smoke like a hurricane of demons. Nothing in the books like it, nothing in Homer, nothing in Shakespeare; more grim and sublime than either, all native, all our own, and all a fact. "A great lot of muscular, tan-faced men, brought to bay under terrible circumstances, death a-hold of them, yet every man undaunted, not one losing his head, wringing out every cent of the pay before they sell their lives. Custer, his hair cut short, stands in the middle with dilated eye and extended arm, aiming a huge cavalry pistol. Captain Cook is there, mortally wounded, blood on the white handkerchief around his head, but aiming his carbine coolly, half kneeling. His body was afterward found close to Custer's. "The slaughtered and half-slaughtered horses make a peculiar 20 FRONTIER DAYS feature. Two dead Indians, herculean, lie in the foreground, clutching their rifles, very characteristic. The many soldiers, their faces and attitudes, the broad-brimmed Western hats, the powder smoke in puffs, the dying horses with their rolling eyes almost human in their agony, the clouds of war-bonneted Sioux in the background, the figures of Custer and Cook, with indeed the whole scene, inexpressible, dreadful, yet with an attraction and fierce beauty that will remain forever in my memory." Such was the inferno from which the scout Curley escaped. He stayed with Custer until the end was in sight. Then he wiped from his face the war-paint of his tribe, shook down his hair, and stole, in the powder-smoke and uproar, toward the charging Sioux. He saw one of them fall from his pony, and picking up a dead man's blanket, Curley wrapped it around him, and ran to the pony of the wounded Indian. He was able to mount it without detection, and pretended to ride toward Custer's lines. Watching his chance, he dashed up a nearby ravine, and was out of the battle. Then he rode for his life and managed to reach General Terry, who was coming up the Big Horn river on the steamer Far West. The General could not credit the awful news, nor could Curley give more than a most confused account, as he was almost insane with terror and grief. Alas, when the surviving cavalry of Reno and Benteen was able to occupy the field, they found it was all as Curley said. The bodies lay as they had fallen, by troops, in-lineof-battle-formation, noble wind-rows of the dead, behind them the subaltern officers, in front of them the troop commanders. Thus their bodies wrote on the bloody grass the story of their heroic death, without panic, without fear, soldiers to the bitter end. When Curley had recovered from the shock, he told what he recalled through an interpreter, whose rendering was partly as follows: "Curley says he went down with two other Crows, and went into action with Custer. The General, he says, kept down the river on the north bank four miles, after Reno had crossed to the south side above. He thought Reno would sweep down the valley so that they could attack the Sioux villages on both sides, he believing Reno would take them at the other end, while he (Custer) would go in at the lower end. "At last Custer found a ford, and dashed for it. The Indians FRONTIER DAYS 2 21 met him and poured in a heavy fire from across the river. Custer dismounted his men to fight on foot, but could not get his skirmishers over the stream, and meantime hundreds of Indians, on foot and on ponies, poured over the river (which was only about three feet deep), and filled the ravines on each side of Custer's men. "Custer then fell back on some high ground behind him, and seized the nearest ravines. The Indians wholly surrounded Custer, and poured in a terrible fire on all sides. They charged Custer on foot in vast numbers, Curley says, but were again and again driven back. "The fight began about two o'clock, and lasted until the sun went down over the hills. The men fought desperately, and after the ammunition in their belts was exhausted, they went to their saddle-bags and got more and continued to fight.. "He says, also, that the Big Chief Custer lived until nearly all his men had been killed or wounded, and went about encouraging his soldiers to fight on. Curley says that when he saw Custer was surrounded he watched his chance until the Sioux charged among them, and they did not know him from one of their own men. He caught a pony, and got away. "When he saw the party was to be all killed, Curley says he went to Custer and begged him to let him show him a way of escape. He waved Curley away and rode back to the little group of men to die with them. Curley says he did not leave Custer until the -battle was nearly over. He is quite sure the Indians had more killed than Custer had white men with him. "Custer got shot in the left side before Curley went away, and sat down with his pistol in his hand. Aother shot struck Custer and he fell over. The last officer killed was a man who rode a white horse.. "Curley says, as he rode off, nearly a mile from the battle-field, he saw in a ravine a dozen soldiers fighting with Sioux all around them. He thinks all were killed, as they were dismounted and were outnumbe-red five- to one. (There were no doubt part of the thirty 22 22 FRONTIER DAYS Nearly thirty years after the battle, Two Moons, a Sioux who was in the attack, told his recollections of that day, and said of the last moments of this magnificent "last stand": "At last, about a hundred men and five horsemen stood on the hill, all huddled together. All along the bugler kept blowing his commands. He was very brave, too. Then the five horsemen and the bunch of men, maybe forty now, started toward the river. A man on a sorrel horse with a white f ace led them, shouting all the time. He was a brave man. He wore a buckskin shirt, and had long black hair and a long black moustache. His men were all covered with dust. He fought hard with a big knife. All the soldiers were now killed, and the bodies were stripped. We came to the man with the big moustache, he lay down the hill toward the river. The Indians did not take his buckskin shirt. The Sioux said: "'This is a big chief. This is Long Hair' (Custer). "'I don't know. I have never seen him. But the man on the white-faced sorrel was the bravest man I sa." This brave unknown, with the buckskin shirt and the long black hair: what an epic figure he makes, as he leads the forlorn hope in the last counter-charge, "shouting all the time," fighting hard "with his big knife." He was one of the scouts with Custer's column, that is all that is known about him. And for him was also reserved the honor accorded the General who died there, that his body should not be stripped after death, because of his conspicuous bravery in his last hour. Of such breed were he soutswh bld ndouhtand suffered with those little columns in blue that tracked across the plains in the days that are no more. THE OLD-TIME FUR TRADE By ALBERT BUSHNELL HART HE earliest fur traders in America were the French who T settled at the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, because that was the front door of the fur country. The first white man to reach Lake Huron was Champlain, a fur ' trader; one of the first two white men to see the MIis"al..-... sissippi was Joliet, a fur trader; the first man to navigate Lake Erie was La Salle, a fur trader; and the first white man to see the Rocky Miountains was Verendrye, a fur trader. One of the purposes of Wolfe's capture of Quebec was to turn the valuable fur trade of the north to the English. The immense far northern country had long been given over by England to a concern called "The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson's Bay," commonly known as the Hudson's Bay Company. That company did not bring colonists or encourage visitors. It looked upon the whole vast region as a private fur park and considered the Indians to be creatures provided by Providence to bring them the furs. When, in 1784, rival traders formed the Northwest Fur Company, the employees of the two concerns began to pursue one another, to underbid one another, to steal from one another and to fight one another. At last, in 1821, they combined into one Hudson's Bay Company, which controlled the Canadian fur trade from Labrador on the Atlantic to the Columbia River on the Pacific. The English, farther south from the beginning of their settlements, traded for furs with the neighboring Indians, but the furs were thinner and less valuable than those from the north. When Lewis and Clark came back, in i8o6, from their wonderful journey through the mountains to the Pacific, they brought tales of the richness of the furs on the upper waters of the Missouri and across the mountains on the Columbia. Those reports led at once to a lively fur trade in the West and Northwest, of which St. Louis was for fifty years the center. In 1807 By permission from THE YOUTH'S cOMtPANION. 23 24 24 FRONTIER DAYS Manuel Lisa wvent up the Missouri and Yellowstone, and built a fort at the mouth of the Bighorn. Two years later he formed the Missouri Fur Company. About the same time John Jacob Astor, who had been in the fur business in New York for twenty years, formed the American Fur Company and planned to plant posts all the way up the Missouri and down the Columbia. Out on the Pacific coast the furs were wonderful, especially those of the sea otters, of which thousands of skins were taken. Astor sent a vessel round Cape Horn in i8io; he also sent a party overland, but the difficulties, of the trackless wilderness were such that it took nearly a year and a half for the men to cross from St. Louis to Astoria-a journey that a train now makes in about three days. In 1822 Gen. Ashley of 'St. Louis started the Rocky M\ountain Fur Company; and for years his concern and the American Fur Company tried to drive each other out of business. The men employed by one would follow the expedition of the other to some spot where it was to meet the Indians, and then would try to get the trade away by making the Indians roaring drunk. In the end the Rocky Mountain Fur Company had to give up, after losing about a hundred men and goods and furs to the amount of a hundred thousand dollars. In the course of years the fur traders, whether they were individuals or firms or companies, acquired a regular system of doing business. By far the greater part of the furs were hunted by the Indians, who brought them into the trading posts in order to exchange them for goods. In addition, all the companies employed gangs of trappers, whose catch was the property of the company. Below the trappers were the "pork eaters," green hands who were fed on their journey to the wilderness on beans and fat pork. There were also free trappers, who wandered anywvhere in the wilderness, and who brought in and sold whatever they got. It was a hard and dangerous service, for several powerful Indiaqn tribes w-xere determined that w%-hite men should not come into FRONTIER DAYS 25 Townsend, an early Western traveler, tells that one day he met about a hundred Indians of the Sac tribe. "They were dressed and decorated in the true primitive style, their heads shaved closely, and painted with alternate stripes of fiery red and deep black, leaving only the long scalping tuft, in which was interwoven a quantity of elk's hair and eagle's feathers. Each man was furnished with a good blanket, and some had an underdress of calic, but the greater number were entirely naked to the waist. The faces and bodies of the men were, almost without an exception, fan:astically painted, the predominant color being deep red, with occasionally a few stripes of dull clay white round the eyes and mouth.... The squaws, of which there were about twenty, were dressed very much like the men, and at a little distance cnuld hardly be distinguished from them. Among them was an old, superannuated crone, who soon after her arrival had been presented with a broken umbrella. The only use that she made of it was to wrench the plated ends from the whalebones, string them on a piece of wire, take her knife from her belt, with which she deliberately cut a slit of an inch in length along the upper rim of her ear, and insert them in it." The Indians were not always so peaceful, for Zenas Leonard, who was much among them, tells a story that scores of their trappers 26 FRONTIER DAYS could doubtless match. "Whilst leading my horse toward the camp an Indian, armed with a bow and arrow, came rushing upon me.... I sprang behind a bunch of bushes, which afforded me a tolerable shelter. He then made signs to me that if I would deliver myself up he would not hurt me. But this I refused. My only weapon was a large knife, which I carried in a scabbard at my waist. I drew this out and proposed to meet him.... I had been in several dangerous situations with the Indians and wild beasts-in some of which I had almost despaired. But none seemed to cause the same feeling as did my present predicament. I had no chance of escaping, and an immediate and cruel death I knew would be my fate if I surrendered..... I carelessly let my body move from the shelter afforded by the bush, and at that instant I felt the pointed arrow pierce my side. I jerked the weapon out immediately, and started to run. By this time, owing to the loss of blood from my wound and the great excitement I was under, I began to grow weak and faint, for I thought that every moment would be my last, as I heard the Indian puffing and blowing behind me. We were now within sight of our camp, and were fortunately discovered by the men who were there, who immediately ran to my relief." The trappers were a rough and boisterous set. French Canadians, famous for their love of wild life and hardships, made up more than half of the total number. An English traveler gives a sample of their talk: "Where from, stranger?" "The divide, and to the bayou for meat and you are from there, I see. Any buffalo come yet?" "Heap, and seal fat at that. What's the sign out on the plains?" "War party of 'Rapahoes passed Squirrel at sundown yesterday, and nearly raised my animals. Sign, too, of more on left fork of Boiling Spring. No buffalo between this and Bijou. Do you feel like camping?" "What's beaver worth in Taos?" "Dollar." "In St. Louiy?" "Same." "Whar's Bill WVilliams?" "Gone under, they say; the Diggers took his hair." "How's powder goin'?" FRONTIER DAYs 27 "Two dollars a pint." "'Bacca?" "A plew (a beaver skin) a plug." "Got any about you?" "Have so." "Give us a chaw; and now let's camp." To the trappers, or rather to the partners, or managers, who went out with the expeditions, we owe the earlier knowledge of the great interior of the North American Continent. They pushed up every stream where there was any chance of getting furs; they were the first to discover the passes across the Rocky "Mountains, and to reach Great Salt Lake. Jedediah Smith was the first white man to cross the Sierra Nevadas. Although only twenty-one years old, he led a party of fifteen men all the way from Great Salt Lake to San Diego, and on his way back passed through or near the Yosemite Valley. In the end he was killed by Comanche Indians. The object of the trapper was of course to take the fur-bearing animals. He did not disdain mink, raccoon, squirrel, skunk and muskrat skins; but wolf, panther and bear skins, except that of the black bear, he did not much esteem. He valued foxes and otter, but his main dependence was the beaver. A beaver skin weighed from one to two pounds according to its size and condition, and was worth in St. Louis about four dollars a pound. There was a time when a million dollars' worth of beaver skins were sent to Europe every year. Indians and free trappers brought the larger part of the skins into the trading posts. The posts, of which not less than two hundred were built at different times, were made square, from fifty to three hundred feet on a side, and surrounded by logs set into the ground. This palisade stood up twelve to eighteen feet, with a plank walk running around the inside so that sentries could fire over the wall. At the four corners were bastions for small cannon. The Indians were never able to take the forts by storm; but in 1763 they got inside the fort at Mackinac on pretense of playing ball. Alexander Henry, an American who chanced to be there, heard outcries and ran to his window. He "saw a crowd of Indians within the fort, furiously cutting down and scalping every Englishman they found." An Indian slave woman hid him in a garret, and through a crack he looked down upon the fearful scene of 28 FRONTIER DAYS massacre. The Indians came to search his refuge, and he hid behind a heap of birch-bark buckets that were used for collecting maple sap. "Four Indians armed with tomahawks and all besmeared with blood" vainly searched for him. The Canadian owner of the house finally turned him over to the Indians, but he ran away; he was one of twenty who were saved out of the ninety English-speaking men who had been in the fort. Most of the goods that the fur traders used came from Europe; and by the time they had been brought to St. Louis and distributed to the posts they had cost about four times the original price. In 1826 General Ashley, the most famous of all the fur traders, sold to another trading concern a lot of goods at wholesale prices. It included gunpowder at $i.50 a pound; green blankets at $ii each; scarlet cloth at $6 a yard; muskets at $24; sugar at $i a pound; vermilion-for painting the Indians' faces-at $3 a pound; kettles at $2 a pound; handkerchiefs at $i.50 each. The goods were undoubtedly sold to the Indians on such terms that the trader got twice those prices. One trapper tells of buying from the Indians a beaverskin robe that was worth from $20 to $30 for which he paid two awls and one fishhook. The thing that the Indians wanted most was liquor; they called it fire water, because, if it was really good, it would burn when poured on the fire. The United States government absolutely forbade the traders to carry liquor with them even for their own use, but the companies succeeded in smuggling it in and selling it. The fur trade was a business full of risks. The owner sent supplies in the spring of one year, and got back his returns the fall of the next year. Many cargoes of goods and furs were wrecked on the Missouri River. The Indians often demanded large payments of goods to let the traders through, and then robbed and murdered them. Trappers, on the other hand, frequently attacked the Indians, and sometimes murdered dozens of men, women and children belonging to the friendly tribes. The men were in constant danger from wild animals, and their diaries abound with stories of hairbreadth escapes. A considerable part of the later fur trade was in buffalo hides from the western plains; as many as fifty thousand hides sometimes reached St. Louis in a single year. The trappers had to make long journeys over waterless stretches; and they were often caught in the FRONTIER DAYS 29 mountains, where they almost died of cold and starvation. A noted trapper named Fitzpatrick once got separated from his party; his only horse was captured by the Indians, and he barely escaped through a hole among the rocks, the outlet of which he covered with leaves and sticks. From his refuge he had the pleasure of watching the Indians running races all day long with his horse. At night he built a raft of old logs, and started to cross a river; but the raft went to pieces and he lost everything except a little clothing and a butcher knife. A pack of wolves drove him up a tree, and howled underneath him for hours. He would have starved if he had not found the skeleton of a buffalo, from which he removed the small amount of meat the wolves had left; he cooked the meat over the fire that he made by rubbing two sticks together. The trade at last died out. The fur-bearing animals soon greatly decreased in number, yet for some time traders made large profits. The annual catch of furs that came to St. Louis was worth about $25o,ooo, and, on the average, it cost not less than $i~o,ooo to get it. Hardly any of the trappers saved money, and most of the managers died poor men. The $ioo,ooo a year profit went mostly to the owners of the business in St. Louis and elsewhere. After the Mormons settled in Utah and the emigrants in Oregon and California, the business ceased to be worth while, except far up in the Arctic circle, where the Hudson's Bay Company still carries it on. Our country owes much to those brave and fearless men, who found the roads across the continent, who did more than anyone else to secure Oregon and who opened the way for the millions of people who now live in the region where the old-time fur traders worked and fought and suffered. THE OREGON TRAIL By ARTHUR GUITERMAN WO hundred wagons, rolling out to Oregon breaking through the gopher holes, lurching wide and f ree, Crawling up the mountain pass, jolting, grumbling, rumbling on, Two hundred wagons, rolling to the sea. From East and South and North they flock, to muster, row on row, A fleet of ten-score prairie ships beside Missouri's flow. The bullwhips crack, the oxen strain, the canvas-hooded files Are off upon the long, long trail of sixteen hundred miles. The women hold the guiding-lines; beside the rocking steers With goad and ready rifle walk the bearded pioneers Through clouds of dust beneath the sun, through floods of sweeping rain Across the Kansas prairie land, across Nebraska's plain. Two hundred wagons, rolling out to Oregon Curved around the campfire flame at halt when day is done, Rest awhile beneath the stars, yoke again and lumber on, Two hundred wagons, rolling with the sun. 30 FRONTIER DAXYS 31 With shield and spear on Europe's plain their fathers marched before. They march where leap the antelope and storm the buffalo Still Westward as their fathers marched ten thousand years ago. Two hundred wagons, rolling out to Oregon Creeping down the dark defile below the mountain crest, Surging through the brawling stream, lunging, plunging, forging on, Two hundred wagons, rolling toward the WVest. Nor toils the dusty caravan with swinging wagon-poles Where WValla Walla pours along, where broad Columbia rolls. The long-haired trapper's face grows dark and scowls the painted brave; Where now the beaver builds his dam the wheat and rye shall wave. The British trader shakes his head and weighs his nation's loss, For where those hardy settlers come the Stars and Stripes will toss. Then block the wheels, unyoke the steers; the prize is his who dares; The cabins rise, the fields are sown, and Oregon is theirs l They will take, they will hold, By the spade in the mold, By the seed in the soil By the sweat and the toil, By the plow in the loam, By the School and the Home I 32 FRONTIER DAYS Two hundred wagons, rolling out to Oregon, Two hundred wagons, ranging free and far, Two hundred wagons, rumbling, grumbling, rolling on, Two hundred wagons, following a Star! KIT CARSON By COLONEL HENRY INMAN. O F THE famous men whose lives are so interwoven with the history of the Old Santa Fe Trail that the story of the great highway is largely made up of their individual exploits and acts of bravery, it has been my fortune to have known nearly all intimately, during more than a ---- third of a century passed on the great plains and in the Rocky Mountains. First of all, Christopher, or Kit, Carson, as he is familiarly known to the world, stands at the head and front of celebrated frontiersmen, trappers, scouts, guides, and Indian fighters. I knew him well through a series of years, to the date of his death in 1868, but I shall confine myself to the events of his remarkable career along the line of the Trail and its immediate environs. In 1826 a party of Santa Fe traders was passing near his father's home in Howard County, Missouri, and young Kit, who was then but seventeen years old, joined the caravan as hunter. He was already an expert with the rifle, and thus commenced his life of adventure on the great plains and in the Rocky Mountains. His first exhibition of that nerve and coolness in the presence of danger which marked his whole life was in this initial trip across the plains. When the caravan had arrived at the Arkansas River, somewhere in the vicinity of the great bend of that stream, one of the teamsters, while carelessly pulling his rifle toward him by the barrel, discharged the weapon and received the ball in his arm, completely crushing the bones. The blood from the wound flowed so copiously that he nearly lost his life before it could be arrested. He was fixed up, however, and the caravan proceeded on its journey, the man thinking no more seriously of his injured arm. In a few days, however, the wound began to indicate that gangrene had set in, and it was determined that only by an amputation was it possible for him to live beyond a few days. Every one of the older men of the caravan positively declined to attempt the operation, as there By permission from THE OLD SANTE FI TRAIL, by colonel Henry Inman. Copyright Crane & Co. 33 34 FRONTIER DAYS were no instruments of any kind. At this juncture Kit, realizing the extreme necessity of prompt action, stepped forward and offered to do the job. He told the unfortunate sufferer that he had had no experience in such matters, but that as no one else would do it, he would take the chance. All the tools that Kit could find were a razor, a saw, and the kingbolt of a wagon. He cut the flesh with the razor, sawed through the bone as if it had been a piece of joist, and seared the horrible wound with the kingbolt, which he had heated to a white glow, for the purpose of stopping the flow of blood that naturally followed such rude surgery. The operation was a complete success; the man lived many years afterward, and was with his surgeon in many an expedition. In the early days of the commerce of the prairies, Carson was the hunter at Bent's Fort for a period of eight years. There were about forty men employed at the place; and when the game was found in abundance in the mountains, it was a relatively easy task and just suited to his love of sport, but when it grew scarce, as it often did, his prowess was taxed to its utmost to keep the forty mouths from crying for food. He became such an unerring shot FRONTIER DAYS 35 with the rifle during that time he was called the "Nestor of the Rocky Mountains." His favorite game was the buffalo, although he killed countless numbers of other animals. All of the plains tribes of Indians, as did the powerful Utes of the mountains, knew him well; for he had often visited in their camps, sat in their lodges, smoked the pipe, and played with their little boys. The latter fact may not appear of much consequence, but there are no people on earth who have a greater love for their boy children than the savages of America. The Indians all feared him, too, at the same time that they respected his excellent judgment, and frequently were governed by this wise counsel. The following story will show his power in this direction. The Sioux, one of the most numerous and warlike tribes at that time, had encroached upon the hunting-grounds of the southern Indians, and the latter had many a skirmish with them on the banks of the Arkansas along the line of the Trail. Carson, who was in the upper valley of the river, was sent for to come down and help them drive the obnoxious Sioux back to their own stamping-ground. He left Fort Bent, and went with the party of Comanche messengers to the main camp of that tribe and the Arapahoes, with whom they had united. Upon his arrival, he was told that the Sioux had a thousand warriors and many rifles, and the Comanches and Arapahoes were afraid of them on account of the great disparity of numbers, but that if he would go with them on the war-path, they felt assured they could overcome their enemies. Carson, however, instead of encouraging the Comanches and Arapahoes to fight, induced them to negotiate with the Sioux. He was sent as mediator, and so successfully accomplished his mission that the intruding tribe consented to leave the hunting-grounds of the Comanches as soon as the buffalo season was over; which they did, and there was no more trouble. After many adventures in California with Fremont, Carson, with his inseparable friend, L. B. M axwell, embarked in the woolraising industry. Shortly after they had established themselves on their ranch, the Apaches made one of their frequent murdering and plundering raids through Northern New Mexico, killing defenceless women and children, running off stock of all kinds, and laying waste every little ranch they came across in their wild foray. Not very far from the city of Santa Fe, they ruthlessly butchered a Mr. White and his son, though three of their number were slain by the 36 36 FRONTIER DAYS brave gentlemen before they were overpowered. Other of the blood-thirsty savages carried away the women and children of the desolated home and took them to their mountain retreat in the vicinity of Las Vegas. Mr. White was a highly respected merchant, and news of this outrage spreading rapidly through the settlements, it was determined that the savages should not go without punishment this time, at least. Carson's reputation as an Indian fighter was at its height, so the natives of the country sent for him, and declined to move until he came. For some unexplained reason, after he arrived at Las Vegas, he was not placed in charge of the posse, that position having already been given to a Frenchman. Carson, as was usual with him, never murmured because he was assigned to a subordinate position, but took his place, ready to do his part in whatever capacity. The party set out for the stronghold of the savages, and rode night and day on the trail of the murderers, hoping to surprise them and recapture the women and children; but so much time had been wasted in delays, that Carson feared they would onlyT find the mutilated bodies of the poor captives. In a few days after leaving Las Vegas, the retreat of the savages was discovered in the fastness of the mountains, where they had fortified themselves in such a manner that they could resist ten times the number of their pursuers. Carson, as soon as he saw them, without a second's hesitation, and giving a characteristic* yell, dashed in, expecting, of course, that the men would follow him; but they only stood in gaping wonderment of his bravery, not daring to venture after him. He did not discover his dilemma until he had advanced so far alone that escape seemed impossible. But here his coolness, which always served him in the moment of supreme danger, saved his scalp. As the savages turned on him, he threw himself on the off side of his horse, Indian fashion, for he was as expert in a trick of that kind as the savages themselves, and rode back to the little command. He had six arrows in his horse and a bullet through his coat! The Indians in those days were poorly arme-d, and did not long FRONTIER DAYS 3 37 self; for he was anxious to save the captured women and children. He talked to the men very earnestly, however, exhorting them not to flinch in the duty they had come so far to perform, and for which he had come at their call. This had the desired effect; for he induced them to make a charge, which was gallantly performed, and in such a brave manner that the Indians fled, scarcely making an effort to defend themselves. Five of their number were killed at the furious onset of the Nlexicans, but unfortunately, as he anticipated, only the murdered corpses of the women and children were the result of the vcoy President Polk appointed Carson to a second lieutenancy, and his first official duty was conducting fifty soldiers under his command through the country of the Comanches, who were then at war with the whites. A fight occurred at a place known as Point of Rocks, where on arriving, Carson found a company of volunteers for the Mexican War, and camped near them. About dawn the next morning, all the animals of the volunteers were captured by a band of Indians, while the herders were conducting them to the river-bottom to graze. The herders had no weapons, and luckily, in the confusion attending the bold theft, ran into Carson's camp; and as he, with his men, were ready with their rifles, they recaptured the oxen, but the horses were successfully driven off by their captors. Several of the savages were mortally wounded by Carson's prompt charge, as signs after they had cleared out proved; but the Indian custom of tying the wounded on their ponies precluded the chance of taking any scalps. The wily Comanche, like the Arab of the desert, is generally successful in his sudden assaults, but Carson, who was never surprised, was always equal to his tactics. One of the two soldiers whose turn it had been to stand guard that morning was discovered to have been asleep when the alarm of Indians was given, and Carson at once administered the Indian method of punishment, making the man wear the dress of a squaw for that day. Then going on, he arrived at Santa Fe', where he turned over his little command. 38 FRONTIER DAYS less than an hour he had hired sixteen picked men and was on his march to intercept them. He took a short cut across the mountains, taking especial care to keep out of the way of the Indians, who were on the war-path, but as to whose movements he was always posted. In two days he came upon a camp of United States recruits, en route to the military posts in New Mexico, whose commander offered to accompany him with twenty men. Carson accepted the generous proposal, by forced marches soon overtook the caravan of traders, and at once placed one Fox, the leader of the gang, in irons, after which he informed the owners of the Caravan of the escape they had made from the wretches whom they were treating so kindly. At first the gentlemen were astounded at the disclosures made to them, but soon admitted that they had noticed many things which convinced them that the plot really existed, and but for the opportune arrival of the brave frontiersman it would shortly have been carried out. The members of the caravan who were perfectly trustworthy were then ordered to corral the rest of the conspirators, thirty-five in number, and they were driven out of camp, with the exception of Fox, the leader, whom Carson conveyed to Taos. He was imprisoned for several months, but as a crime in intent only could be proved against him, and as the adobe walls of the house where he was confined were not secure enough to retain a man who desired to release himself, he was finally liberated, and cleared out. The traders were profuse in their thanks to Carson for his timely interference, but he refused every offer of remuneration. On their return to Santa Fe from St. Louis, however, they presented him with a magnificent pair of pistols, upon whose silver mounting was an inscription commemorating his brave decd and the gratitude of the donors. FRONTIER DAYS 39 The following summer was spent in a visit to St. Louis, and early in the fall he returned over the Trail, arriving at the Cheyenne village on the Upper Arkansas without meeting with any incident worthy of note. On reaching that point, he learned that the Indians had received a terrible affront from an officer commanding a detachment of United States troops, who had whipped one of their chiefs; and that consequently the whole tribe was enraged, and burning for revenge upon the whites. Carson was the first white man to approach the place since the insult, and so many years had elapsed since he was the hunter at Bent's Fort, and so grievouNlyv had the Indians been offended, that his name no longer guaranteed safety to the party with whom he was traveling, nor even insured respect to himself, in the state of excitement existing in the village. Carson, however, deliberately pushed himself into the presence of a war council which was just then in session to consider the question of attacking the caravan, giving orders to his men to keep close together, and guard against a surprise. The savages, supposing that he could not understand their language, talked without restraint, and unfolded their plans to capture his party and kill them all, particularly the leader. After they had reached this decision, Carson coolly rose and addressed the council in the Cheyenne language, informing the Indians who he was, of his former associations with and kindness to their tribe, and that now he was ready to render them any assistance they might require; but as to their taking his scalp, he claimed the right to say a word. The Indians departed, and Carson went on his way; but there were hundreds of savages in sight on the sand hills, and, though they made no attack, he was well aware that he was in their power, nor had they abandoned the idea of capturing his train. His coolness and deliberation kept his men in spirit, and vet out of the whole fifteen, which was the total number of his force, there were only two or three on whom he could place any reliance in case of an emergency. When the train camped for the night, the wagons were corralled, and the men and mules all brought inside the circle. Grass was cut with sheath-knives and fed to the animals, instead of their being picketed-out as usual, and as large a guard as possible detailed. When the camp had settled down to perfect quiet, Carson crawled 40 FRONTIER DAYS outside it, taking with him a Mexican boy, and after explaining to him the danger which threatened them all, told him that it was in his power to save the lives of the company. Then he sent him on alone to Rayedo, a journey of nearly three hundred miles, to ask for an escort of United States troops to be sent out to meet the train, impressing upon the brave little NMexican the importance of putting a good many miles between himself and the camp before morning. And so he started him, with a few rations of food, without letting the rest of his party know that such measures were necessary. The boy had been in Carson's service for some time, and was known to him as a faithful and active messenger, and in a wild country like New Mexico, with the outdoor life and habits of its people, such a journey was not an unusual occurrence. Carson now returned to the camp, to watch all night himself, and at daybreak all were on the Trail again. No Indians made their appearance until nearly noon, when five warriors came galloping up toward the train. As soon as they came close enough to hear his voice, Carson ordered them to halt, and going up to them, told how he had sent a messenger to Rayedo the night before to inform the troops that their tribe were annoying him, and that if he or his men were molested, terrible punishment would be inflicted by those who would surely come to his relief. The savages replied that they would look for the moccasin tracks, which they undoubtedly found, and the whole village passed away toward the hills after a little while, evidently seeking a place of safety from an expected attack by the troops. The young Mexican overtook the detachment of soldiers whose officer had caused all the trouble with the Indians, to whom he told his story; but failing to secure any sympathy, he continued his journey to Ravedo, and procured from the garrison of that place immediate assistance. Major Grier, commanding the post, at once despatched a troop of his regiment, which, by forced marches, met Carson twenty-five miles below Bent's Fort, and though it encountered no Indians, the rapid movement had a good effect upon the savages, impressing them with the power and promptness of the government. Early in the spring of i865, Carson was ordered, with three companies, to put a stop to the depredations of marauding bands of Cheyennes, Kiowas, and Comanches upon the caravans and emigrant FRONTIER DAYS 41 outfits traveling the Santa F' Trail. He left Fort Union with his command and marched over the Dry or Cimarron route to the Arkansas River, for the purpose of establishing a fortified camp at Cedar Bluffs, or Cold Spring, to afford a refuge for the freight trains on that dangerous part of the Trail. The Indians had for some time been harassing not only the caravans of the citizen traders, but also those of the government, which carried supplies to the several military posts in the Territory of New Mexico. An expedition was therefore planned by Carson to punish them, and he soon found an opportunity to strike a blow near the adobe fort on the Canadian River. His force consisted of the First Regiment of New Mexican Volunteer Cavalry and seventy-five friendly Indians, his entire command numbering fourteen commissioned officers and three hundred and ninety-six enlisted men. WVith these he attacked the Kiowa village, consisting of about one hundred and fifty lodges. The fight was a very severe one, and lasted from half-past eight in the morning until after sundown. The savages, with more than ordinary intrepidity and boldness, made repeated stands against the fierce onslaughts of Carson's cavalrymen, but were at last forced to give way, and were cut down as they stubbornly retreated, suffering a loss of sixty killed and wounded. In this battle only two privates and one non-commissioned officer were killed, and one non-commissioned officer and thirteen privates, four of whom were friendly Indians, wounded. The command destroyed one hundred and fifty lodges, a large amount of dried meats, berries, buffalorobes, cooking utensils, and also a buggy and spring-wagon, the property of Sierrito, the Kiowa chief. 42 FRONTIER DAYS In his official account of the fight, Carson states that he found ammunition in the village, which had been furnished, no doubt, by unscrupulous Mexican traders. He told me that he was never deceived by Indian tactics but once in his life. He said that he was hunting with six others after buffalo, in the summer of 1835; that they had been successful, and came into their little camp one night very tired, intending to start for the rendezvous at Bent's Fort the next morning. They had a number of dogs, among them some excellent animals. These barked a good deal, and seemed restless, and the men heard wolves. "I saw," said Kit, "two big wolves sneaking about, one of them quite close to us. Gordon, one of my men, wanted to fire his rifle at it, but I did not let him, for fear he would hit a dog. I admit that I had a sort of an idea that those wolves might be Indians; but when I noticed one of them turn short around, and heard the clashing of his teeth as he rushed at one of the dogs, I felt easy then, and was certain that they were wolves sure enough. But the red devil fooled me, after all, for he had two dried buffalo bones in his hands under the wolf-skin and he rattled them together every time he turned to make a dash at the dogs! VWell, by and by we all dozed off, and it wasn't long before I was suddenly aroused by a noise and a big blaze. I rushed out the first thing for our mules, and held them. If the savages had been at all smart, they could have killed us in a trice, but they ran as soon as they fired at us. They killed one of my men, putting five bullets in his body and eight in his buffalorobe. The Indians were a band of Sioux on the war-trail after a band of Snakes, and found us by sheer accident. They endeavored to ambush us the next morning, but we got wind of their little game and killed three of them, including the chief." Carson's nature was made up of some very noble attributes. He was brave, but not reckless like Custer; a veritable exponent of Christian altruism, and as true to his friends as the needle to the pole. Under the average stature, and rather delicate-looking in his physical proportions, he was nevertheless a quick, wiry man, with nerves of steel, and possessing an indomitable will. He was full of caution, but showed a coolness in the moment of supreme danger that was good to witness. During a short visit at Fort Lyon, Colorado, where a favorite son of his was living, early in the morning of MIay 23, 1868, while FRONTIER DAYS 43 mounting his horse in front of his quarters (he was still fond of riding), an artery in his neck was suddenly ruptured, from the effects of which, not-withstanding the medical assistance rendered by the fort surgeons, he died in a few moments. His remains, after reposing for some time at Fort Lyon, were taken to Taos, so long his home in New 'Mexico, where an appropriate monument was erected over them. In the Plaza at Santa Fe, his name also appears cut on a cenotaph raised to commemorate the services of the soldiers of the Territory. As an Indian fighter he was matchless, as a scout he was peerless, and as a man he was honest, modest and courageous. KIT CARSON By ARTHUR GUITERMIAN WAS nine when my father died, killed by a falling limb; Daniel Boone was my father's friend-mebbe you've heard of him. He and his kind were my teachers, then, trapper, hunter and guide, + '~ They taught me to shoot and to speak the truth; I taught myself to ride. Woodsman I was till I saw the plains and I saddled and rode away To the little old Indian town of Taos and the city of Santa Fe' Plainsman I was till I saw the hills and the trails that westwvard ran To the farther hills and the farthest hills-and I am a mountain man. Mine were the days of the mountain men, the days that are now a dream; As once we followed the buffalo track we followed the beaver stream; Trapping the beaver on lake and creek in woods till then unknown, We ranged from the Platte to the San Joaquin, f rom. the Salt to the Yellowstone. Old Jim Bridger, Robidoux, Meek, Young from the Rio Grande, Cut-face Sublette, Pegleg Smith and Fitz of the Broken HandNone knew the roads through the desert dust, the trails of the cliffs 44 FRONTIER DAYS 45 But the mountain men and the plainsmen know that Carson brought them there. I helped to hold these hills of ours for the Union, cliff and crag, When we fought our fight, both Red and White, under the starry flag; And that's why I'm General Carson, now, in my grand adobe house With Injuns there at the open door in the little old town of Taos.* The six-foot braves came striding in with scalping-knife and gun To tell their troubles to Father Kit-and I not five-foot one! They call me friend, and their friend I am, though I fought them hard and long, For the Injun's right in the Injun's way and the White is mostly wrong. But the Injun's got to learn our way, so I'll help him while I can, For the Injun's way is near its end-like the way of the mountain man. Williams, Beckwourth the tall Crow chief; Gant with the Eastern band, Cut-face Sublette, Pegleg Smith and Fitz of the Broken HandWhether you're up and away once more on the last unchartered trail, Whether you're waiting here like me with the rifle on the nail, Light one flare to the mountain men and the joy of our reckless years When we probed the heart of the wilderness ahead of the pioneers, Reaching the heights with the cimarron, the gulfs with the grizzly bear, Trapping the beaver for means to live, living as free as air, Doing the work we were meant to do, though little we dreamed it thenFinding the rifts in the mountain wall for the march of a million men! *Pronounced Touse to rhyme with house. TENNESSEE'S PARTNER By BRET HARTE DO not think that we ever knew his real name. Our Si Jignorance of it certainly never gave us any social inconI. venience, for at Sandy Bar in 1854 most men were christened anew. Sometimes these appellatives were derived Sfrom some distinctiveness of dress, as in the case of + ' "Dungaree Jack," or from some peculiarity of habit, as shown in "Saleratus Bill," so called from an undue proportion of that chemical in his daily bread; or from some infelicitous slip, as exhibited in "the Iron Pirate," a mild, inoffensive man, who earned that baleful title by his unfortunate mispronunciation of the term "iron pyrites." Perhaps this may have been the beginning of a rude heraldry; but I am constrained to think that it was because a man's real name, in that day, rested solely upon his own unsupported statement. "Call yourself Clifford, do you?" said Boston, addressing a timid newcomer with infinite scorn: "hell is full of such Cliffordsl" He then introduced the unfortunate man, whose name happened to be really Clifford, as "Jay-bird Charley"-an unhallowed inspiration of the moment, that clung to him ever after. But to return to Tennessee's Partner, whom we never knew by any other than this relative title: That he had never existed as a separate and distinct individuality we only learned later. It seems that in 1853 he left Poker Flat to go to San Francisco, ostensibly to procure a wife. He never got any further than Stockton. At that place he was attracted by a young person who waited upon the table at the hotel where he took his meals. One morning he said something to her which caused her to smile not unkindly, to somewhat coquettishly break a plate of toast over his upturned, serious, simple face, and to retreat to the kitchen. He followed her, and emerged a few moments later, covered with more toast and victory. That day week they were married by a Justice of the Peace, and returned to Poker Flat. I am aware that something more might be By permission from OVERLAND MONTHLY, 46 OL t.a 1ý ATI. 7j 7~ ~ ~ ~, r, 7t., lor* e. Ow op/ K 7> z LU / z ILI 914 FRONTIER DAYS 4 47 made of this episode, but I prefer to tell it as it was current at Sandy Bar-in the gulches and bar-rooms-where all sentiment was modified by a strong sense of humor. Of their married felicity but little is known, perhaps for the reason that Tennessee, then living with his partner, one day took occasion to say something to the bride on his own account, at which, it is said, she smiled not unkindly and chastely retreated-this time as far as Marysville, where Tennessee followed her, and where they wvent to housekeeping without the aid of a justice of the Peace. Tennessee's Partner took the loss of his wife simply and seriously, as was his fashion. But, to everybody's surprise, when Tennessee one day returned from Marysville, without his partner's wife-she having smiled and retreated wvith somebody else-Tennessee's Partner was the first man to shake his hand and greet him with affection. The boys, who had gathered in the can-on to see the shooting, were naturally indignant. Their indignation might have found vent in sarcasm but for a certain look in Tennessee's Partner's eye that indicated a lack of humorous appreciation. In fact, he was a grave man, with a steady application to practical detail which was unpleasant in a difficulty. Meanwhile a popular feeling against Tennessee had grown up on the Bar. He was known to be a gambler-he was suspected to be a thief. In these suspicions Tennessee's Partner was equally compromised; his continued intimacy with Tennessee after the affair above quoted could only be accounted for on hypothesis of a copartnership of crime. At last Tennessee's guilt became flagrant. One day he overtook a stranger on his way to Red Dog. The stranger afterward related that Tennessee beguiled the time with interesting anecdote and reminiscence, but illogically concluded the interview in the following words: "And now, young man, I'll trouble you for your knife, your pistols, and your money. You see your wveppings might get you into trouble in Red Dog, and your money's a temptation to the evilly disposed. I think you said your address was San Francisco. I0 shaLlendeavorto1cal." It may be tated here tatL-A 48 FRONTIER DAYS closed around him, he made a desperate dash through the Bar, emptying his revolver at the crowd before the Arcade Saloon, and so on up Grizzly Canion; but at its farther extremity he was stopped by a small man, on a gray horse. The men looked at each other a moment in silence. Both were fearless; both self-possessed and independent; and both types of a civilization that in the seventeenth century would have been called heroic, but, in the nineteenth, simply "reckless." "What have you got there?-I call," said Tennessee, quietly. "Two bowers and an ace," said the stranger, as quietly, showing two revolvers and a bowie knife. "That takes me," returned Tennessee; and, with this gamblers' epigram, he threw away his useless pistol, and rode back with his captor. It was a warm night. The cool breeze which usually sprang up with the going down of the sun behind the chaparral-crested mountain was that evening withheld from Sandy Bar. The little canion was stifling with heated, resinous odors, and the decaying drift-wood on the Bar sent forth faint, sickening exhalations. The feverishness of day, and its fierce passions, still filled the camp. Lights moved restlessly along the bank of the river, striking no answering reflection from its tawny current. Against the blackness of the pines the windows of the old loft above the express office stood out staringly bright; and through their curtainless panes the loungers below could see the forms of those who were even then deciding the fate of Tennessee. And above all this, etched on the dark firmament, rose the Sierras, remote and passionless, crowned with remoter, passionless stars. The trial of Tennessee was conducted as fairly as was consistent with a judge and jury who felt themselves to some extent obliged to justify, in their verdict, the previous irregularities of arrest and indictment. The law of Sandy Bar was implacable, but not vengeful. The excitement and personal feeling of the chase were over; with Tennessee safe in their hands, they were ready to listen patiently to any defense, which they were already satisfied was insufficient. There being no doubt in their own minds, they were willing to give the prisoner the benefit of any that might exist. Secure in the hypothesis that he ought to be hanged, on general principles, they indulged him with more latitude of defense than his reckless hardihood seemed to ask. The Judge appeared to be more anxious than FRONTIER DAYS 49 the prisoner, who, otherwise unconcerned, evidently took a grim pleasure in the responsibility he had created. "I don't take any hand in this yer game," had been his invariable, but good-humored reply to all questions. The Judge--who was also his captor-for a moment vaguely regretted that he had not shot him "on sight" that morning, but presently dismissed this human weakness as unworthy of the judicial mind. Nevertheless, when there was a tap at the door, and it was said that Tennessee's Partner was there on behalf of the prisoner, he was admitted at once without question. Perhaps the younger members of the jury, to whom the proceedings were becoming irksomely thoughtful, hailed him as a relief. For he was not, certainly, an imposing figure. Short and stout, with a square face, sunburned into a preternatural redness, clad in a loose duck "jumper" and trousers streaked and splashed with red soil, his aspect under any circumstances would have been quaint, and was now even ridiculous. As he stopped to deposit at his feet a heavy carpet-bag he was carrying, it became obvious, from partially developed legends and inscriptions, that the material with which his trousers had been patched had been originally intended for a less ambitious covering. Yet he advanced with great gravity, and, after having shaken the hand of each person in the room with labored cordiality, he wiped his serious, perplexed face on a red bandana handkerchief, a shade lighter than his complexion, laid his powerful hand upon the table to steady himself, and thus addressed the Judge: "I was passin' by," he began, by way of apology, "and I thought I'd just step in and see how things was gittin' on with Tennessee thar-my pardner. It's a hot night. I disremember any sich weather before on the Bar." He paused a moment, but nobody volunteering any other meteorological recollection, he again had recourse to his pockethandkerchief, and for some moments mopped his face diligently. "Have you anything to say in behalf of the prisoner?" said the Judge, finally. "Thet's it," said Tennessee's Partner, in a tone of relief. "I came yar as Tennessee's pardner-knowing him nigh on four year, off and on, wet and dry, in luck and out o' luck. His ways ain't allers my ways, but thar ain't any p'ints in that young man-thar ain't any liveliness as he's been up to-as I don't know. And you 50 FRONTIER DAYS sez to me, sez you-confidential-like, and between man and mansez you, 'Do you know anything in his behalf?' and I sez to you, sez I-confidential-like, as between man and man-what should a man know of his pardner?" "Is that all you have to say?" asked the Judge, impatiently, feeling, perhaps, that a dangerous sympathy of humor was beginning to humanize the Court. "Thet's so," continued Tennessee's Partner. "It ain't for me to say anything again' him. And now, what's the case? Here's Tennessee wants money, wants it bad, and doesn't like to ask it of his old pardner. Well, what does Tennessee do? He lays for a stranger, and he fetches that stranger. And you lays for him, and you fetches him; and the honors is easy. And I put it to you-bein' a fair-minded man-and to you, gentlemen, all, as fair-minded men, ef this isn't so?" "Prisoner," said the Judge, interrupting, "have you any questions to ask this man?" "No! no!" continued Tennessee's Partner, hastily, "I play this yer hand alone. To come down to the bed-rock, it's just this: Tennessee, thar, has played it pretty rough and expensive-like on a stranger, and on this yer camp. And now, what's the fair thing? Some would say more; some would say less. Here's seventeen hundred dollars in coarse gold and a watch-it's about all my pileand call it square!" And before a hand could be raised to prevent him, he had emptied the contents of the carpet-bag upon the table. For a moment his life was in jeopardy. One or two men sprang to their feet, several hands groped for hidden weapons, and a suggestion to "throw him from the window" was only overridden by a gesture from the Judge. Tennessee laughed. And apparently oblivious of the excitement, Tennessee's Partner improved the opportunity to mop his face again with his handkerchief. When order was restored, and the man was made to understand, by the use of forcible figures and rhetoric, that Tennessee's offense could not be condoned by money, his face took a more serious and sanguinary hue, and those who were nearest to him noticed that his rough hand trembled slightly on the table. He hesitated a moment as he slowly returned the gold to the carpet-bag, as if he had not yet entirely caught the elevated sense of justice which swayed the tribunal, and was perplexed with the belief that he had FRONTIER DAYS 51 not offered enough. Then he turned to the Judge, and saying, "This yer is a lone hand, played alone, and without my pardner," he bowed to the jury and was about to withdraw, when the Judge called him back. "If you have anything to say to Tennessee, you had better say it now." For the first time that evening the eyes of the prisoner and his strange advocate met. Tennessee smiled, showed his white teeth, and saying, "Euchred, old man1" held out his hand. Tennessee's Partner took it in his own, and saying, "I just dropped in as I was passin' to see how things was gettin' on," let the hand passively fall, and adding that "it was a warm night," again mopped his face with his handkerchief, and without another word withdrew. The two men never again met each other alive. For the unparalleled insult of a bribe offered to Judge Lynch-who, whether bigoted, weak, or narrow, was at least incorruptible-firmly fixed in the mind of that mythical personage any wavering determination of Tennessee's fate; and at the break of day he was marched, closely guarded, to meet it at the top of Marley's Hill. How he met it, how cool he was, how he refused to say anything, how perfect were the arrangements of the Committee, were all duly reported-with the addition of a warning moral and example to all future evil-doers--in the Red Dog Clarion, by its editor, who was present, and to whose vigorous English I cheerfully refer the reader. But the beauty of that midsummer morning, the blessed amity of earth and air and sky, the awakened life of the free woods and hills, the joyous renewal and promise of Nature, and above all, the infinite Serenity that thrilled through each, was not reported, as not being a part of the social lesson. And yet, when the weak and foolish deed was done, and a life, with its possibilities and responsibilities, had passed out of the misshapen thing that dangled between earth and sky, the birds sang, the flowers bloomed, the sun shone, as cheerily as before; and possibly the Red Dog Clarion was right. Tennessee's Partner was not in the group that surrounded the ominous tree. But as they turned to disperse, attention was drawn to the singular appearance of a motionless donkey-cart, halted at the side of the road. As they approached, they at once recognized the venerable "Jenny" and the two-wheeled cart as the property of Tennessee's Partner--used by him in carrying dirt from his claim; and a few paces distant, the owner of the equipage himself, sitting under a buckeye-tree, wiping the perspiration from his glowing 52 FRONTIER DAYS face. In answer to an inquiry, he said he had come for the body of the "diseased," "if it was all the same to the Committee." He didn't wish to "hurry anything"; he could "wait." He was not working that day; and when the gentlemen were done with the "diseased," he would take him. "Ef thar is any present," he added, in his simple, serious way "as would care to jine in the fun'l-they kin come." Perhaps it was from a sense of humor, which I have already intimated was a feature of Sandy Bar; perhaps it was from something even better than that: but two-thirds of the loungers accepted the invitation at once. It was noon when the body of Tennessee was delivered into the hands of his partner. As the cart drew up to the fatal tree, we noticed that it contained a rough, oblong box-apparently made from a section of sluicing-and half filled with bark and the tassels of pine. The cart was further decorated with slips of willow, and made fragrant with buckeye blossoms. When the body was deposited in the box, Tennessee's Partner drew over it a piece of tarred canvas, and gravely mounting the narrow seat in front, with his feet upon the shafts, urged the little donkey forward. The equipage moved slowly on, at that decorous pace which was habitual with "Jenny" even under less solemn circumstances. The men-half curiously, half jestingly, but all good-humoredly-strolled along beside the cart; some in advance, some a little in the rear of the homely catafalque. But, whether from the narrowing of the road, or some present sense of decorum, as the cart passed on the company fell to the rear in couples, keeping step, and otherwise assuming the external show of a formal procession. Jack Folinsbee, who had, at the outset, played a funeral march in dumb show upon an imaginary trombone, desisted, from a lack of sympathy and appreciation-not having, perhaps, your true humorist's capacity to be content with the enjoyment of his own fun. The way led through Grizzly Canon-by this time clothed in funereal drapery and shadows. The redwoods, burying their moccasined feet in the red soil, stood in Indian file along the track, trailing an uncouth benediction from their bending boughs upon the passing bier. A hare, surprised into helpless inactivity, sat upright and pulsating, in the ferns by the road-side, as the cortege went by. Squirrels hastened to gain a secure outlook from higher boughs; and the blue jays, spreading their wings, fluttered them like outriders, FRONTIER DAYS 53 until the outskirts of Sandy Bar was reached, and the solitary cabin of Tennessee's Partner. Viewed under more favorable circumstances, it would not have been a cheerful place. The unpicturesque site, the rude and unlovely outlines, the unsavory details, which distinguish the nest-building of the California miner, were all here, with the dreariness of decay super-added. A few paces from the cabin there was a rough inclosure, which, in the brief days of Tennessee's Partner's matrimonial felicity, had been used as a garden, but was now overgrown with fern. As we approached it, we were surprised to find that what we had taken for a recent attempt at cultivation was the broken soil about an open grave. The cart was halted before the inclosure; and rejecting the offers of assistance, with the same air of simple self-reliance he had displayed throughout, Tennessee's Partner lifted the rough coffin on his back, and deposited it, unaided, within the shallow grave. He then nailed down the board which served as a lid; and mounting the little mound of earth beside it, took off his hat, and slowly mopped his face with his handkerchief. This the crowd felt was a preliminary to speech; and they disposed themselves variously on stumps and bowlders, and sat expectant. "When a man," began Tennessee's Partner, slowly, "has been running free all day, what's the natural thing for him to do? Why, to come home. And if he ain't in a condition to go home, what can his best friend do? Why, bring him home! And here's Tennessee running free, and we brings him home from his wandering." He paused, and picked up a fragment of quartz, rubbed it thoughtfully on his sleeve, and went on: "It ain't the first time that I've packed him on my back, as you see'd me now. It ain't the first time that I brought him to this yer cabin when he couldn't help himself; it ain't the first time that I and 'Jinny' have waited for him on yon hill, and picked him up and so fetched him home, when he couldn't speak, and didn't know me. And now that it's the last timewhy"-he paused, and rubbed the quartz gently on his sleeve"you see it's sort of rough on his pardner. And now, gentlemen," he added, abruptly, picking up his long-handled shovel, "the fun''Ts over; and my thanks, and Tennessee's thanks, to you for your trouble." Resisting any proffers of assistance, he began to fill in the grave, 54 FRONTIER DAYS turning his back upon the crowd, that after a few moments' hesitation gradually withdrew. As they crossed the little ridge that hid Sandy Bar from view, some, looking back, thought they could see Tennessee's Partner, his work done, sitting upon the grave, his shovel between his knees, and his face buried in his red bandanna handkerchief. But it was argued by others that you couldn't tell his face from his handkerchief at that distance; and this point remained undecided. In the reaction that followed the feverish excitement of that day, Tennessee's Partner was not forgotten. A secret investigation had cleared him of any complicity in Tennessee's guilt, and left only a suspicion of his general sanity. Sandy Bar made a point of calling on him, and proffering various uncouth, but well meant kindnesses. But from that day, his rude health and great strength seemed to visibly decline; and when the rainy season fairly set in, and the tiny grass blades were beginning to peep from the rocky mound above Tennessee's grave, he took to his bed. One night, when the pines beside the cabin were swaying in the storm, and trailing their slender fingers over the roof, and the roar and rush of the swollen river was heard below, Tennessee's Partner lifted his head from the pillow, saying: "It is time to go for Tennessee; I must put 'Jinny' in the cart"; and would have risen from his bed but for the restraint of his attendant. Struggling, he still pursued his singular fancy: "There, now-steady, 'Jinny'-steady, old girl. How dark it is! Look out for the rutsand look out for him, too, old gal. Sometimes, you know, when he's blind drunk, he drops down right in the trail. Keep on straight up to the pine on the top of the hill. Thar-I told you sol--thar he is-coming this way, too-all by himself, sober, and his face a-shining. Tennessee Pardnerl" And so they met. THE ANTELOPE By GENERAL RANDOLPH B. MARCY HIS animal frequents the most elevated bleak and naked T prairies in all latitudes from Mexico to Oregon, and constitutes an important item of subsistence with many of the prairie Indians. It is the most wary, timid, and fleet animal that inhabits the Plains. It is about the size of a small deer, with a heav coating of coarse, wir hair, and its flesh is more tender and juicy than that of the deer. It seldom enters a timbered country, but seems to delight in cropping the grass from the elevated swells of the prairies. When disturbed by the traveler, it wvill circle around him with the speed of the wind, but does not stop until it reaches some prominent position whence it can survey the country on all sides, and nothing seems to escape its keen vision. They will sometimes stand for a long time and look at a man, provided he does not move or go out of sight;a but if he goes behind a hill with the intention of passing around and getting nearer to them, he will never find them again in the same place. I have often tried the experiment, and invariably found that, as soon as I went where the antelope could not see me, he moved off. Their sense of hearing, as well as vision, is very acute, which renders it difficult to stalk them. By taking advantage of the cover afforded in broken ground, the hunter may, by moving slowly and cautiously over the crests of the irregularities in the surface, sometimes approach within rifle range. The antelope possesses a greater degree of curiosity than any other animal I know of, and will often approach very near a strange S5 56 FRONTIER DAYS is good during the winter season, they collect in immense herds. The Indians are in the habit of surrounding them in such localities and running them with their horses until they tire them out, when they slay large numbers. The antelope makes a track much shorter than the deer, very broad and round at the heel, and quite sharp at the toe; a little experience renders it easy to distinguish them. WAITING FOR THE BUFFALO By J. S. CAMPION WVO days' travel passed barren of adventure, and on the T followving one we made our first camp on the bank of the AL Republican. XWe first struck the river about forty miles above where it joins the Kaw, and over four hundred below its sources, and though at its lowest stage, f ound it to be a much more considerable stream than the one we had left. It was meandering a most winding course in the "bottom" down which it flowed, with a sharpish current of two and a half miles an hour. The central portion of every curve it made was fringed and clustered with strips and groups of cottonwood trees, fifty or sixty feet high, and averaging two feet six inches through at their butts, and with large willows, osiers, and wild plums. The bottom varied in width between its bluff s for a half mile to five miles, and looked as level as a billiard-table; but such was only a deceptive general appearance, it was in reality full of depressions known as "buffalo wallows," and seamed with deep narrow gullies, "wash-outs" of rain storms, and covered with a carpet of coarse "bottom grass," nearly waisthigh in many places. This bottom had bluffs varying in height from a few feet to a couple of hundred, and was of an ever varying width. Coincident with the river f rom its source to its mouth, it might have been called wvith propriety "The Valley of the Republican." The formation of the ground seemed to be bottomless sand, and the banks of the river were always Perpendicular at one side 58 58 FRONTIER DAYS tered over it as to make galloping quite dangerous; and the inhabitants of them, prairie-dogs, owls, rattlesnakes, and rabbits, seemed to be the original and only settlers in the country. The succeeding day we journeyed up the valley, keeping the general course of the stream. On the second day's travel along it, on coming to where the river swung round ahead of us in an unusually large bend-making an elbow, in fact-it was thought best to attempt a cut off, so we then left the river valley, ascending the bluff to the general level of the country. An old and well-worn buffalo trail of about twenty feet in width, beaten hard by many a year's annual migration, gave us easy access up the f ace of the bluff to the level ground above; and, on attaining it, we took the course we judged would bring us to the valley again in ten or fifteen miles. Our direction and conjecture as to distance proved correct, and after about twelve miles' traveling we again arrived at the edge of the general level, but at a place where descent was impossible, the bluff being there perpendicular, and over two hundred feet in height. The river was flowing below us, now hiding behind the dark green clumps and clusters of the trees upon its banks, anon showing flashes of sparkling water. But where was the valley? The bluffs we had expected to see opposite to us were vanished. From the further edge of the river a grassy plain extended to the far horizon. W~e were looking west, and the sinking August sun, shining full in our faces, threw a gorgeous flood of colour to our very feet, tinging the grass with purple and gold, throwing a halo of glory round the tree-tops, and a blaze of crimson on the water. But what were those few dark specks in the middle ground, the small masses farther off, that dark line on the horizon? Each man's hand was to his forehead shadingr his eyes as he took a close scrutiny. With one accord, and with a wild "hurrah!" every hat was flung into the air. " Buffaloes at last! and heading straight to us.," But*twa-no imefr fooingfor we0 hadto be-1 down off tAt FRONTIER DAYS _9 When darkness fell the regular concert we had nightly been enjoying for some time received a most important addition; new and distinguished performers were at hand. We had early become accustomed to the cheering nightly howls of the sportive coyote; then to an obligato accompaniment thereto by the burrowing owls, who tooted with great impartiality in every hour of the night; latterly the fox with his sharp yap-yap, the wild-cat with her Scotch bagpipes run mad, and the plaintive whippoorwills had joined in and done "their level best" to make night hideous. But these had only been the orchestra; the "chief musicianers" had at length arrived, and when the overture had been played, and the moon shone forth, the grand chorus broke on our startled ears. The light cavalry, who hang in squadrons round the main army of the buffaloes, cutting off stragglers, devouring the defenceless and the weak, making a prey of the unwary, the gray-coated uhlans of the Plains-the buffalo-wolves-were upon us. Wolf answered to wolf, pack answered to pack. Pandemonium had been a quiet teaparty to it. Fortunately the din was soon over, and the remainder of the night was much quieter than any we had experienced since we started out. The cunning fox and sly coyote knew well their masters had arrived, and kept most discreet silence. The midnight cat was scared. The nightingale of the plains tooted only at long intervals, and the whippoorwill's low cry hardly disturbed the ear. Morning brought excitement and bustle. Our intended quarry were still far away, but permanent camp and all necessary preparations for action had to be made. The first thing to do was to choose a site, and of course the idea of taking a good defensive position presented itself. It was an absurd idea. What could five men avail against a band of Indians? Still, one of us was a soldier by profession. We were in an enemy's country, a strategic position was necessary for safety. We found an excellent place for our purpose. A more than usually sharp curve of the river washed close round a triangular point of land, whose precipitous banks were forty feet high, and which was covered with heavy timber and thick brushwood. The trees would render the smoke of our fire invisible at a distance, as it would be dissipated in going through the thick overhanging boughs. The thickets would mask our tent. The steep banks would make two sides of our position inaccessible. The base of the triangle, the 60 FRONTIER DAYS edge of the timber, would be only a hundred yards wide from edge to edge of the river's bank, and in front of it the level grass land reached out to the valley's bluff, a mile off, without a bush to cover an advance. The situation seemed made to order. A place opposite the middle of our position, and advanced in the open some twenty yards beyond the edge of the timber, was pitched upon for an outpost. There our solitary night-watch was to keep his guard. It is well understood that, when watching against Indian surprise, a sentinel never walks, never stands; if he did either, his wily foe might snake up to him in the grass, and the well-directed silent arrow would place a sleeping camp at the mercy of its assailants. No. The guard who understands his business lies on the ground on his chest, his elbows far apart, his wrists brought together, his chin supported on his hands, his ears open, and his eyes everywhere; that is to say, he keeps as much in such attitude as he can, for of course he cannot maintain it for two hours without change. This is the best position to "sky" any object approaching a nightguard, and should anything be moving near him in the grass, its waving tops would give him indication and warning. Besides, with the ear near the ground, sounds can be distinctly heard that, standing up, would be inaudible. A few large stones, a sage-brush or two, placed so as to look as natural as possible, a hole in the ground, made a fair rifle-pit. The highest tree in the grove was utilized as a look-out station, sufficient foot and hand holes were soon made in the trunk to enable a climber to reach its branches. From these the top of the tree was easily accessible, and the lopping off of a few boughs permitted the eye to have a clear view to the horizon. No more could be done. The festive tin cup was passed round. "Camp Gibraltar" received its christening. After dinner all hands turned out with sharpened hunting knives, to work until night-cutting and stacking the long grass; thenceforth the animals were to be securely tied up every night to the thicket, and would have to have hay. An observation, taken at sunset from our look-out, revealed the fact that the buffaloes were drawing nearer, and we lay down for the night in a fever of expectation. Sleep, except in broken snatches, was an impossibility. The peep of dawn found a watcher in the tree, but disappointment was his lot. The main herd seemed to FRONTIER DAYS have moved diagonally to our left, and to be really no nearer than when last seen, and so we had to employ and amuse ourselves, and while away the time as well as we could. More grass was cut, wood was chopped, collected, and piled up for future use. Arms were examined and cleaned. Cards brought out; seven-up, mountainjack, and euchre had each their turn, and whisky-poker, a harmless, non-gambling game, in which the winner gets a drink and the losers a smell at the cork of the bottle, was tried. Fifty times in the day some one or other climbed the look-out trees. Gradually it became certain that the main herd of buffaloes was approaching us. The outside fringes of bulls were becoming more and more defined, the dark patches behind them were resolving themselves into distinct groups, the dusky streak on the horizon was widening and widening, spreading and spreading, it was covering the ground by square miles. The excitement became intense, but night again fell, and the buffaloes were still far off. About ten o'clock, camp was aroused by the watchman. He had heard a sound which he could not make out. We all listened with breathless attention. The light western breeze brought at intervals a low distant murmur, like that from a far-off sea. What could it be? Anon it became more and more distinct, then died away, then came louder than before. Ere long it sounded like the roll of distant thunder, the hum of a busy city, the surf breaking over sunken reefs. Was it the roar of a prairie fire? No. There was no glow in the sky, and the grass was too green to burn. Was it the rush of waters, had there been a storm to westward, was a flood coming down the river? The idea took away our breath. We were camped on sand, and a big head of water would ground-sluice our foundations from beneath us. Could the sound be made by the distant herd? The wind was coming directly from them. It was the noise of the herd. They were coming. By-and-by, however, we ceased to hear them. The day-wind, which had been dying out, no longer blew. The night-breeze had set in from the opposite direction, and its sigh through the tree-tops, the hoot of the owl, and the ripple of the stream were the only audible soundsand soon all were fast asleep again. I have reason to believe the guard slept, worn out with excitement and expectancy. Suddenly everyone jumped to his feet. A terrific row smote 62 62 FRONTIER DAYS upon our ears. The air shivered with noise; the earth trembled under our feet. The main herd was crossing the river close to camp. The roar of the bulls, the lowing of the cows, the tramp of thousands of feet, the splash of water as the huge mass of animals plunged and struggled through it, the crumbling fall of the bank as the buffaloes forced their way up its steep face-all were blended in one mighty tumult. We stood spell-bound for an instant, then a thought of terror forced itself upon us. What if the herd should come our way? What if they should stampede over the camp? Nothing could save us. We should be crushed into the earth, ground into powder. There would not be a "grease spot left of us." We might climb a tree, true; but we should be left without transport, without food, without ammunition, out in the wilderness on foot. Better to be killed at once. There was but one safeguard-fire! True it would be a beacon to any Indians who might be near, but there was only a possible, contingent danger, while an immediate one stared us in the face. A pile of wood, grass, leaves, anything, everything, was raked together, the contents of the greasepot poured over it, a double-handful of powder scattered on, a match applied, and a column of fire shot up towards the sky., We were in safety so long as our blaze lasted.. We stood watching and waiting, hour after hour, as that seemingly interminable multitude surged on, the ground trembling, and the din ceasing not. Since that night I have gone through many strange adventures, witnessed many striking scenes. The din of conflict, the terrors of an earthquake, the conflagration of a Western city. I have stood on the deck of a ship a-flame in mid-Atlantic.. The murderous midnight rush of moccasined savages upon a surprised camp has found me there. I have been startled from deep sleep by the sharp firing of rifle balls, the quick zip-zip of flying arrows, the death-scream of a slaughtered sentinel, and the wvarwhoop of the Red Indian. But none of those scenes recall themselvs mre frcily o metha doe tht mdnigt cossig oAth AN EARLY HERO OF THE PACIFIC DAVID DOUGLAS, Botanist By T. SOMERVILLE HE most familiar object of natural scenery in Oregon, JI'i 4Washington Territory, and British Columbia is the - "Douglas Pine" (Abies Douglasii). Rising from a base ten feet in diameter, often to the height of four hundred feet, it forms the pillared aisles in the forests, that extend from Alaska to Shasta. Conspicuous in itself, it acquires additional interest by its name, which commemorates one of the early enthusiasts of science upon the coast. Twenty years after those bold adventurers, Lewis and Clark, crossed the Rocky Mountains, and ten years after John Jacob Astor commenced his ill-fated enterprise at Astoria; at a time when Mlexican Alcaldes were chasing their herds in the valley of California, and a few trappers were roaming through the forests around the Columbia River, there went out, on board the Hudson's Bay Company's ship at London, David Douglas, who was the first to introduce the productions of this Western country to the world of science. Romantic and interesting his life, tragic and melancholy his end: it is well that one of the most widely distributed trees on our coast should bear his name, and perpetuate the memory of his noble and self-sacrificing labors. During the ten years between 1824 and 1834, the fur-trappers and Indians often came across a stalwart Scotchman traveling through the forests, with his gun across his shoulder and the vasculum on his back, attended only by his inseparable terrier, rough and shaggy as his master. This man often stopped to ask them strange questions about plants and birds, and passed away. Among the Indians he was accounted a "Big Medicine," and far and wide was known in the ranchos as "the Grass Mlan." Often the chief traders at the different posts between Puget Sound and Mlonterey, where he was ever a welcome guest, would hear at night the terrier' s yelp that By permission from OVERLAND MONTHLY. 63 64 64 FRONTIER DAYS announced the approach of David Douglas, and prepare for him their warmest corner. Not long would he stay, however. The forest was his home and his delight. Sleeping behind the shelter of the trunk of his favorite tree became so natural, that he was shy of blanket and bolster, and felt uneasy when within the pickets and bastions of a well-appointed post. Finally, having accomplished his mission, and added above a thousand plants to the vocabulary of the botanist, he started on his journey homeward, in which he was tragically cut off. A Scotchman, born in the last year of the eighteenth century, we may trace something of his intense love of Nature to the scenery around his native place; the ancient town of Scone, where the Kings of Scotland were crowned of yore. Set in the strong background of the Grampians, right in front of the Highlands, it looks out from among its stately groves upon the stream of the winding Tay and the rich valley of Strathmore. His father-a. worthy stonemasonhad set his heart upon making him a scholar, but the boy turned from book-learning to fishing and bird-nesting. The only books he manifested a liking for were "Robinson Crusoe," "Si nbad the FRONTIER DAYS 65 Sailor," and accounts of travel. Yet in other things he manifested perseverance and steadiness of purpose. Among his family of birds, he had secured some hawks and a nest of owls. He could not catch mice and birds quickly enough to supply them with food. So he saved up the pennies which were given him for his daily lunch at school, and made an arrangement with the neighboring butcher for a supply of liver. Though strange and peculiar-a boy difficult to deal with-he appears to have commended himself, to those who knew him, by an active and generous disposition. Strong and hardy, he held his own with other boys, and his master sharply replied to one of numerous complaints brought against him, "I like a deil better than a dult." He started his Botanical career, in humble capacity, as a sevenyears' apprentice under the old gardener of the Earl of NMansfield. Here we find him, first, in the flower-garden, and afterward in the forcing department. During the day he works away, puzzling the older heads about the names and the nature of plants, and devoting the evenings to the study of books that treat of them. A great reader now, he buys and borrows all the books he can get hold of on travel and Natural History. He soon obtains another situation in the garden of Sir Robert Beston, at Culross. Here we find him at nineteen, working away in the kitchen garden. At this place, there was a fine collection of exotic plants. This was his peculiar delight. In the manor-house there was an excellent Botanical library. To this he had access, and diligently improved the privilege. During the two years he spent here his ambition was fired, and his course determined. His next step was wisely chosen. Having obtained a situation in the Botanic Garden at Glasgow, he was surrounded with associations and opportunities which greatly improved him. He was no daysman working for a wage, but an ardent student, walking among things he loved. He was brought into contact with one whose influence was potently to direct the after-current of his life. Glasgow University was peculiarly fortunate in having, at this time, as Professor of Botany, a man whose enthusiasm flowed over into all his students. This was the late Sir W. J. Hooker. One of the highest mountains on our coast perpetuates his memory. His students are scattered throughout the world. The garden was then most unfavorably situated in the midst of reeking chimneys and 66 FRONTIER DAYS murky factories. The lecture-room was a small, dingy building in its center-only different from a dog-kennel in being up-stairs. Since that time, both the university and the garden have been removed to more favorable localities. Yet in that old building some noble work was done. There Hooker gave those lectures which established his name as a prince in Botanical Science. These lectures Douglas attended while engaged there. His soul was set on fire with zeal. Not any of the medical students, who attended as a part of their curriculum, made better progress, or attracted more attention of the warm-hearted Professor. David became his favorite companion in those delightful summer excursions which he made to Benlomond, Balquhidder, and the Western Islands. From Hooker came his first promotion to the ranks of an explorer. The plants and trees of America had long attracted the interest of the Horticultural Society, in London. They applied to Hooker for a qualified collector, and David Douglas was appointed. In 1823 he came to the United States, and was so successful in adding to their collections of fruit-trees, that, next year, when an opportunity was offered by the Hudson's Bay Company of sending a collector to the region around the Columbia River, Douglas was the man fixed on. He never forgot Hooker. Two years after, in writing to him from Oregon, he says: "I expect to reach the mountains in August. How glad I shall be to join you in our usual trip to Benlomond, where we shall have more time, and a keener relish, for talking over north-west America. Pardon the shortness of this note, as I have neither time nor convenience for writing-no table, nor desk: this is penned on the top of my specimen board, under which are some exceedingly interesting things." Strange enough, at the time Douglas was dispatched to explore the flora and plants from the western sea-board, another acquaintance, Drummond, who had wrought with him in the garden at Culross, was attached as Naturalist to the Expedition of Sir John Franklin, which made its way from eastward up to near Peace River. Three years afterward, they met at Carlton House, on the Rocky Mountains, where they showed each other their varied treasures. Douglas says of Drummond, "He had spent the greater part of his time in exploring the Rocky Mountains contiguous to the sources of the rivers Athabasca and Columbia, where he had made FRONTIER DAYS 67 a princely collection." Such meeting with kindred spirits occasionally relieved his solitary life. At Monterey, he once met Doctor Coulter, who had been collecting in Mexico, and, in the joy of his heart, reports his luck to Doctor Hooker: "As a salmon-fisher, he is superior to Walter Campbell, of Islay-the Izaak Walton of Scotland-besides being a beautiful shot with a rifle; nearly as successful as myself! And I do assure you from my heart, it is a terrible pleasure to me thus to meet a really good man, and one with whom I can talk of plants." It is noticeable that the Hudson's Bay ship on which he embarked took from July i th, 1824, till April 8th, I825-nine months. The tedious voyage was interesting to Douglas from the improvement which he made of it. We have a lively picture of him, sitting on deck, hooking up sea-weeds, and casting his bait to the birds. He seems to have rejoiced most in the stormy weather, it being only then he could catch the "Diomedea exulans," a smaller species of gull. They called in at the island of Juan Fernandez, and singularly enough, found there a second Robinson Crusoe. On the second day, when out exploring upon the island, a being sprang from the bushes, to their great surprise, clad in coarse trousers, the original material of which it was hard to say, a flannel shirt, and no hat. In the vicinity, they found his hut, built of stones and turf, and thatched with the straw of the wild oat. His only cooking utensil was a cast-iron pot, with a wooden bottom, in which he boiled his food by sinking it a few inches in the floor, and placing fire around the sides. He longed to taste roast beef. One day he tried to bake some, but the bottom of his pot had given way in the process. His name was NWilliam Clark, and he had come from London five years before. He had a few books, among them "Robinson Crusoe," and "Cowper's Poems." From the latter, he had committed to memory the poem of Alexander Selkirk: "I am monarch of all I survey, MNly right there is none to dispute." Douglas says, "No pen can correctly describe the charming and rural appearance of this island." Lord Anson and Douglas have been its Botanical benefactors. The former had introduced the peach, the quince, the apple, the vine, the strawberry, and a few kitchen plants; and Douglas, in return for the few dried specimens 68 FRONTIER DAYS he bore away, sowed the seeds of a few fruit trees and culinary vegetables. After a few months more, the guns of Astoria announced their arrival. "The joy of viewing land, and the hope of being able in a few days to range through this long-desired spot, may be easily imagined. I think I may truly reckon this (April 7th) as among the happiest moments of my life." Doctor Scouler, the surgeon of the ship, and he went ashore at Cape Disappointment, which, by a singular error, he supposed to be on the south of the Columbia. On the following day, Doctor McLoughlin, the Chief Factor, came down in a small boat, and took him ninety miles up to Fort Vancouver. This post, pitched on a beautiful opening in the woods, opposite the spot where Vancouver completed his survey in 1792, became his headquarters and home (so far as a place where he occasionally reported himself may be called a home) during his pioneer life. Situated amid extensive wooded scenery, broken only by the white summits of fine, lofty mountains, it was long the center of life and commerce in the West. Once every year the mail, and the supplies brought in the big ship from England, were here distributed. To this point gathered the trappers, in their canoes and on their cayuse horses, with the produce of their season. To Fort Vancouver came the early missionaries and settlers for advice and assistance. Many a serious council and social gathering took place within its pickets. The Resident Factor was king of all the land. The scene has now greatly changed. The fort of the Hudson's Bay Company has become a post of the Federal Government. Instead of the huge log-house, there is a smaller village of a thousand inhabitants. The old bastions and the mess-house have been swept away to make room for the officers' quarters. Instead of the Indians yelling amid their occasional "potlatches," there is now heard the reveille and the steady tramp of guards. Douglas began to collect immediately on stepping out of the boat. Between June and October, when the ship returned, he was ready to dispatch a considerable number of specimens, and had completed three journeys; one to the Dalles, another to the Falls of the Multnomah (Oregon City), and a third to the Grand Rapids of the Columbia. He had thus introduced himself to some of the sublimest scenery of the West, and given proof of this fitness for pioneer exploration. No man could accommodate himself with more readiness to the emergencies of his new life. At this day, FRONTIER DAYS 6 69 miners acknowledge the difficulty of prospecting in this region. Very few would trust themselves out alone 'in the forest to depend upon the game and fruits. But Douglas, although hitherto inexperienced, at once managed to do it, content wvith his gun and his vasculum., in which there were usually more specimens than bread. Writing when he had been out only a few months, he says: "IC arrived at Fort Vancouver on August Sth, and employed myself until the i8th in drying the specimens I had collected, and making short journeys in quest of seeds and plants; my labors being materially retarded by the rainy weather. As there were no houses yet built on this new station, I first occupied a tent, which was kindly offered me, and then removed to a larger deerskin tent, which soon, however, became too small for me, in consequence of the augmentation of my collections. A hut, constructed of oak bark, was my next habitation, and there I shall probably take up my winterquarters. I have been in a house only three nights since my arrival in N. W. America, and these were the first after my debarkation. On my journeys I occupy a tent, wherever it is practicable to carry one-which, however, is not often-so that a canoe turned upside down is my occasional shelter; but more frequently I lie under the boughs of a pine-tree, without any thing further. In England, people shiver at the idea of sleeping wvith their window open; here each person takes his blanket, and stretches himself, with all possible complacency, on the sand or under a bush, as may happen, just as if he were going to bed. Habit has rendered the practice so comfortable to me that I look upon anything more as mere superfluity." So industrious was he in collecting, that in two years, 1826 and 1827, he had already sent home many hundreds of specimens, and had made numerous additions to the vocabulary of Botany. Dr. Hooker, who published his journal, gives a list of nearly two hundred which were introduced by him during these years, and had alIready become common in Botanical collections. Whenever he 70 FRONTIER DAYS factured tobacco-an enormous remuneration-he would on no account part with it. The nicotiana is never sowed by the Indians near the village, lest it should be pulled and used before it comes to maturity. They select for its cultivation an open place in the forest, where they burn a dead tree or stump. and strewing the ashes over the ground, plant the tobacco there. Fortunately, I happened to detect one of these little habitations, and supplied myself with specimens, both for drying and for seeds. The owner, whom I shortly met, seeing the prize under my arm, appeared much displeased, but was propitiated with a present of European tobacco, and becoming good friends with me, gave me the above description of its culture, saying that the wood ashes invariably made it grow very large." He here introduces us to the early currency of the forest-feet and inches of tobacco. In 1825, he noticed, in the tobacco pouches of the natives, the seeds of a remarkably large pine, which, they said, grew in the country of the Umpqua, two degrees south of the Columbia River. Having secured one of the large cones, he named it the "Pinus Lamberiana." When the spring came, he prepared to visit its region. "I packed up six quires of paper, and a few other articles requisite for what I called my business-a copper kettle, and a little tobacco to pay my way." This journey was attended with many dangers. A dreadful storm burst upon him in the forest; then dangerous sickness overtook him. At last he reached the grove, and saw the precious cones, hanging like sugar-loaves from the pendulous branches. In securing three of these, he nearly brought his life to a close. It being impossible either to climb the tree or hew it down, he tried to shoot them down. The report of the gun soon surrounded him with Indians, painted with red earth, and armed with bows, arrows, bone-tipped spears, and knives. They appeared anything but friendly. Who was this stranger that thus rudely invaded their sacred grove?-who was he that dared to fire upon these sires of the forest? Their sacred tree was in danger-a Douglas must try this mettle. Presenting all their weapons, they faced him for a time, and retired; when he embraced the opportunity of their temporary absence to bury himself in the forest. The return journey was made with even greater danger. On the first day, a storm again broke upon him; on the second, the Indians overtook him; on the FRONTIER DAYS 7 71 r third, his horse fell over a precipice. Twelve days, passed in extreme misery, brought him to the Columbia River again. Well did he deserve the title of "the Grass Man," which he received from the Indians. Any sacrifice he would undergo for the sake of his plant. On one occasion, we find him wearing a damp shirt, in order to keep the dry one to wrap around his specimens. At another time, he congratulated himself, when crossing the Columbia up in the Okanegan country, that while he had lost all he had to eat, he had saved his plants. Having formed the intention of crossing the continent and going by sea to visit England, w-hich he accomplished, we are permitted to contemplate the Naturalist's outfit. "My store of clothes is very low, nearly reduced to what I have on my back. One pair of shoes, no stockings, two shirts, two handkerchiefs, my blanket, and cloak. Thus I adapt my costume to that of the country, as I could not carry more without reducing myself to an inadequate supply of paper and such articles of Natural History." On one occasion he had nothing but a little boiled horseflesh to eat, and was glad to eke out this scanty f are with a roasted rat. Although "the Grass Man" par excellence, he also made observations for other departments of Natural History. All living things were sources of interest to him: the birds, the bears, the elks, the 72 72 FRONTIER DAYS deer, claimed his attention. He introduced to history a ground-rat, which he discovered in rather a curious way. "During the night I was annoyed by the visit of a horde of rats, Who devoured every article of seed I had collected, ate clean through a bundle of dried plants, and carried off my soap-brush and razor. As one was taking away my inkstand, which I had been using shortly before, and which lay close to my pillow, I raised my gun, which, with my faithful dog, is alwvays placed under my blanket by my side, and hastily gave him the contents. When I saw how large and strong this creature was, I ceased to wonder at the exploits of the herd. The body and tail together measured a foot and a half; the back is brown, the belly white, while the tail and the enormous ears are each threequarters of an inch long, with whiskers three inches in length, and jet-black. Unfortunately, the specimen was spoiled by the shot, in my eagerness to recover my inkstand, but I secured another. I understand that these rats are found in the Rocky Mountains, particularly to the north, near the McKenzie and Peace rivers, where, during the winter, they destroy every thing that comes in their way." We are struck wvith the shrewdness of the shaggy Scotchman, in dealing with the Indians. It was no small matter to be surrounded by hundreds, who had never seen the face of a White Mlan before. One of these, having struck a mark iio yards distant with his rifle, exclaimed that none of King George's Chiefs could do that any more than chant the death-song or dance the war-dance. Douglas lifted his gun, raised a bird, and brought it down flying. This had great effect: they never think of shooting an object in motion, and laid their hands upon their mouths in token of fear. "My fame was hereupon sounded throughout the whole count~ry Ever since," remarks the wily pioneer, "I have found it to be of the utmost importance to bring down a bird flying when I go near any of their lodges, taking care to make it appear as a little matter, not done to be observed." On another occasion, having finished a bit of salmon in the eyes of a few hundred Indians of whom he was no sure, he I coolly-took -out of his pocketI- An effervescing powder,-3 put- - A FRONTIER DAYS 73 fear. Occasionally he dealt with them in a more forcible manner. One Indian had stolen his knife. When detected, he claimed to be paid for it. "I paid him, certainly, and so handsomely that I will engage he does not forget 'the Grass NIan' in a hurry." The Chief of the Kyemuse tribe having done him friendly service, "the Grass Man" bored a hole through his only shilling, and observing that his nose was pierced, suspended it thereon by brass wire. Another Chief was rewarded for similar service by requesting to be shaved after the fashion of White Men. When coming up to the Chehalis River, in Washington Territory, he was accompanied by Mladsue, or "Thunder." Thunder would not taste liquor, but he made up for it in smoking. In self-defense Douglas smoked also, but in this he astonished his companion by putting out the smoke from his mouth. "0!" cried Thunder; "why do you throw away the smoke? See, I take it in my belly." He ever speaks in the kindest way of his Indian companions. "Among these people confidence answers best. Another good point in their character is hospitality." When it was reported to him that the Indians at the Columbia had taken part in wrecking a ship, he says: "I cannot believe that my old friends would do this. I have lived among them for weeks and months." Thus, then, our hero wandered through the land, going out of his way often a dozen miles for a single plant; often ready to famisk with hunger; often lying in the rain for several days, unable to move, because of his lame knee, which he hurt in packing his first box of specimens; sometimes stumbling over a precipice, sometimes overcome by the pitiless storms; and several times nearly wrecked in crossing rivers. It was his intention, for instance, to visit the Peace River and Russian America, but his canoe was dashed to pieces against the rocks, called the Stony Island, up near Quesnelle, of the Fraser River, all his supplies and specimens lost, himself cast into the waters, and dashed in upon the shore. This event appears greatly to have discouraged him: four hundred specimens, the result of laborious toil, gone forever. To add to his misfortunes, his eyesight began to fail him. He could not shoot well; at times, out on the mountains, he could not discern the objects immediately around him; at times, he was lonely, desolate, and dependent. Again and again he refers to this in his letters. After having been nearly ten years in the country, relieved only 74 74 FRONTI ER DAYS byhs ii t nladi 12,he indulged the prospect of home. Leaving the Columbia River in October, 1833, he reached the Sandwich Islands in December. He set out to explore the country around the volcano of Mauna Kea on the 7th of January. "Walking with my trousers rolled up to my knees, and without shoes, I did not know there were holes in my stockings till I was appraised of them by the scorching heat and pain in my feet. While on the summit I experienced a violent headache." Between this time and July he made several excursions of the same kind. Returning from his last-the ascent of Mauna Loahungry, thirsty, blistered, and jaded, he wrote: "Gratified though one may be at witnessing the wonderful works of God in such a place as the summit of this mountain presents, still it is with thankfulness that we again approach a climate more congenial to our natures, and welcome the habitations of our fellow-men, where we are refreshed with the scent of vegetation, and soothed by the melody of birds." These were among the last words he wrote. The last were these to Professor Hooker: "May God grant me a safe return to England. I cannot but indulge the pleasing hope of being soon able in person to thank you for the signal kindness you have ever shown to me." In this he was fatally disappointed. He left Kohala Point to cross Mauna Kea on the north side. At six A. M. of the 12th July, he called at the house of an Englishman, Edward Gurney, on the mountain; stated that his servant had given out the day before, and asked him to point out the way to Hilo, They took breakfast together, and Gurney went with him about a mile, showed him the paths, and warned him of the pit-traps, set for the wild cattle. He had not gone more than two miles, when he came to an open trap, in which a bullock had been caught. He had looked into it, and also into another, where a cow was caught. He passed, and went up the hill on the way to Hilo. There, some idea induced him to turn. Lying down his bundle, beside which the dog remained, he proceeded to1examne the pit more'Inutely;A. andIit a pp %A:& %w %ea f nrs that,.6 FRONTIER DAYS 7_g which he had in his pockets, which were forwarded to Richard Charlton, the Consul at Oahu. Thus ended the life of Douglas, on the I2th of July, 1834, when thirty-five years of age. Exactly ten years after his first embarkation on board the brig for America, his body was brought down to Oahu for burial. His death was all the more unfortunate, as he had not completed his account of his last exploration in the Northwest. At the Stony Islands, he had lost his last collection of specimens-about four hundred. He had not corresponded regularly with the Horticultural Society, and had delayed his descriptions for some favored time of rest. Cut off ere he had reached middle life, yet his name and his labors for science will not soon be forgotten. To his memory there are countless monuments in the widely distributed Douglas Pine. Their waving branches, moved by the winds, will sound forth the melancholy requiem of him who loved so well these forests and forest-trees. THE TALL MEN By ARTHUR GUITERMAN *.Wi HE land was loved by many, the land was held by none; Unruled, the forest burgeoned in wind and rain and sun. Though still across the barrens the tribes of South and U h l ar -eNorth SPursued the ranging bison and drove them back and forth, ~"'&Upon the gentle upland and river-furrowed plain There stood no tented village, there waved no tasseled grain; Though Iroquois and Shawnee and Creek and DelawareThose whooping braves of warlike clans of beaver, wolf and bearAwoke the echoing caverns where still their darts are found And strove in arms to make their own the Dark and Bloody Ground, Though still the woods were lighted by torch and council flame, The wilderness was masterless until the Hunters came, Until the Long Knives trod the ways that cleave the mountain wall And through to Transylvania where men grew brave and tall. Pack saddles, pack saddles, rocking through the passes, Through the narrow mountain gaps, Cumberland and Pine Up the steep and shelving slope, round the bowlder masses, Down where under virgin woods flows Nepeperninel Deer hunters, deer hunters, keen and greatly daring, Following the bison track over root and bole, Silent-footed, falcon-eyed, grave or gay in bearing, Founders, builders, pressing on, knowing not their goal!l Down the Chatterawha, the Ohio and the Green, The Cumberland, the Licking and the waterways between They found the trail they wanted or they made it with the ax-- The Hunters of Kentucky with their rifles and their packs. By permission from I SING THE PIONEER, by Arthur Guiterman. Copyright by E. P. Dutton & Co. 76 FRONTIER DAYS 77 They built their lonely stations and the logs were cut and hewn By the breed of Simon Kenton and the blood of Daniel Boone. They stood behind the loopholes in their rugged palisades Through hot and weary sieges, attacks and ambuscades. They shot and made their sallies till the Shawnees broke and fled, While the women charged the rifles and the women shaped the lead, The women nursed the wounded and the women watched by night, The women brought the water through the peril of the fight. The mothers never faltered; and the sons that then were small Grew as Hunters of Kentucky and were strong and brave and tall. They earned a name that lives in song, Those woodsmen stout and plucky Whose hair and rifles both were longThe Hunters of Kentucky. Their height was mostly six-foot-one, Their race was Celt and Saxon; They fought up North with Harrison, Down South with Andrew Jackson. Oh, they could turn a watercourse And win a battle later, 78 78 FRONTIER DAYS For "every man was half a horse And half an alligator 1" The wilderness was conquered and the wars were fought and won. Kentucky throve and blossomed like her roses in the sun. The Hunter of Kentucky put the laurel from his brow; He laid aside the rifle for the sickle and the plow. (He sometimes fought a little, as he deemed it only right To be in decent training when one really had to fight.) His door and heart stood open to the weary and forlorn; He raised the finest horses and tobacco leaf and corn; He reared his hardy offspring in the good old-fashioned way, To ride, to shoot, to speak the truth, and vote for Henry Clay. And still the true descendant of the Transylvania line Through all removes and changes keeps a sacred inner shrine For the homeland of Kentucky where the lazy rivers crawl, Where the women all are lovely and the men are brave and tall. %t 4k, &0.*#III4 1,I B 11 I i IS fhtIttll THE LAND OF GOLD By EDWIN L. SABIN wo+N THE summer of 1848 Thomas 0. Larkin, Esq., was S United States consul to the former MNexican province of A. Upper California. A year and a half before this California had been seized by the United States, in the war with Mexico. The war was ended, and Upper California was * still only a conquered province. The United States had arranged to keep it and pay for it, but had not yet made it a regular American Territory. Therefore Thomas 0. Larkin, Esq., was holding on as consul. Now he sat at a desk and dating his letter, "San Francisco, Upper California, June 1, 1848" wrote to James Buchanan, Secretary of State, at f ar-away Washington: "Sir: I have to report to the State Department one of the most astonishing excitements and state of affairs now existing in this country, that, perhaps, has ever been brought to the notice of the government. On the American fork of the Sacramento and Feather rivers, another branch of the same, and the adjoining lands, there has been, within the present year, discovered a placer, a vast tract of land containing gold, in small particles. This gold, thus f ar, has been taken on the bank of the river, from the surface to eighteen inches in depth, and is supposed deeper, and to extend over the country." Consul Larkin scrawled away at a great rate. The astounding news had been brought from the north by several men direct from the m?nes, who had some of the gold, with which they wished to buyx goods nt androvisions. This gold they had washed out, them 80 FRONTIER DAYS Soldiers and sailors were deserting. The newspaper Cali. fornian had been obliged to quit. The Star had only one printer. A merchant from China had lost his Chinese servants. Cooks were being offered fifteen dollars a day, to cook for the miners, and spades and shovels were bringing prices as high as fifty dollars I United States Consul Larkin enclosed a quill of the gold dust, for President Polk and Secretary of State Buchanan, and announced that he was going up to "visit this gold mine." After dispatching his letter and the gold dust by government messenger, overland, and a copy of the letter, to make sure, by ship for the Isthmus of Panama and New Orleans, Mr. Larkin started on to the new gold field, iSo miles to the northeast. When he got back to Monterey, toward the end of June, he had been convinced. He had seen the miners at work, he had done a little of the washing, himself; in this his second report he enclosed two or three dollars in gold dust that he had washed out from a bucket of stones and dirt in half an hour; there were probably 2,000 people already at work digging and washing in the new field; ordinary wages were fifty dollars a day, for almost anyone could make that at digging gold; Monterey itself was almost deserted, and the whole country had gone mad. - 4 2Wv API IMINMUL4A NKý " FRONTIER DAYS 81 II How had this extraordinary state of affairs begun? Who had started this golden flood that was to make California known the world over, and was to bring a tide of eager people breaking from the plains and deserts down over the mountains, and scrambling ashore from hundreds of ships crowding the anchorage in Yerba Buena Cove of San Francisco Bay? It all had begun at Sutter's sawmill near the South Fork of the American River, some forty miles up the American from where it emptied into the Sacramento; it had begun there, when James W. Marshall, building the sawmill for Captain Sutter, in January 1848, had seen a yellow glitter in the bottom of the mill race, and had stooped and had picked up a yellow flake, of value half a dollar; and had bitten and hammered it, and had decided that it might be gold. This Captain John Augustus Sutter, for whom James Marshall was working, was a German of Switzerland, but had become an American citizen. From New York he had taken the adventure trail west, until on a trading trip overland he had reached Oregon. From Oregon he sailed for California by way of the Sandwich or Hawaiian Islands, and landed in the summer of 1839. Here he decided to stay. He proposed, to the Mexican governor of California, to be a Mexican citizen, if the governor would give him lands upon which to settle. The governor gave him eleven square leagues, or over thirty-three square miles, selected in the Sacramento Valley. Captain Sutter, a rosy-faced, blue-eyed, military man, who claimed to have served in the French army, with his Sandwich Islanders and his supplies located his headquarters upon a nice spot up the American River, about three miles east of the future Sacramento City. He soon gathered about him a small army of Indians, stocked his ranch with cattle, built a fort of adobe or sun-dried mud brick, mounted guns upon it, raised his own grain and meats, ground his flour, manufactured his tools in his smithy, and was the lord of all he surveyed. By 1844 he boasted of twelve cannon and a garrison of forty Indians in soldier uniforms; had thirty white men working for him; 8 1 FRONTIER DAYS and was afraid of no one. In fact, he was as powerful as the Governor of California. He had been given twenty-two square leagues in all, and had named his place New Helvetia, or New Switzerland. His fort, called Sutter's Fort, was a stopping place for all the white travelers who came that way; and especially for the Americans who entered California in the north, down out of the Sierras. Americans had been entering California for many years. Trading ships from Boston and other Atlantic ports rounded the Horn and bought hides and tallow at San Diego, Monterey, San Pedro which is now the port of Los Angeles, and Yerba Buena or Good Herb, which was renamed San Francisco. Whalers put in for supplies. Sailors went ashore and stayed. Trappers and traders from the Rocky Mountains and the deserts trailed in, seeking beaver and horses; and a portion of them stayed. Then in 1843 "Oregon I" was the cry. The Oregon country must be settled by the United States or it would be taken by England. The Oregon Trail, which became the Overland Trail, was opened; a branch led southwest to California, and emigrants for Oregon split off for California instead. Now by the close of I846 the population of California numbered about Io,ooo white persons; 8,ooo of these were the Spanish; the rest were mainly United States soldiers and sailors, and American settlers. The change of flags did not alter in any great degree the manner of living. There were the enormous ranches, of thousands of acres, which raised some grain and grapes, but which were devoted mostly to cattle and horses. The Spanish Californians took life easy; they sold horses and hides and tallow; their daily fare was beef and beans; they did not use butter or milk; they employed Indian and Spanish herders and servants, visited around, danced and idled, and lived to a good old age. The majority of the land was only open range, for the stock. The foreigners, as the Americans were called, married Spanish women and were granted lands also, if they wished. Those who did not open stores or follow a trade became ranchers and adopted the Spanish customs. The war with Mexico continued through I847, and California grew slowly. A sprinkling of immigrants and ship passengers FRONTIER DAYS 83 traveled in, there were the soldiers and sailors stationed in the coast towns and in the harbors. San Francisco was the one American town. In August of 1847 it had numbered only 373 grown persons, but was doubling that and was bragging that it would be a world port. Nevertheless, California as yet seemed to be upon the waiting list of the United States. But this was altered by the magic word GOLD. III The majority of the Americans lived in Northern California: in the Sacramento Valley and the San Joaquin Valley, and on down to Monterey. Bold Captain John Augustus Sutter of Sutter's Fort had prospered. His fort was on the main immigrant trail down from the mountains and along the American River to the Sacramento River. He sold quantities of grain and flour and beef, and leather from his tannery, to the incoming settlers. Sutter's Fort was a thriving place indeed. Its mud walls, twenty feet high, enclosed a place Soo feet long by 13o wide. From its low hill it looked upon ten acres cultivated to fruits and vegetables, upon the fields of yellow grain and of grazing cattle and horses, upon the gravelly road extending up and down the river, and upon the huts and frame houses of its employes. The Sutter lands out-spread for sixty miles. There were sixty houses within sight: the white employes numbered almost 300, and the Indian and half-breed employes were a thousand. The busy Captain Sutter owned 12,000 caftle, 2,o00 horses and mules, i5,cxxo sheep and 10o00 hogs. He operated a twenty-ton sloop, with an Indian crew, for trading trips to San Francisco. The fort clanged to the blacksmith shop, forging or repairing plowshares and other implements, and to the beat of hammers and the rasp of carpenter'5 saws; a brass cannon set in front of the main building marked the sentry post, where one of the fifty native soldiers paced, day and night, and sounded a bell every hour. Six miles up the river a new gristmill was being built. A great deal had been done by Captain John Augustus Sutter in eight years. He was a rich and important man. 84 FRONTIER DAYS The war with Mexico had ended. A large party of Mormons on their way from Los Angeles to Salt Lake had stopped off at Sutter's Fort, to work for a short time. They were from the Mormon Battalion of settlers for the far West who had been recruited at Council Bluffs, Iowa, and had been marched to Santa Fe in New Mexico and thence on across the desert to California. The battalion had been discharged in Los Angeles. But James Marshall, the man who colored the world yellow, was not of the Mormons. This James Wilson Marshall, of New Jersey, and thirty-three years old, had come out to California in 1845, from Missouri, as a wagon-maker, carpenter, farmer and general handy-man and had been hired by Captain Sutter. He was a moody kind of man, with a heavy face and a mouth that curved down instead of up; so that sometimes he was friendly and pleasant and sometimes he was silent and dour. But he was a practical mechanic, and a woodsman, and could be trusted. When, in this spring of 1847, Captain Sutter decided that a sawmill was badly needed he sent James Marshall out to find the best site. A sawmill site should be level, and close to large, clear pine timber, and near enough to a stream so that a current of water could be ditched to turn the mill wheel. At the fort the trees were poor and the water did not have enough fall to turn a wheel. The only place for the sawmill was in the foothills up toward the mountains. James Marshall started exploring. In the third week of May the Indian guide led him and his three white companions to a beautiful park or open valley, of rolling country and reddish soil, about a mile and a half wide, bordered by gentle wooded hills and skirted on the north by the curving South Fork of the American River. It was some forty miles east from the fort. "What is this?" James Marshall asked. "Called 'Culuma.' That mean beautiful valley," said the Indian. "Mebbe good place for sawmill." And it was: the mill could be built here in the curve of the river, with the mill race, or ditch, cutting across the curve from above to below to turn the mill wheel; plenty of good timber right at hand; FRONTIER DAYS an easy country for a road down to the fort-they had found the very spot. Away went James Marshall, with the news. Captain Sutter wvas much pleased. He took James Marshall in as hi's sawmill partner and they drew up articles of partnership. In August James set out, with his party of workmen, a fleet of ox-carts, bearing tools and supplies, and a flock of sheep for food, to build the mill. He was to be the superintendent; Captain Sutter would furnish the labor and the food. Peter Wimmer, who had come out from Missouri in an emigrant train of 1846, took his wife Jennie and two boys along. Mrs. Wimmer was to be the camp cook. There were thirteen Americans, mainly Mlormons of the Mormon Battalion, and eight of Captain Sutter's Indians. A channel had to be dug, from the upper part of the river bend across to the lower part, so that a good current of water might be led under the mill wheel, to turn it. This was the mill race. A mill race is divided into the head race and the tail race. A brush dam was built in the river by which the water could be diverted into the mouth of the race wvhen the head gate or sluice gate there was lifted. By the first of January the mill frame had been erected, and a little later the dam and the race were about finished. The upper part of the race had to be blasted out of a rocky bed. The lower part, the tail race, was softer; and after the dirt had been loosened with picks and spades during the day, the water was let in, to run all night and wash the dirt away. At last the winter rains had lessened for a time, the mill wheel was soon to be put in, lumber would be turned out, and the Mormons would be free to go to Salt Lake with their wages in their pockets. And in this afternoon of January 24, 1848, James Marshall, the boss and manager, took a stroll down along the tail race, through which the water had been running all night, to see how deeply the rac had been -cut.-%Ms& 86 86 FRONTIER DAYS quite a little of it scattered upon the surface of the dirt in tiny grains and flakes. So he stooped down. Then he called one of the Indians who was working below with Peter Wimmer. Up near the mill James 0. Brown was whip-sawing when the Indian boy came to him and said that the boss, who was Mr. Marshall, wished a tin plate at once. James Brown could not imagine what Marshall wanted with a tin plate, but he jumped off the big log he was working on and ran and got one f rom the dining room. Away ran the Indian boy with the plate for the boss, and James Brown thought no more about it. Marshall was a queer sort of man, anyhow. With the tin plate James Marshall washed a few fistfuls of the dirt, and found in the bottom of the plate enough of the yellow to cover a ten-cent piece. But he decided to put in no more time upon this foolery. The mill was of more importance, and he sent back the plate. Only, that night, af ter supper, he seemed to be 'in one of his dazes, as if he were seeing spirits; and he said, once or twice: "Boys, I believe I've found a gold mine." "Naw," they laughed. "Reckon not. No such luck, Jim." Presently he went off to his own cabin, and they let him go. But he came back before the crowd in the bunk house had turned 'in. That idea was still pestering him.I "Boys," he said, "I'm almost certain I found gold down the mill race. Now, Brown, I want you and Bigler to shut down the head gate early in the morning. Throw in sawdust and rotten leaves and dirt; make it all tight and we'll see what comes of that." B-ack he went to his cabin. "Marshall's crazy," they said. How could there be gold, in this mill race! Nevertheless he was the boss, and orders were orders. Therefore early in the morning James Brown and Henry Bigler, two of th MomNsIshutthehed gate nd1stpped1t0up Igtysotha FRONTIER DAYS 87 Work had just begun when back he came. He was stepping slowly, and was carefully carrying his old white slouch hat, rightside-up, in his arm-sort of nursing it; and he had a queer, quizzical smile upon his hard face. Something extraordinary was ailing Jim MLarshall. He trudged into the mill-yard, while everybody looked; and there he halted, and he gazed from one man to another. At last he said, in a solemn tone: "Boys, I've got it." With that he laid his hat, still carefully, upon a bench, and waited for them all to crowd forward and see. The top of the hat had been dented in; and in the dent there was a little collection of yellow particles, like the grains in a coffee cup, only yellow-bright yellowl Not all the particles were tiny. Several were as large as a grain of wheat. "What is it, Jim?" "I won't say, boys. I call it gold-found it in the tail race. I picked this up, too." And Jim Marshall fished out a larger, irregular fragment. "I saw the first goodish speck glimmering on a rock, under six inches of water. So did Wimmer. I didn't know whether it was worth while picking up, but I got down in and fished it out. Guessed it was too heavy for mica; calkilated it might be copper or 88 FRONTIER DAYS pyrites; but I bit it, and it was soft; and when I hammered it with a rock I found I could flatten it. After that Wimmer and I gathered what you see, along down the race. It's all about the same as I found yesterday afternoon." "But it can't be gold! Is there any more of it?" Peter Wimmer came in. "Call it what you like, I'm willing to take my pay in it," he said. Azariah Smith drew a five-dollar gold piece of his soldier pay in the Mormon Battalion from his pocket and held it against the yellow in the hat top. "Here's mint gold," he said. "Let's see how the two compare." The stuff in the hat was a little darker-a little off color, it seemed. But then, it might be pure, whereas the half-eagle piece was alloyed, of course. "There's one way to tell. Put a sample in Mrs. Wimmer's soap kettle and have her boil it along with her soap. If it's gold, the lye and potash won't change it." "Here, Martin," said Superintendent Jim Marshall to Peter Wimmer's little boy: "You take this pretty stone to your ma and tell her I'd like her to boil it in her soap kettle while she's making her soap today; and be careful and not throw it away when the soap's done. I'll want to see it." Away ran Martin with the pretty stone. By now the men were growing excited. They dropped their work, trooped for the tail race, and began to scout around, looking for the yellow metal. They found more of it, and when they quit to go back to work they had three ounces collected in flakes and grains and in particles even as large as a small dried pea. Some was tried out in vinegar, and the vinegar did not affect it; but they waited for the verdict of Jennie Wimmer's soap kettle, and at dinner joked her about her "golden" soap-asked her if she could do with gold instead of grease, for if she could, there was plenty of it out in the sand and gravel of the tail race. That evening, when the kettle had cooled off, Mrs. Wimmer lifted out her lump of soap and laid it upon a plank. Then she sliced it into bars, but she did not find the gold. Had the piece of yellow melted? Then she looked into her kettle again, and saw a double handful of the potash and lye. While the men peered and FRONTIER DAYS 89 joked, she lifted out the potash and lye-and there in the very bottom of the kettle was the yellow metal l It had been so heavy that it had sunk clear down, and had stayed; it had not changed in the slightest-it was as bright as ever. The potash and the lye had not tarnished it. Well, if it wasn't gold it was something just as remarkable. However, no one would yet believe that this yellow stuff really could be gold. There was too much of it lying around. "I'll tell you what I'll do, boys," said Jim Marshall. "I'm going down to the fort in a day or two, and I'll take part of what we've found to Old Cap, there, and he and I'll test it with acid and in the scales. 'Meanwhile don't you, any of you, say anything about it. We don't want to spread any false reports, and we've got this mill to finish." They promised to keep mum, and they went about their work, with occasional trips, between hours, to explore the race and gather the yellow. In the afternoon of the second day following-January 27 it was-Marshall rode away in the rain, for the fort. Down at the fort rosy-faced, dignified Captain John Sutter had had his after-dinner nap, and the rain again lashed the roof and the deep-set windows. He was writing letters in his snug office, when he was astonished to see his mill superintendent, James Marshall, enter, dripping, and acting very strangely. "WVhy, what's the matter, MNarshall?" "Can I see you alone, in your private rooms in the big house?" "Why, certainly, Marshall. What's wanted?" replied Captain Sutter. 'Come on, man." So he took James Marshall into his parlor in the big house, where the clerks' offices were. "Are we alone?" James asked; and would have peeped under the bed in the bed-room. "Yes." "Is the door locked, Cap?" "No, but I will lock it." Captain Sutter was not afraid, but Marshall certainly was acting strangely. What did he intend to do? And why should he have come down from the mill in the rain when fresh supplies had been sent up only the other day? 90 FRONTIER DAYS "Wait," said Marshall. "First, I want two bowls of water." "Very well. You shall have them." Captain Sutter pulled a bell rope to signal a servant, and ordered two bowls of water. "Now," said Marshall, "I want a stick of red-wood and a piece of twine and some sheet copper." "But what do you want of all these things, Marshall?" Captain Sutter demanded. "I want to make a pair of scales." "Oh, as to that, I've scales enough in the apothecary's shop," said Captain Sutter. "I'll get you a pair." "Well," stammered Marshall, "I didn't think of that." So Captain Sutter went to the fort apothecary shop, which served out drugs for the fort's sick, and brought back a pair of scales. He waited, curious to see what James Marshall was going to do next. Marshall cautiously pulled out of his pantaloons pocket a white rag-only a white rag, rolled in a ball. He was unfolding the roll, when the door opened and a clerk passed through, on business. The clerk was astonished and Marshall was alarmed. He stuck the rag into his pocket again and he exclaimed: "There l I could have told you we had listenersl" "No, no," said the Captain. "This is just one of my clerks, entering on business. He didn't know we were here. He will get out and I'll lock the door." Out went the clerk, and this time Captain Sutter locked the door, to please James Marshall. After the door was locked Marshall again hauled forth the mysterious cotton rag. This time he did unroll it, and he held it open in his trembling hand for the Captain to see. Peering, Captain Sutter saw an ounce or more of yellow metal in flakes and grains. "What is that, Marshall?" "I believe it is gold; but the men at the mill laughed at me and called me crazy." "Where did you find it?" "In the tail race. There seems to be quite a bit of it." Captain Sutter squinted more closely at the stuff, and fingered it. The largest grain was the size of a small pea. FRONTIER DAYS 9 91 "By Jo, it looks like gold!I" he said. "W~e'll try it out with aqua fortis. You wait here." He bustled away and brought back some nitric acid from the apothecary shop. The acid had no effect upon the yellow flakes and grains. "Now, have you any silver?" Mlarshall asked. "Yes, I have." And the Captain produced several coins. "Balance the silver with the gold, in the scales; and then weigh them against each other under water, in those bowls," s-aid iMarshall. "If the yellow stuff outweighs the silver under water, it's gold, or as heavy as gold." Sure enough, the yellow stuff, balanced under water in the one bowl, out-weighed the silver, balanced under water in the other bowl. It had the greater specific gravity, which was another test. Captain Sutter stepped to a book-shelf and took down a volume of the American Encyclopedia, and opened it to Gold. Yes, gold could not be dissolved by any common single acid, its specific gravity was higher than that of silver, it wvas soft-and yellow "By Jo! Why, why!" exclaimed Captain Sutter. "Marshall, I believe this is the finest kind of gold 1" Marshall was getting excited, now. "Let's go right back up to the mill, then." "No, no. Not at this hour, in this rain, man. You stay here for supper, and in the morning I'll go up just as soon as I've got things started for the day here."~ But James Marshall could not wait. He set off at once, with only a Mexican blanket to protect him. Left to himself, Captain Sutter began to cool down. Gold? Gold? By Jo! He didn't know as he liked that, after all. It was liable to turn all his plans inside out. Howv could he get men to work for him if they could make money digging gold? How was he to finish his sawmill and his new flour mill? His improvements would stop, his fort and lands would be deserted, he would be ovr-unbyalotof raz god-sekes,2higswoud oIosrckan 92 FRONTIER DAYS After breakfast he ordered his horse saddled, and taking two of his Indian soldiers he rode up-river to his precious sawmill. The rain was falling hard; and when, about half-way to the mill, he saw something moving in the bushes beside the muddy road he pulled in his horse. "What's that in those bushes? A bear?" "No," said one of the Indian soldiers. "It is the man who talked with you last night." Sure enough, James Marshall, sopping wet, came out on all fours, and met him. The Captain exclaimed: "Have you been here all night, Mlarshall?" "No; I spent the night at the mill, but early this morning I rode down here to meet you." I\Iarshall got his horse and rode on with Captain Sutter. "Have you been looking for more gold on your way down, Marshall?" the Captain anxiously asked. "No; but I believe this whole country around is rich in gold." "Have you told the men so?" "No, sir; but I told them we tested the yellow stuff in your office and it's the pure article." "Well, we shall see, we shall see," said Captain Sutter. And he thought to himself, again: "Here I've got $25,000 in my new flour mill and $Io,ooo in this new sawmill, and my tannery and my grain-fields must not be neglected. I wish that the gold were at the bottom of the sea." It took most of the day to ride those forty miles through the rain and the mud, and when, with James Marshall, he arrived at the mill he was soaked and tired. Therefore he went on to Marshall's log cabin to rest and to change his clothes. The plaguey gold could keep. James Marshall returned to the mill, and said to the men who were working indoors: "Boys, Old Cap is here. He's up at my house. Now, I'll tell you what let's do. You know he always carries a bottle. Let's each of us throw in a pinch of gold and give it all to Henry [who was Henry Bigler], and in the morning after we've shut off the water Henry can go down early and sprinkle the stuff over the rock bottom of the tail race; then when the Old Gent comes down FRONTIER DAYS 93 and sees it lying there he'll be so excited that he will out with his bottle and treat all hands." It sounded like a good joke. That night Captain Sutter spent in James Marshall's comfortable cabin, and talked mill matters over and cogitated upon just what he was going to do about that gold. In the morning, while the men at the mill were rushing through their breakfast, one of them said, "Here comes Old Cap now," and they could see Captain Sutter, dressed in a fine blue coat with brass buttons, with a proper wide-brimmed black felt hat upon his bald head, and his gold-headed cane in his hand, as befitted the master of a fort and of thousands of acres, coming down escorted by Superintendent James Marshall and Peter Wimmer. They all went outside to greet him. It was a bright morning after the rain. " Boys, I am going down the race, to see what all this talk is about," "Old Cap" said. "Will you join me in the walk?" They assuredly would. That was the very thing, for Henry Bigler had been down before breakfast and had sprinkled the gold. So, with the dignified "Old Cap," in his best clothes, and leaning upon his cane, leading the procession, and little Martin Wimmer and his littler brother running ahead, away they all went to inspect the race again. Now just wait till Old Cap's eyes lighted on that goldl The men were chuckling and winking and nudging each other, and were almost at the spot, when here came the boy Martin, running back, with his little brother legging it behind him. They were holding something in their hands; and before he could be stopped Martin had opened his fist and was bleating, out of breath: "Father! Father! See what I've found!" It was the goldl Confound those two scampsl They had picked up almost all the gold that Henry had carefully laid upon the rocks They had spoiled the gamel But Old Cap saw, too; and he acted as excited as though he had found it himself. "By Jo!" he exclaimed, sticking his cane into the ground. "It's rich!" So it was, if two boys could make such a haul! Down he went, into the race, and down went the men; and they all began to explore 94 FRONTIER DAYS the rocks and dirt. They found more gold-found plenty. Captain Sutter himself found some, and the men gave him what they found; and soon he had an ounce and a half. That settled it. "By Jol" he kept saying. And: "This all must be made into a finger-ring, as soon as we can get a goldsmith." "Oro, oro-gold, gold," said one of the Indians, who had worked in the gold mines near La Paz, of Lower California in Mexico. Even the Indians knew, so there was no use in dodging matters. They went back to the mill and Captain Sutter made a little speech. "Boys," he said, thumping with his cane, "there's no doubt about this stuff being gold. We don't know how much it may amount to, and it probably doesn't extend very far around; but if people outside know about it they'll all come up to look for it and let other business go to the dogs. Now I don't want you to say anything about it, outside. I want you to keep our find secret and to go on working for the next six weeks, until this sawmill and my new flour mill above the fort are finished. I've a great deal of money invested in the mills, and I can't afford to let the work on them stop. And you would be foolish to give up good wages, in order to grub around in a wild-goose chase for gold." The men promised to keep the find secret; they would not even let the men down at the fort know. Then Captain Sutter and his partner James Marshall hastened to talk with the chiefs of the Culuma Indians and get a three years' lease of ten or twelve square miles of land around the mill site, to be paid for with shirts and hats and gay handkerchiefs and brass ornaments and flour. This would shut out trespassers; and if no more gold was discovered the land could be used for its timber. Anyway, it was not costing much. Then Captain John Augustus Sutter went down to New Helvetia and his fort, well satisfied for the present. The discovery of that plaguey gold in his mill race was to be a secret. IV Now, in olden time there was a King Midas, of Phrygia, whose ears were changed by angry Apollo into ass's ears. King Midas FRONTIER DAYS 99 wore a cap to hide them, and only his servant knew and his servant was sworn not to tell. But that was a bursting secret; and at last the servant was obliged to dig a hole in the ground so that, for relief, he might whisper into it: "King Midas hath ass's ears! Midas hath ass's ears!" And the earth told it to the reeds, and all the reeds began to whisper to the breeze: "King Midas hath ass's ears! Midas hath ass's earsI" It was the same way with this secret of gold! Gold! Gold! Gold was lying around, to be picked up! At Sutter's mill, on the South Fork of the American River; and who knew where else, in that region? But it must not be told. No, no! At least, not generally. Maybe a few friends might be told, if they would promise not to repeat the secret. Captain Sutter himself was the first to break out. He kept the secret for ten days-that is all. Then he simply had to write to his old friend General Mariano Guadaloupe Vallejo, who had been commanding general of Northern California under Mexico, and was living at Sonoma, north of San Francisco. "I have made a discovery of a gold mine," wrote Captain John Augustus Sutter, "which according to our experiments is extraordinarily rich." Therefore the popular and generous General Vallejo, of Sonoma, now knewl But Captain Sutter still itched to do something about the discovery. He sent up to the mill for Charles Bennett, who was James Marshall's assistant there, and started him down to Monterey with a letter for Colonel Richard B. Mason, the military governor of the United States possessions in California. Charles Bennett was not to say a word about gold; he was only to get from Colonel Mason, for Captain Sutter, the land, water and mineral rights, under the laws of the United States, in that claim which had been leased from the Indians. If Colonel Mlason was curious about the word "mineral," Charles should explain that there were traces of lead and silver in the region. Captain Sutter thought himself very clever. Away went the trusty Charles Bennett, glad indeed to go, for in a buckskin bag in his pocket he had six ounces of gold of his own! By the time that he reached Benicia, above San Francisco, the 96 96 FRONTIER DAYS bag was burning a hole through his pocket; and when, in a store there, he heard somebody say that coal had been found near-by and would make California very valuable to the United States, he couldn't stand it. "Coal!" snorted Charles Bennett. "Coal, you say? Why, I've something that will beat coal and make this the greatest country in the world." Then out came his buckskin bag of gold dust. "Just look at this, gentlemen 1" Everybody in the store looked; and soon all Benicia knew that Charles Bennett from Sutter's Fort was toting around what he thought to be a bag of gold dust. "It is gold!" "Nonsense! It isn't gold.," "By golly, gold it is-we all say so," had retorted Charles Bennett. "And when I get down to San Francisco I'll find somebody who knows gold when he sees it." On he went, by boat to San Francisco village. Now he was more keen upon proving the contents of his sack than he was upon getting to Colonel 'Mason with his letter from Captain Sutter, In San Francisco he heard of the very man who could tell him not only all about gold but how to mine it. That man was FRONTIER DAYS 97 Isaac Humphrey, an American who had mined for gold in Georgia. He found Humphrey, and showed the sack. "Yes, sir; that's gold, and good gold. VWhere are you from?" "From Sutter's sawmill, up the American Fork." "Did you get that stuff there? Is there much of it?" "Plenty, I reckon. We've been picking it up in the mill race." "When are you going back?" "I've got to go to MIonterey first. I'm taking a letter to Colonel NMason from the Old Cap." "By thunder, I'll go down to Monterey with you, and we'll show Mason your gold. Then we'll go back to your diggin's. There'll be more of that stuff-the hills may be full of it. I've mined for it in Georgia and I'll show you boys how to take it out of the ground." Down at Monterey young Lieutenant William Tecumseh Sherman, Third Artillery, U. S. A., as adjutant-general upon the staff of Colonel and Governor NMason was busy in the military headquarters office when two travel-stained Americans entered and asked to see the governor personally. "What is wanted?" "We have come on special business from Captain Sutter of New Helvetia." "Very well," said young Lieutenant Sherman (who was to be the famous General Sherman of the Civil War), and passed them in to Colonel Dick Mason. After a short time Lieutenant Sherman was summoned by his chief; and there, upon a bit of paper upon the table, he saw a small mound of yellow flakes. "What do you call that, Sherman?" the colonel rapped out at him. "Why, it's gold, sir, isn't it?" answered Lieutenant Sherman, examining it with his eyes and fingers. "Are you familiar with native gold?" "Somewhat, sir. When I was in northern Georgia in I844 I saw native gold, but it was finer than this and was in quills and small bottles. We can test this, though, with acids and by hammering." Whereupon Lieutenant Sherman called his orderly and told him to fetch in an ax and a hatchet. Then he took the largest grain 98 FRONTIER DAYS of yellow and hammered it with the hatchet, upon the butt of the ax. It hammered out very thin without breaking. "Where did this come from, Colonel?" he asked, of Colonel Mason. "These men claim it was found in the tail race of a sawmill being built by Sutter forty miles above his fort. But no matter, Mlr. Sherman. No gold to any value has yet been found in California." Colonel Mason could not give any title to lands, and Bennett and Humphrey hastened out with that reply. In San Francisco Humphrey tried to get friends of his to go with him to the new gold field; but they laughed at him. Now the news of the mill race gold had been spread from Sonora clear to Monterey, 250 miles. Furthermore, Captain Sutter had sent George McKinstry, his sheriff, down to San Francisco in the schooner, with samples of the grains and flakes, for testing; and Captain J. L. Folsom, of the quartermaster department there, made an assay. Furthermore, and worse, the gold craze was breaking out at Sutter's Fort itself, Captain Sutter was in danger of losing all his workmen, and the gold field was growing larger and better. Captain Sutter, foolish as he was, had hoped to keep the secret from the ears of the people at his New Helvetia. He had stopped travel between the mill and the fort; but in less than a month the sawmill required provisions. So he sent a Swiss teamster, whom he thought that he could trust, up there with a wagon-load of supplies. This time one of the little Wimmer boys again spilled the beans. When he saw a strange man at the mill he ran to him and blatted: "Hello. We've got some gold up here." "Aw, tell that to the marines," laughed the teamster. "Go away, bub, with your fairy story." "Well, you needn't laugh," called Mrs. Wimmer. "He's telling you the truth. We have found gold. If you don't believe, look here. What do you call this?" The Swiss teamster's eyes bulged when he saw the bits of yellow. By Yiminyl Then he promised not to tell, and the mill men helped him to get a little of the gold for himself. Back he went, to the fort, with his secret big within him. He felt rich FRONTIER DAYS 9 99 and he decided that now he would celebrate. Many a time he had gone into the store of Smith and Brannan, near the fort, and had been refused credit because he always drank up his wages; but this time he would fool those storekeepers. He stumped in, to the counter. "Give me a bottle of brandy." And he slapped down his purse. "Where's the money?" George Smith demanded. "You know very well wve sell only for cash." "There's your money, in gold. This is gold." George Smith, the store-keeper, peered at the yellow "You call that gold? Where did you get it?" "It is gold, and I got it not far from here, where I can get more. Give me my brandy, and take your pay." "Tut, tut! That will do," scoffed George Smith. "I've no time for your joking." The teamster grew angry. "If you don't believe me, you take my purse and go to the fort with it and ask the Captain." "Ilxvill." Out posted Store-Keeper Smith, with the purse, and found Captain Sutter. "Your teamster you sent up to the sawmill has come into my store and says this stuff is gold. Of course he lies, and I have told him so." "Nevertheless it is gold," Captain S utter groaned; and wished that he had sent his Indians up wvith the supplies, instead of this loose-mouthed teamster; for very soon, now, George Smith knew everything, and in much excitement wrote to his partner Sam Brannan, in San Francisco, to come back at once. Gold had been discovered I The gold had been found first by James Marshall, in the last of January. The four weeks of February had not yet passed, and I O0 FRONTIER DAYS all the day, on hands and knees, grubbing and scratching, and collecting with caps and hats, so that when darkness came and they had to get up they cried out with the cramps in their backs. On Mlarch 7 Isaac Humphrey the Georgia miner arrived posthaste at the sawmill; the next day he started in with a regular gold-pan, like a professional, to wash out the gold; the next day he had built a rocker, or sizable wooden trough that rocked like a cradle and settled the heavy gold against cleats in the bottom while the water and dirt flowed out at the lower end. Those men who could watched him with great interest. This was a better method than digging with a pocket knife and sifting with one's fingers or a shallow pie-pan. The next day there came a French Canadian trapper, Baptiste Ruelle, who had been a miner in Mexico. He had heard of the gold and he had lost no time in following Isaac Humphrey. The disease of the gold-fever was increasing. But the men stuck to their work, according to their promise to Captain Sutter, and on March II the mill was started. The Indians had cared little for the yellow grains and flakes that the white men were gathering so crazily. Captain Sutter and James Marshall had set some of them also to gathering it, for wages of food and clothes. That was all they wished; food and a few things to wear. They FRONTIER DAYS IOI were more interested in the mill. Now they lay flat on their stomachs, with their mouths open, watching the great wheel turn and the saw rip the logs, and trying to understand how this was done with a stream of water. They called it big medicine. It was far more marvelous than the yellow particles scattered around in the dirt and rocks. Sam Brannan the Mormon leader and store-keeper had hastened up from the Bay of San Francisco. John Bidwell, an American settler and Sutter man who had been surveying in the upper part of the Sacramento Valley came in to see the gold field; he said that he had seen what might be gold, where he had been exploring, and back he went and working with his Indians he found gold on his own lands along the Feather River, in the north. P. B. Reading came, from his ranch up that way also. Back he hurried, and he too found gold on his own ranch, 200 miles distant, up the Sacramento Valley. Why, there was gold everywherel Nothing now was kept secret. Further work on the sawmill and the new flour mill stopped. The Mormon workmen at the flour mill and the sawmill were going to Salt Lake, their city in Utah, but they wished to gather gold before they left. Everybody working for Captain Sutter wished to gather gold. The men began to strike for San Francisco, in order to show their riches and to spend them. John Bidwell went there, with his news of his own gold field. Sam Brannan galloped through the streets waving a bottle of gold dust in one hand and swinging his hat with the other and shouting: "Goldl Goldl Gold from the American River!" A squad of other new arrivals, whiskered and tattered and torn, proudly showed their quinine bottles, tin cans and buckskin bags heavy with the precious yellow-all from the new gold fields above Sutter's Fort. Up soared the rocket, presently to burst with a golden shower. The rush to the gold fields began in May. V San Francisco merchants closed their shutters; real estate men sold out for a song, laborers quit their jobs, houses were left vacant, signs on business places said: "Gone to the Diggings." 102 FRONTIER DAYS San Francisco, which its 8oo people had hoped would be a great city, was "busted." "Pay up before you go-everybody knows where," begged Editor Edward Kemble of the Star. "Pay the printer, if you please." But in a twinkling there was no congregation for the church, no town council, and no subscribers for the papers. The Californian of Editor Robert Semple ceased, and Editor Semple, who was a Kentucky dentist, in a coonskin cap, turned ferryman up the Straits, boating people across to the mainland and making twenty dollars a day at that. Editor Kemble hung on a little longer, but a paper "cannot be made by magic," he mourned, and the Star ceased. Shovels rose in price to six and ten dollars. Small row boats rose from fifty dollars to $400. San Francisco was being stripped of mining supplies-picks, hoes, spades, crowbars, anything with which to dig, and of bottles, snuff-boxes, glass tubes and brass tubes, and buckskin, anything that would hold gold. Nothing else would sell. And those persons who had no cash easily borrowed a thousand dollars or got credit, and gave the lender or the merchant an order for the gold that they expected to findl In the Bay crews deserted the ships and were followed by the officers. A bark from Peru put in-nobody ran down from the houses to greet her-her captain, going ashore and fearing a plague, hailed a Mexican"What's the matter here?" "Everybody has gone into the north, sefior, where there are valleys and mountains of gold." "What I" Within an hour nobody was left on that ship. The water-way from the Bay to the mouth of the Sacramento River, being the shortest way to the diggings, was strung with all kinds of crafts, from the sloop and schooner down to the barge and the dug-out with a shirt-tail sail, all loaded full and beating on at top speed for those golden diggings. San Francisco being situated at the tip of a peninsula forming the ocean entrance into the bay, the people without boats had to hire a passage across the channel, in order to reach the mainland on the north, and after that had to get across the Sacramento River; FRONTIER DAYS 103 or else they were obliged to travel clear down the peninsula, and round the end of the bay and turn north again until they were halted by the Carquinez Straits. Here Editor Semple, tall and lank, sweated day and night ferrying them over to the Sacramento side in his scow, which held two wagon outfits at a time; and by wagon and horse and mule and foot they hastened on, up-country for Sutter's Fort and the trail into the golden hills. And still they came: Americans, Mexicans, Frenchmen, Germans, Englishmen, Hawaiians, South Americans, Australians, soldiers, sailors, who not? They were coming now from the towns south of the Bay of San Francisco. San Jose imitated San Francisco. Ranchman John Horner left 5oo acres of ripened wheat for the cattle to trample down and started with his family for the mines. Livery-man WVest received a letter from his two brothers, who were already digging gold"Burn your livery barn if you can't get rid of it any other way, but come at once"; and away he went. The mayor and the judge lit out. Constable Henry Bee had ten prisoners, two of them charged with murder; he wished to turn them over to another keeper, but there was nobody who would stay; therefore he herded them into the road and took them along to dig his gold for him! Merchants left their shops open, with a notice bidding customers to help themselves, put the pay in the drawer and make their own change. The excitement seized Monterey, the capital, Ioo miles south. "The blacksmith dropped his hammer, the carpenter his plane, the mason his trowel, the farmer his sickle, the baker his loaf --" Soldiers and sailors deserted, debtors jumped their bail, criminals broke their parole, constable and jailor pretended to pursue but only kept on going. By foot and horse and cart, and even on crutches, with one sick man in a litter, into the north piled Monterey. The fever sped still southward. Santa Barbara became mad for gold; Iooo people left Los Angeles in a week; San Diego joined the pilgrimage. Gold, gold, gold-pounds of it, sacks of it, barrels of it, all to be dug up without cost, by picks and spades and butcher knives as fast as a man could work: this was the talk. California thought in gold, and nothing else was worth mentioning. 104 FRONTIER DAYS Up at Sutter's Fort of New Helvetia Captain John Augustus Sutter was almost snowed under by the storm from the south. At first the gold seekers were scattering, like the scout flakes of a blizzard; and then, on a sudden, driven in ever faster and thicker, they piled up at his very doors. Bringing clouds of dust they swamped the fort premises with their greedy presences and their thousand demands. He was beset. His own laborers had deserted him, the work on his flour mill had stopped, his blacksmith shop had been idle; from the mass of incomers he could hire other labor which also left him as soon as it had earned a little stake. But he seemed to be in good way to get richer as a host than he could as a mine owner. He kept open house, in his private quarters, and entertained whoever sought him there, whether clad in buckskin, wool, or broadcloth. But supplies-why, he could not sell supplies fast enough although hardware, dry-goods, tobacco, drugs and so on crammed his ware-houses to bursting. He rented his buildings to traders and store-keepers--his guard-house, empty of his Indian soldiers, was rented. Five hundred dollars a month was paid for a two-story house; he could get $ioo a month for a single room! In less than ten weeks one store made sales of over $3o,ooo. And more and more buildings were going up-on his land, and some of them without waiting for his permission. All along the American River stations were being established. His sawmill was away behind with orders for lumber. But he had no time to attend to details. Prices were mounting higher and higher. In-going gold seekers were willing to spend anything, in order to push on; out-going gold finders proudly planked down their dust, for they could get more. Flour was grabbed at $8oo a barrel; a barrel of sugar or of pork, at $400; $ioo was paid for a pair of boots, a blanket, even a shovel; eggs brought three dollars apiece, a pound of butter, six dollars, a pound of hard bread, two dollars. Camphor and other drugs were a dollar a drop, pills were a dollar each, a doctor was paid $ioo for a visit, and cooks received twenty-five dollars a day. Even the Indians prospered. For an ounce of this yellow stuff that had been useless to them but that the white men went crazy over they got a whole ounce of glass beads; for an ounce and,', FRONTIER DAYS IO1 quarter (or twenty dollars) they got a yard of calico; six ounces (at sixteen dollars the ounce) bought them a white blanket, and thirty ounces bought them a colored blanket, and for two ounces they could buy a red handkerchief I Certainly these white men were great fools, to covet yellow dirt and stones that they could not eat or wear. James Marshall was still up at Coloma, over-seeing the Indians and Sandwich Islanders whom he and Captain Sutter had hired to gather gold. Now, that rush to Sutter's Fort and the gold fields of the American Fork which was stirring the dust of 300 leagues of trail up through California had as yet been that of Californians. The people of the States, 2,000 and 3,000 miles east, knew nothing of it. They soon were to be roused, and then the real rush started. But the news of a land of gold richer than that which Columbus had discovered spread first to the Sandwich or Hawaiian Islands. June 17 the trading schooner Louise brought it to Honolulu, from San Francisco, along with two pounds of the gold itself, and newspapers announcing the craze. Other vessels, with gold and papers and letters, hove in. This was enough. The Sandwich Islanders prepared to move to the land of gold; Americans, Englishmen, Germans, Frenchmen, Chinamen, and natives clamored for passage to California. From Honolulu the word literally sailed, by vessel, to Oregon, before it could travel there across the northern mountains. It sped by newspaper and letter from Oregon into British Columbia and Russian Alaska; by land and water a part of British Columbia and half of settled Oregon which included present Washington, started for California. Northern Mexico heard, and up came the Mexicans, by vessel, and by the trail from Sonora. And across the ocean to China, Japan, Australia, and around the Horn to England, and down the coast to Peru, went letters, bidding friends and relatives to come, come, come. Thus spread the ripples from the tail race of Sutter's Mill, in that county to be named Eldorado, The Golden. But the excitement had scarcely begun. The millions of people in the States were to be notified. And this brings us back to Consul Thomas O. Larkin, Esq., and Colonel and Governor Dick Mason, First Dragoons, and io6 FRONTIER DAYS Lieutenant William Tecumseh Sherman, and those other United States officials, at Monterey. VI On June i Consul Larkin had written that first report to the Secretary of State, James Buchanan, who nine years later was President. "I shall, within a few days, visit this gold mine and make another report to you," he had said. He went up, and on June 28, from Monterey he wrote again to Secretary Buchanan. He had found the gold fields to be "all that I had heard and much more than I anticipated." Already Ioo miles of land had been occupied by the gold seekers. One party of eight men were washing out fifty dollars e'ach in a day. He estimated that $io,ooo a week was being taken out of the sand and gravel of the American Fork diggings. In a year the gold found would cover the price to be paid to Mlexico for California. June 17 Colonel Mason and young Lieutenant Sherman started north. They celebrated the Fourth of July as guests of Captain Sutter at a sumptuous dinner which Lieutenant Sherman believed cost $2,000, and proceeded on up the American River. They saw their first gold-diggers at Mormon Island, fifteen miles up; and made camp, to watch them. It was an amazing sight. Here in the hot, parched, almost barren valley, under the burning sun 300 men were toiling like mad in a large gravel bed of the river. The water was icy cold from the snowy Sierras in the farther east; but all day the men worked standing in it, and wet from head to foot, while they dug out the gravel by shovelfuls, and carried it in buckets and emptied it into troughs which they rocked by means of a handle at the upper end, and from which they scooped out the gold after the dirt and water had flowed over the cleats. At night they slept in brush huts, upon pine needles and blankets; but they were averaging an ounce, or sixteen dollars, a day. That paid them for their labor. The further Colonel Mason and Lieutenant Sherman went, in FRONTIER DAYS 107 among the hills, the greater grew the marvels, and the more they themselves were bewildered. Now it remained for former Consul Larkin, who had been appointed United States naval agent, and Governor Mason and Lieutenant Sherman to get their dispatches and letters and specimens of gold to Washington on the other edge of the continent. Copies of the dispatches were started by dispatch bearer overland, across mountains and deserts, but the gold and the original dispatches should go more safely by sea and the Isthmus route. The Indians were making the overland trails dangerous again. Governor Nlason could find no ship out-bound. Every vessel in the harbors of Monterey and San Francisco was being deserted by its crew. Lieutenant Lucien Loeser, Third Artillery, was about to go home on furlough; he should bear the news and the proof of the treasure hoard-but how was he to get to the Isthmus in the shortest time? A ship must be chartered. Captain Folsom, quartermaster, hired the Columbia bark Lambayecana, at San Francisco, to take Lieutenant Loeser down to Peru; a bonus of extra pay was promised the owner of the bark if she made a quick trip and caught the regular October steamer, of the British line, from Peru up to Panama on the Pacific coast of the Isthmus. From Panama Lieutenant Loeser was to make all speed by saddle and canoe across the Isthmus, at the Atlantic side was to take the first steamer for Kingston, Jamaica, and at Kingston was to take the first vessel out for New Orleans. Colonel Mason and Captain Folsom decided to send gold enough to convince the Government. In San Francisco Captain Folsom bought outright over 230 ounces, at ten dollars the ounce. Gold was getting cheap. This was packed in a tea caddy, or small tea chest. Lieutenant Loeser was entrusted also with thirteen other samples of dust and grains and nuggets, from as many diggings in the new gold field. With his twenty pounds of treasure, and his dispatches dated from the middle of August to August 28, and with private letters, Lieutenant Loeser boarded the Lambayecana at Monterey, August 30. He landed at Payta, Peru, and caught the coastwise steamer for Panama; crossed the Isthmus, caught another steamer for Kingston of Jamaica, at Kingston took a sailing ship for New Orleans, io8 FRONTIER DAYS and in the last week of November reported from New Orleans by the new Electro-Magnetic Telegraph to Washington. Before he had set out by stage and train for Washington the New Orleans papers were spreading the news of nuggets from the gold fields of California. But Lieutenant Loeser was late into Washington. The Navy had beaten the Army, and Naval Agent L'arkin had beaten Governor Mason. About July i, while Colonel Mason and Lieutenant Sherman were still on their way to the gold fields, the flagship Ohio, stationed at Monterey, had weighed anchor for La Paz of Lower California, to report to the navy commander in the Pacific, Commodore Thomas Catesby Jones. Among the Ohio's young officers there was Lieutenant Edward Fitzgerald Beale, doing shore duty. He was already celebrated for his scouting adventures with Kit Carson as his partner, during the conquest of California by the American troops, in 1846; with Kit Carson he had carried dispatches across from Monterey to Washington, in the winter of 1846-47, and the next winter had returned with other dispatches. Naval Agent Larkin seized upon Lieutenant Beale in the nick of time, gave him his dispatch of June 28, to Secretary Buchanan, and the sample of gold in a paper, and wrote a letter about the gold fields to the commodore. Lieutenant Beale had gold of his own, too; had traded precious quinine for a good-sized nugget and a small bottle of grains, it is said. With these, and with the dispatches and the sample in the paper, he sailed upon the Ohio-and the very thing that he had hoped for and that Agent Larkin had rather anticipated, happened. Commodore Jones read the letter, and saw the samples; and he immediately wrote a note to the Secretary of the Navy and ordered Lieutenant Beale to get the budget to Washington without delay. No better dispatch bearer could have been found. From La Paz on the inside of the tip of Lower California he made stormy passage in a Mexican fishing boat across the Gulf of California to the mainland of Mexico. Then, dressed like a rough Mexican, in sombrero, and red flannel shirt and leather pants and boots, armed with four navy FRONTIER DAYS lo9 revolvers and a butcher knife, he set off ahorse and alone, down through Central Mexico, for Mexico City and for Vera Cruz on the east coast-a thousand miles. Bandits chased him, but he out-bluffed them or out-rode them. He traveled night and day, in the rains, and rested only while changing horses. A party of eleven travelers were killed by robbers so close ahead of him that he saw their blood upon the muddy ground beside the trail. He swam swollen streams and clambered over storm-felled trees and masses of wash, and picked his way at night by the flashes of lightning; and when, on August 21, the eighth day from the coast, he arrived at Mexico City, he was a sight of mud. The American minister at Mexico City sped him on. He was again chased by bandits, but having ridden almost 300 miles in sixty hours he reached Vera Cruz. He was all right, but the guide that he had taken was crazy from fear and hard travel. In the first week of September the sloop-of-war Germantown landed him at Mobile; and hastening on by stagecoach and railroad, while at every station the people crowded to see this messenger, the famous Lieutenant Beale who bore gold from California, he burst upon Washington in the middle of September. Lieutenant Loeser was still fighting through. The first dis' patch from Consul Larkin, that of June i, had been received. The people, and even the Government officials, scarcely would yet believe. The whole thing was so sudden and so remarkable. Lieutenant Beale appeared before the Senate. The Baltimore Sun of September 20 announced: "Rich gold fields have been discovered in California 1l" The National Intelligencer, official newspaper in Washington, published the story of the trip, as told by Beale himself. People followed him in the street and into his hotel, begging to see and to feel the gold. In Philadelphia and New York he attracted the same attention. P. T. Barnum the showman, of Barnum's Museum in Philadelphia, wrote to him-"I am informed you have in your possession an 8 lb. lump of California gold"-and wished to buy or to rent the lump, for exhibition in the Museum. Half of the gold was put on view in the Patent Office in Washington; the other half Lieutenant Beale kept, to have it made into an engagement ring for the girl whom he was to marry. 110 110 FRONTIER DAYS Then toward the end of November Lieutenant Loeser arrived in Washington with the reports of Governor Mason and with his twenty pounds of gold in the specially made tea caddy. That settled all discussion; and he was just in time to get his reports also into the President's annual message to Congress, December S. The tea caddy was exhibited in the War Office, the gold was tested in the Philadelphia mint and was pronounced to be of the highest standard. The newspapers now teemed with the wildest kind of stories and letters. In the California gold fields the people were running around picking gold out of the earth like a thousand hogs rooting up ground-nuts! One man was employing sixty Indians and making a dollar a minute!I An ounce of gold was being paid for a plug of tobacco!I A man had taken two and a half pounds of gold out of a basin the size of a wash-bowl in fifteen minutes!I Nuggets were being found like potatoes in a potato hill!I Rivers were paved with gold to the thickness of one's hand!I Advertisements of things that the gold seeker must have occupied columns in the papers and pages in the hasty "Guides to the Gold Mines." Merchants and manufacturers urged the purchase of portable rubber boats; inflatable rubber rafts for floating wagons across rivers; water -proof tents, blankets, clothes and matches; patent sheet-iron take-down houses, to be put together in sections; oil-cloth roofs at thirty cents the square yard; kit bags, rubber boots, rifles, pistols, bowie knives, medicines, dried vegetables, "(preserved" foods, patent tests for gold, patent goldwashers and rockers, patent pumps for pumping out the golden sands, dredges, and diving bells; the travelers were invited to insure their lives and have their pictures taken, before starting, and even were advised to get United States passports ere leaving the country. Store windows displayed gilded pebbles and chunks of iron, labeled "California Gold," surrounded by articles for sale to the gold seeker. *N11** FRONTIER DAYS III vii The Government had already advertised for the building of side-wheel steamships to carry the United States mail between New York and Chagres on the east side of the Isthmus, and between Panama on the west side, and Oregon. When California was won by the Mexican War the Pacific coast steamships were scheduled to run to San Francisco. There were to be five steamships for the Atlantic route, and three for the Pacific. The Atlantic line should leave New York every two weeks, for New Orleans, Havana and the Isthmus. The first of the mail steamships was the California of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company. She left New York October 6, 1848, before the gold craze had gripped the East, and she did not have a single passenger for California. She rounded Cape Horn in December, bowled along up the west coast of South America, threshing the water with her great paddles-and when she put into Callao, Peru, she was stormed by a mob of Peruvians clamoring to be taken to the gold fields of California. The officers and crew were amazed. What was all this fuss about? Gold? Gold in California? Yes, yes! We have heard of it, we have read of it, we have seen it! Miles of gold! How much to take us to San Francisco? The California was not yet ready for passengers. She was supposed to take on no passengers until she reached Panama. But fifty Peruvians were given staterooms, and the over-flow extended into the steerage, below deck. All the way up the South American coast the same excitement was met with; and when, on January 3o, the California cast anchor off Panama, she found, not merely another company of would-be passengers, but a regiment. She found i,5o00 people, all men, and practically all Americans, waiting for her and howling to be taken aboard at oncel Many had been waiting for three weeks. The first of the Atlantic line steamships, the Falcon, had sailed from New York for the Isthmus December I, to transfer her mail and passengers in time to connect with the California at the other side. The President's message and the reports from the golden land had not then been delivered to Congress and the newspapers, and she started with only a few passengers. When she hove to, at New 112 FRONTIER DAYS Orleans, in the middle of December, she also was astonished-New Orleans had the gold fever! Her passenger list was increased by two hundred persons, bound for California. All right. The day after Christmas she reached Chagres on the Isthmus. The harbor there was alive with vessels of all kinds, and the shore was black Nwith scrambling people who had landed from them and were still landing. The gold rush to California not only had begun but was well under way. The President's message of December 5, and the reports from Naval Agent Larkin and Governor Mlason, and the stories in the newspapers, had done their work. In the ports of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, New Orleans, and a score of smaller harbors people were hiring passage on whatever craft would take them to the Isthmus or around Cape Horn. Old sailing ships were being put into commission; new ones were being thrown together; in one month, following the middle of December, Ioo barks, brigs, sloops, schooners, small coasting steamers, left the Atlantic coast for the Isthmus or the Horn, crowded with passengers for California. The Falcon landed her mail and passengers. It was to be a race across the Isthmus, to catch the California at Panama. The Falcon passengers joined a procession, extending before and behind, and ever the procession grew longer. And before the California, delayed by fogs, arrived at Panama, the fifteen hundred treasure seekers, with a sprinkling of army officers, were gathered there, most of them sleeping out, some of them sick with fevers, and all waiting. But the California had accommodations for only about ioo passengers, and she was already full of Peruvians. And here were men who had paid for tickets up; here were the army officers, with Government transportation; among them was General Persifer Smith, California's new military governor! What was to be done? Old Panama had not seen such a sight since the days of the buccaneers. The crowd fought to get out to the steamer; she was besieged by a fleet of skiffs and dug-outs and little fishing boats bearing men determined to board her. On shore there was a riot in front of the ticket office. Almost any sum was offered for a ticket. The captain was ordered to put off those Peruvians. General FRONTIER DAYS i'3 Persifer Smith was petitioned to put them off. "American gold for Americans," was the cry. General Smith thought that the Peruvians would be trespassers upon the public lands of the United Statesbut the Peruvians refused to budge. Having taken on 400 more passengers, loaded to the guards the California at last steamed for San Francisco, 3,240 miles. NM-any of the passengers were without their baggage. Some had paid $1,ooo for a ticket entitling them to blanket space in the steerage; others slept upon coils of rope on deck, or slung in hammocks in the rigging. Left behind, to the cholera and to scant rations, I,ooo men shook their fists and howled in disappointment. A few hired dug-outs and small fishing craft, to take them as far as possible, after which they would go on afoot to California. The rest settled to wait for the next steamer or for the chance of a sailing ship. On steamed the California, with her human freight. In three weeks, or on February 23, she emerged from the fog into the harbor of Monterey. She had been expected for days. The guns of the fort boomed the national salute for her; Lieutenant Sherman and Naval Agent Larkin put out in a boat to meet her; when she had anchored the Spanish residents gathered upon the beach to stare at her. She was the first steamship that they had seen. "Tan feo-how uglyl" they exclaimed, viewing her black hull and stumpy spars and great paddle boxes and short stacks. What a monster l The gold hunters aboard her clamored for her to go on; go on, to the promised land. They wished to dig, not to sit here. But the California was out of fuel, and could not move. Her coal bunkers were empty. There was no coal in Monterey or anywhere else along this coast; she might burn wood, but no laborers could be found who would cut that wood-they were all at the gold mines. Here she lay, helpless, while her passengers raged, and a number took to the shore, bound to get to those gold fields by foot or horse if not by boat. Then, in overhauling the freight in her hold, her crew discovered a batch of coal covered by a lot of machinery! It had been forgotten. The California's stacks belched black smoke again, and for San Francisco she headed;made it, this time, and on February 28, a month out of Panama, she entered through the Golden Gate. 114 FRONTIER DAYS Cannon boomed, people cheered. Now over her sides tumbled her passengers, taking to the first boats they could-yes, and in their race to get ashore even jumping out, in the shallows, and wading through the mud. Where is the gold? How far to the gold? Show us the gold! Here's a trifle of it, stranger. How do you like the looks of this bag? Gosh! Is there more? Plenty, plenty, where this came from. Before night all the crew of the California, except the third assistant engineer, had deserted her, to go gold seeking. She was an abandoned ship, unable to return to Panama! On April I the Oregon, second of the new Pacific Mail Steamships, arrived. She had left New York, for the voyage around the Horn, in the last week of December. When she put in at Panama, in the middle of March, the waiting list there had increased to 3,000. It was another riot. She took aboard 500; and with her decks and her rigging swarming with men who were afraid that they might be too late to get their share of the gold, she steamed out. Among her passengers there were half a dozen women, booked through from the East. Captain Pearson of the Oregon was up to snuff. He rather foresaw what might happen when he reached San Francisco, for the California never had returned to Panama. Yes, there she lay, idle in the harbor; he had heard his crew talking among themselves and to the passengers; at iMonterey his carpenter swam ashore in the night; so he anchored under the guns of the man-of-war Ohio, and stowed his crew aboard her, as prisoners, until he should leave or until they signed on again at an extra $100oo a month. That worked, and back he hastened, for Panama. The California still stayed; could not recoal from the supply ship that came in; did not get away until May. The Panama, the third mail steamer, arrived June 4, thronged like a bee-hive. She too had had a hard time at the Isthmus port. There was no let-up in the rush. And now the sailing ships around Cape Horn, from the East, 14,000 miles, were winging in; and also ships from Europe and the Orient, all bringing their gold seekers and their medley of freight -even small steamboats packed in sections, for navigating the golden rivers that might not take steamboats; and great dredges, for digging out the golden gravel by the ton. The vessels around the Horn, from New York, Nantucket, FRONTIER DAYS I I ý Boston, Baltimore, New Orleans, had been four months and more on the way. Those that had left in December arrived in April or May or June. The ports of the Atlantic coast were said to be thick with the masts of ships whose hulls displayed the announcement: "For California." In December and January ninety vessels had sailed, carrying 8,ooo gold seekers. Seventy more ships were getting ready for the Cape Horn trip. Bakers were working day and night turning out ship's bread. Tinsmiths were working day and night turning out tin pans. Factories were working day and night turning out picks and shovels and other tools. Shoe-makers were working day and night turning out heavy boots. But what of that favorite short route, the route by the Isthmus? It was a terror. The first-class steamship fare to England or the Continent was $ioo to $120. The lowest fare to San Francisco, from New York, Boston, Baltimore, was $400-$100oo to the Isthmus, $300oo from the Isthmus up to San Francisco; other fares rose to $6oo; and there were a hundred "extras," for service and ordinary comforts, such as ice, in the tropics, at twenty-five cents the pound melted down to a quarter of a pound. A steamer authorized to carry 5oo passengers was jammed with i,5oo; every inch was occupied with flesh and freight. Two weeks 16 FRONTIER DAYS out of New York or Boston she unloaded at the mouth of the Chagres River, of the Isthmus. Over her side tumbled her passengers, as fast as they could elbow their way, into her boats and the dug-outs that had put out from shore, and their baggage was thrown after them. Now on for Panama, of the Pacific coast, said to be seventy miles by river and trail: forty or fifty miles, two days and two nights, by canoe up river, and then twenty or twenty-five miles by foot or mule across the mountains. First come, first served-if his money talked for him. The log bongos, or dug-outs, had to be hired, with their black native crews to pole them up the crooked, muddy river. How much? Ten dollars-fifteen dollars-twenty dollars-here, I'll give you fifty dollars if you'll take me on quickl All the muddy shore was a bargain-day scene, while men of every degree fought to get a boat. Up the river went the lucky ones, poled at the rate of a mile an hour by black crews who wore nothing but a straw hat, and who regularly stopped and jumped overboard for a cooling bath. Halts were made at huts and villages, for meals and night's lodging. The rains fell in torrents, the heat was sultry, the mosquitoes bit, the pythons swung from the jungle and the alligators splashed under the keels; fever and cholera accompanied and lay in ambush ahead; the fruits and the water made the passengers sick. But they were bound for Panama; what they were to do when they reached Panama many of them did not know, except that they would somehow get to the Land of Gold. From the head of the Chagres River an ancient trail, in some places only three feet wide, led over the mountain range and through swift streams and forests and along steep precipices, to Panama. It was the old gold-train road of the Spanish of pirate days; had once been paved with stones but was broken and washed out, and the soil was slippery clay. On to Panama! How much for a horse or mule to Panama? Ten dollars-twenty dollars. How much for baggage? One hundred pounds at six dollars. Mounted in saddles, or sitting in chairs slung like panniers, or carried in litters by black bearers, on went the lucky; and those who failed to get a lift set out on foot, and if the baggage did not follow it stayed. Panama, at l'ast! Fifteen hundred, 3,000 people here, waiting for another lift. Tickets had all been sold, to capacity. I'll give FRONTIER DAYS 117 $6oo for a ticket to San Francisco! I'll give $i,oool There's a sailing craft-I'll offer the captain $ioo to take me to the first port in California. The steamer anchored a mile and a half off shore. Out plied the boats, to be first to board her and nab a passage. In a few hours she was filled chuck, and away she steamed. There would not be another steamer for a month I She might fill up, too, and go on. Seven gold seekers, left behind in this fashion, took to a halfdecked launch and by sail and paddle reached San Francisco in 13o days. Others paid for passage on sailing ships, and were seventy days. Others hired log canoes and did not get there at all. Others started to walk. And many died in Panama. Another column of gold seekers was toiling, by canoe and rickety little steamboat and mule and foot across Nicaragua, 175 miles. They hoped to save two days, for Nicaragua ýwas nearer to California than the Isthmus of Panama was. They took the chance of finding a ship on the other side. Other parties landed at Vera Cruz and crossed wide Mexico. In the early summer forty-five ships arrived at San Francisco in a day. Not all the ships were from the Eastern United States. Ships hastened from London and Liverpool, from Germany, Holland, France, Russia, Ireland, Scotland, Australia, the Sandwich I I 118 i FRONTIER DAYS Islands, Peru, Chile, ]Brazil, even China, the Philippines and the South Sea Islands, around the Horn or across the Pacific. The whole world was upset by the news "Gold! Gold! Gold in Calif ornia!" By July 500 square-rigged vessels, flying the flags of all nations, swung at anchor inside the Golden Gate. They had no crews. As soon as they had come to in front of those mud-flats and that array of tents and shacks sprawling among the sand-hills their passengers h-ad jumped overboard into the boats that had put out-and the crews did not hesitate to join. From a scant 8oo inhabitants of last year San Francisco had grown to a population of 5,ooo. On raced the gold seekers, wading the mud-flats, scrambling ashore, stopping maybe to get together their baggage and to buy supplies, then hustling out, wild to dig gold in the gold fields. They had left wife, children, parents, home and business; they counted upon being absent only six months or eight months and upon returning by the shortest route with a fortune. The bay was alive with hurrying boats making for the Sacramento River. Any kind of a boat-barge, scow, ship's boat, skiff, dug-out--was grabbed. Any kind of a sail was hoisted. The passengers bent to, with oars, paddles, boards and tin pans, to help the sails. The Sacramento River was a crowded waterway, and a sight to make a dog laugh. Down-bound craft were eagerly hailed. "What news from the mines? It there plenty of gold yet?" "Oh, surely. just go on and fill your bags." And when the down-river men held up large sacks of sand used for ballast the newcomers goggled and gasped and again plied the water with paddles, boards, shovels and tin pans. As f ast as they had boiled by land as well as by water out of San Francisco another influx filled their places. In the year 1849 39,000 Argonauts by sea landed in California. But the overland rush, by way of plains and deserts and mountains, was pouring in FRONTIER DAYS II9 not ready to leave home and business, had been asking: How do we get to California by land? What is the best route? How long will it take? How should we travel? What will we need? When is the best time to start? The distance from the Missouri River to the first settlement near the gold fields was 2,050 miles. A light, strong wagon hauled by three or four yoke of oxen or three span of mules was the best outfit; the rate of travel by oxen would be twelve to fifteen miles a day. Men without families could go ahorse, with pack-mules, and save a month's time. Every person should be provisioned with I50 pounds of flour, the same of bacon, twenty-five pounds of coffee, thirty pounds of sugar, fifty or seventy-five pounds of crackers; and rice, dried peaches or dried apples, salt, pepper, and a keg of lard. Every man should carry a good rifle, a pair of pistols, five pounds of powder, ten pounds of lead, a hatchet and a hunting knife. And in the wagon outfit there should be ax, hammer, handsaw, auger, gimlet, chisel and other tools, for making repairs and for use in California. Tents would be found very useful, on the way and after arrival. Emigrants should be at the Missouri River border by the 20th of April, in order to be ready to start as soon as the grass was green -say in the first week of May. That would give time for crossing the Sierras before the snows blocked the trail. All winter and into the spring people made ready to go to California. Parties and companies were formed, wagons were fixed up, money was saved, farms and business were sold, horses and oxen were groomed for the trip or somebody in the company or neighborhood went ahead, to the Missouri border, to buy animals there and break them. By April 20 twenty thousand persons were gathered in great camps at Independence near Kansas City, and at ferry crossings of St. Joseph of Missouri and Fort Leavenworth of Kansas and Council Bluffs of Iowa. They had 'arrived from everywhere in the United States: from Maine, Vermont, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa-not a state and scarcely a county or town was missing. There were farmers, merchants, lawyers, doctors, school-teachers, professors, ministers, 120 FRONTIER DAYS bankers, soldiers, traders, gamblers, ne'er-do-wells. There were old men and young men, wives and mothers, boys, girls, babies and dogs. They had come by railroad and canal and steamboat and stage, and many had driven their own outfit from their homes in Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio-yes, and clear from the East, with the sign painted on the wagon cover: "Bound for California," and with the tar-bucket, for greasing the wheels, swinging under the tail-gate. The outfits were of every description, from the great hooded prairie schooner, specially made, with high flaring box, down to the rickety old farm wagon with a top of cotton sheeting, and even the family buggy. They were drawn by ten, eight, six, four oxen, by six, four, two mules, and by horses and by a milch cow and bullock hitched up together. There were squads of horsemen, also, and of pack animals. Ho, for California! That was the sign upon the wagon covers; or else "To the New Diggin's," "To the Land of Gold," "All the Way from Pike," "California or Bust," "Meet you at Sutter's Fort," and so forth. In this year 1849 there was not a settler's house for the twelve hundred miles between the Missouri River frontier and the Salt Lake of Utah. From the Salt Lake, where the Mormons lived, FRONTIER DAYS '121 there was no house for the 850 miles to the gold regions of California. To be sure the road had been pretty well marked by the emigrants for Oregon, and for California in 1846; but it was a long, tough trip, at the best, of four months-the same time as the quickest passage by sea around Cape Horn-with all kinds of weather, and all kinds of Indians; and not half, not a quarter of the people had any idea of what they were getting into. In less than a month, or by the middle of May, 4,300 wagons had crossed the Missouri River and were heading westward. 0, Susanna! 0, don't you cry for me! I'm goin' to Californy With a wash-bowl on my knee. It rained so hard the day I left, The river here ran dry. I shorely almost froze to deathSusanna, don't you cry! 0, don't you cry, Susanna! 0, don't you cry for me! I'm goin' to Californy With a wash-bowl on my knee. 0, don't you cry, for I am told In that land where we're bound They pick the great big lumps of gold In chunks right off the ground! 0, Susanna! 0, don't you cry for me! I'm goin' to Californy With a wash-bowl on my knee. And when we get our pockets full Of this bright, shinin' dust, We'll travel straight for home again, And spend it on a bust. So don't you cry, Susanna! 0, don't you cry for me! I'm goin' to Californy With a wash-bowl on my knee. 122 FRONTIER DAYs The wagons were loaded with trunks and furniture and ploughs and gold-digging machines, and barrels and sacks of flour, and of sugar, and sides of bacon and sacks of beans and other food (some outfits took supplies to last two years!) and cook-stoves and blacksmith anvils, and tents and even with sheet-iron boats for crossing rivers. Men and boys trudged along, with their whips, driving the oxen; other men rode in the saddle, protecting the flanks; when the wagons were full, and there was no room upon the seat, women walked, carrying babies; while children ran about, picking flowers on the way. Herds of beef cattle were taken along, and milch cows. And here was a stout old Dutchman, who certainly was moving his whole menage. His huge covered wagon, drawn by six yoke of oxen, bristled with furniture. Behind him his good wife drove a covered cart filled with babies, bringing a large coop of chickens tied at the rear and two cows tied to that; next came the old mare with a little bare-footed girl upon her back; and the old mare's new-born colt followed them. The old Dutchman did not know exactly how far it was to California, but he was on the wayl The procession strung out along the trail. There was no end to it. It averaged upwards of fifty wagons to the mile. In due time for i,ooo miles the road was marked with white, like a string of white beads or like a mighty column of ships. At sunset the parties formed wagon corrals, and camped, and then the road was a-twinkle with camp fires as far as the eye could reach. The Indians were astonished. At first they made little trouble. Nevertheless the trip was not a picnic. Terrible storms of thunder, lightning and rain burst upon the trains and upon the camps. Stock stampeded, wagons bogged, the Platte and other rivers rose and animals and persons were drowned. The cholera broke out. It accompanied the travelers all the way to Fort Laramie in the high country; more than 5,oo0 men, women and children died, so that the road was bordered by rude graves. Bad water and poor food and the storms helped the cholera. Many a wagon train or camp-fire group was startled by the appeal from tl'e roadside or from a horseman galloping in: "Is there a doctor in this party?" The pack trains and the lighter and stronger wagons forged to FRONTIER DAYS 123 -sau"W" NWACXMW 10% w I I I "I the fore. The march became a go-as-you-please. A large number of the wagons were over-loaded. As they toiled on and on their owners commenced to abandon baggage. Beyond Fort Laramie, Wyoming, especially when the hard pull set in, up grade, over the grassless hills and through the rocky canyons of the Continental Divide, which separated the eastern slope from the western slope, the wreckage was to be seen. The roadside was a sight of furniture and plows and grindstones and trunks and stoves and harness and tools, and barrels, and sacks of beans and kegs of lard, and broken wagons-and dead oxen: eight and nine dead oxen in a heap, worn out, or poisoned by bad water. Wagons were being sold for seventy-five cents; they were being knocked dawn and the wheel spokes and other wood were being built into pack-saddles. The old Dutchman stopped and sawed his wagon in two, to change it into a couple of carts. Most of his baggage had gone. One gold-seeker finally loaded what he had left upon a wheel-barrow, and at twenty-five miles a day passed wagon after wagon and reached California ahead of the crowd. Anybody could pick up almost anything he needed or wished, along that road; but few were able to carry their finds. Away back, outfits had stopped and had turned home, discouraged by sickness 124 FRONTIER DAYS and by winds and rains and mud and weariness. To them, the California gold fields were not so golden after all; the old farm in Illinois or Ohio or Indiana was the best place. And beside the road other emigrants were sitting, stalled; "critters" were dead, wagons were "busted," wife or husband or boy or girl was sick; they couldn't go on, they couldn't go back-"Stranger, this is tough, and no mistake." But this year of the great pilgrimage 42,000 people, the most of them by the northern trail, the rest by the southern route through the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona or up from Mexico, arrived overland in California, in "the days of old and the days of gold, the days of Forty-nine." IX What with the ships unloading their human freight at San Francisco, and the column of wagons and pack-trains pouring over the Sierra and down the American River trail, northern California was getting populated. Men scattered at once for the diggings. Where is the gold? Where is the nearest gold? The rivers and gulches and valleys from Sacramento to the mountains, in northward and in southward rang to the strokes of the picks, to the grate of the shovels and the swish of the pans and the rockers. Camps sprang up with rude names: Rough and Ready, Grizzly Flat, Hangtown, Ragtown, One-Eye, Chucklehead Diggin's, Shirt-tail Canion, Poker Flat, Jackass Gulch, Ground Hogs' Glory, Slapjack Bar, Shinbone Peak, Centipede Hollow, Blue-belly Ravine, Nary Red. Gold, gold, gold! Not every miner struck it rich; scarcely any remained rich when they did strike it. They spent because they either had worked hard, or had got it easy: either they were entitled to a good time, or they could go right back to the diggings and find another fortune. A few saved up and went home with a sackful; the steamships began to carry whiskered, flannel-shirted, booted men, bound for the States with fat buckskin bags of dust. In San Francisco nothing was cheap but gold. It was a curious place, this bustling, noisy San Francisco, growing so fast that it could not catch up with itself. The buildings were mainly tents, FRONTIER DAYS 125 or of canvas partly boarded up, lumber from boxing and shipping crates, rusted sheet-iron, or tin cans flattened out. At night, when the tents and the canvas houses and stores were lighted by oil lamps and candles, from the Bay San Francisco looked like a great campmeeting. The streets were thick with dust in summer, and deep with clay mud in winter. Mules and horses sank from sight in this mud, and men had to be rescued. Empty packing boxes were thrown in, for stepping stones. A sign read: "This street is impassable, not even jackassable." Through the streets, by day and by night, there eddied Yankees, Southerners, Westerners, Englishmen, Germans, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Scotchmen, Irishmen, Chileans, Peruvians, Sandwich Islanders, Malays wearing their curved swords, Turks, Italians, Russians, Chinamen, Portuguese; bankers, merchants, lawyers, teachers, sailors, gamblers, and everybody else. There were only fifty women to each thousand men. Prosperity brings high prices. Butter was not to be had. Eggs were likely to be a dollar each-and up to $18 the dozen. Potatoes were $1.50 a pound. Salt pork was $40 a barrel. Flour might be $0oo a barrel. Boots were $30, $So, $Ioo a pair. Used calico shirts, unwashed, were snapped up at $20. Washing, (badly done by a French count!) was $8 the dozen pieces. Eastern newspapers, three to six months old, brought in by new-comers who had stuffed their trunks with them, were grabbed at a dollar apiece. The hotels, of rough lumber, with muslin ceilings, charged $25 a week for a room up under a roof so low that the lodger could not sit up on his cot, and besides was almost blown out of bed by the wind through the cracks; board was $20 a week. The Parker House hotel, ramshackle and two story, paid $i1o,ooo a year rental; its chef received $1o,ooo a year and its waiters $1oo a week. A hole in the ground six feet deep by twelve feet wide, was rented for a lawyer's office at $250 a month. A one-story store, of twenty feet frontage, paid $40,000 a year for its lease. New York City had no rents like these. Prices in the back-country, of the mining camps, were as bad. Up the American River two pilgrims stopped at a grocery store to buy a lunch. After they had eaten they started to settle their bill, but the bill almost settled them. 126 FRONTIER DAYS I box Sardines....................... $16 i lb. Hard Bread....................... 2 I lb. Butter........................... 6 Y2 lb. Cheese......................... 3 2 Bottles of Beer....................... 16 Total...........................$43 But nobody thought himself poor. Everyone expected to be rich. Small sums were scorned. The least change was fifty cents. In San Francisco so much gold dust leaked from the buckskin sacks and fell from careless fingers that little boys dabbed about in the streets with moistened pin-heads and gleaned $1o to $I4 a day. Laborers would not work for less than $20 a day, or two dollars for a ten minutes' job. A ship captain tumbling ashore with his trunk tossed fifty cents at a ragged by-stander and asked him to carry the trunk up town. The ragged man tossed back two half-dollars and said: "Carry it yourself I" San Francisco was all business. The business extended to the shipping ports of the world, and vast quantities of goods flowed in, for enormous profits. Well had Fremont the explorer in 1846 named the port the Golden Gate, comparing its entrance with the Golden Horn of Constantinople. Of course this is only a high-light picture of boom San Francisco and the gold fields. There were sober-minded men, and men who failed. The get-rich-quick craze, and the furor of speculation, ruined hundreds. Home ties were broken-men who came out by ship and by land, and had told wives and children and parents that they would return, rich, in the next fall or the next spring, fascinated by the rough, free life in the hills or by the swift, reckless life in the towns ceased to write home, never did go home, and left their families to get along as best they could. James W. Marshall and Captain John Augustus Sutter died poor, themselves. James Marshall's brain was turned by the wealth that he thought that he had created. He deemed himself too great a man to dig and labor; he waited to be rewarded with independence handed to him upon a golden platter; in consequence he was crowded off his ground, lost everything, wandered about complaining, and passed away, in 1885, near Coloma, almost forgotten. Captain Sutter tried to do everything and succeeded in doing w b I ler Ni2t.~ M.co, GOLD! FRONTIER DAYS 127 nothing. He lost his lands in lawsuits and mortgages, his profits of Sutter's Fort went the same way, he fell behind the procession, and in i88o he died in Washington while trying to get a bill for his relief through Congress. But now as to the Land of Gold, again. By the end of 1849 San Francisco numbered 25,000 people. Sacramento City had been founded upon the old landing-place for Sutter's Fort, at the Sacramento River near the mouth of the American River. Other towns had been started. California boasted a population of 100oo,ooo. Without having been made a Territory she was admitted as a State in September of i850; and the immigrants were still pressing in. The actual settler was succeeding to the miner. The area of improved farm land in i85o was only 32,450 acres; in 186o it was 2,468,000 acres. Tons of wheat and wool and other produce were being sent to Europe. Ten millions in gold had been washed out and dug out in 1848; in 1849 the sum was $4o,ooo,ooo; in I85o, $5o,ooo,ooo; the next year, $55,ooo,ooo; the next, $6o,ooo,ooo; in 1853, $65,ooo,ooo. Previous to the discovery of this gold the United States had been supplied with gold from NMexico, Africa, Georgia, Virginia, South Carolina and North Carolina, Alabama and Tennessee. The whole amount minted in 1846 had been only a little more th'an $4,000,000. But times had changed. The United States had become the gold mart of the world, and asked none from outside. Gold was also sending the people hither and thither, settling new districts. And it was the California gold that, like a savings bank, during the Civil WNar proved to be a great mainstay of the Union. WVithout it, the United States would have been almost bankrupt. California, changed in a twinkling from a foreign province of easy Spanish customs into a hustling American state away out across the deserts and mountains, became very much worth while. She had over-flowed her mountain barrier and Nevada had been formed. A railroad to the Pacific Ocean had been talked of; now a railroad was needed, and would pay. In January, 1863, the Central Pacific Company of California, aided by the Government, started east from Sacramento. In December the Union Pacific Company of the East, aided by the Govern 128 FRONTIER DAYS ment, broke ground at Omaha for a start west. In May, 1869, the two roads met in Utah. The peoples of the East and of the West had been united by 1,8oo miles of iron and the journey of seventeen days by horse-coach had been reduced to a flight of five days by steam-coach. Within another year a new population of 2oo00,000ooo had settled along the route. PART II.-Mon-momm"m THE INDIAN THE INDIAN: HIS HOME By GEORGE BIRD GRINNELL -'.ELLOW under the burning sun lies the far-stretching L prairie. In one direction the rounded swells rise and fall Y 1like the heaving breast of an ocean after a storm has V4 passed; in another, the ragged rav-ine-seamed soil rears sharp crests like billows tossed by the storm in fury. In " " the distance the level sweep of the horizon is broken by high buttes, some square-topped and vertical-sided, others slender and sharp-pointed--like huge fortresses or cathedral spires. All are dotted here and there with gnarled, stunted black pines and cedars, that, with tenacious grip. cling to the bare rocks from which they draw a sustenance-scanty, yet sufficient. Scattered over the prairie far and near are the wild denizens of this land: brown buffalo feeding or resting, yellow antelope singly From THE STORY OF THE INDIAN, by George Bird Grinnell. Copyright D. Appleton and Company, Publishers, New York. 13' 132 FRONTIER DAYS or in groups, a family of wolves playing at the mouth of a ravine, prairie dogs in their towns, little birds swinging on the tops of the sage bushes, and over all a blue arch in which swings motionless a broad-winged eagle. Away to the westward, so far that the forest-clad foothills are purple with distance and the rough rock slopes gray with haze, stands the mighty wall of the Continental Divide. White and grey and brown, snow fields and rock peaks, and high naked plateaus rear rough outlines against the blue of the summer sky, or are blotted out mile by mile when black storm clouds creep down from the peaks toward the plains, which the summer storms never reach. This is the country of the Indian of the West. Here the prairie is split by a great crooked gash-a river's course-to which the ravines all run. Down in the valley the silvery leaves of cottonwood tremble, copses of willow and bits of fresh growing grass stand along the stream, and there is the shimmer of flowing water, coolness, and shade. This is the Indian's home. The cone-shaped dwellings stand in a rough circle which touches the river bank. Some of the lodges are newly made, clean, and white; others are patched, grey with weather stain, and smoke browned near the top. Each conical home terminates in a sheaf of crossing lodge poles, and between the extended "ears" shows a wide dark opening from which rise curling wreaths of blue smoke. Some of the lodges are painted in gay colors with odd angular figures of men, and animals, and guns, and camp fires, which tell in red, black, or green of the coups of the owner-his brave deeds or strange adventures. Here and there from the lodge poles of some leading man hangs a buffalo tail, or one or two eagle feathers are turning in the breeze, or a string of little hoof sheaths, which rattle as they are shaken in the wind, runs from the lodge poles nearly to the ground. Leaning against the lodges, and, if standing on end, quite equalling the lodge poles in height, are the travois, the universal vehicle. Before or behind the lodges of medicine men, chiefs, and noted braves hang the medicine bundles of the doctors and priests, and the arms and war dresses of the warriors. Tripods of slender poles support the sacks or bundles, or sometimes a lance is thrust in the ground, and to it is tied the warrior's equipment. The eagle FRONTIER DAYS 133 ~--NN %t % feathers, scalps, and fringes with which these things are ornamented, wave gaily in the breeze. Near the stream bank, above and below the camp, stand curious low frames, woven of willow branches, and looking somewhat like large bird cages of wickerwork. Some are oval and others hemispherical, and in the ground which forms their floor a little hollow is dug out in the center in which are ashes and a number of stones which show the marks of fire. Besides this, on the ground outside each one, is a spot where a little fire has been built, and near the fireplace are other round stones. These are the sweat lodges of the camp, where are taken the steam baths used in healing and in certain religious rites. Up and down the stream valley, and scattered over the bordering bluffs, are the horses, for the most part wandering at will, though here and there a group is herded by a boy or young man who spends most of his time lying on the ground in the shade of his horse, but now and then clambers on its back and gathers together his little band or drives away others that seem disposed to mingle with it. There are hundreds-perhaps thousands--of horses in sight, dotting the valley, the bluffs, and even the distant upper plains. Here and there on little elevations, on the points of the bluffs 134 FRONTIER DAYS or on the river bank-usually on some commanding eminence-are single figures of men. Closely wrapped in his robe or his summer sheet, each one remains apart from all the others, and sits or stands for hours, motionless. These men have left the camp and retired to such places to be alone. Some of them are praying; some are acting as sentries, looking over the country to see if enemies are approaching; some desire to think out their projects without fear of interruption; while it is possible that among the motionless figures may be one who belongs to some hostile tribe and has ventured thus boldly to expose himself in order to learn the ways of the camp, to find out how the watchers are disposed, where the swift horses are kept, at what points an attack may be made with best prospects of success. If such a spy is here, he is for the present safe from detection. He feels sure that no one will approach him or speak to him, for when a man goes off in this way by himself it is understood by all that he wishes to be alone, and this wish is respected. Within the circle of the camp the daily life of the people is going on. Moving forms, clad in bright colors, pass to and fro, and people are clustered in the shade of the lodges. Tied near most of the doors are one or two horses for immediate use. Now and then the bark of a dog falls upon the ear, and above the indistinct hum of camp life are heard the whoops or shrieks of children at play. Everywhere groups of men are seated in the shade, smoking, chatting, or sleeping. Some are naked, some clad only in a blanket, but most wear leggings of deer or cow skin and are wrapped in sheets of dressed cow skin. Here with infinite care a young dandy is painting himself; there a man is sharpening arrowheads; a third is mending a saddle; another fashioning a pipe stem. WVithout the circle of the camp, off toward the bluff, stands a group of men, some of them naked to the breech-clout, others, spectators, wrapped in their sheets or blankets. At intervals two naked men are seen to dart out from this group and race along, nearly side by side, throwing their sticks at some object that rolls along in front of them. Often at the end of such a race there is a loudvoiced dispute as to which contestant has won, in which the two racers and their friends take part with violent gesticulations and earnest speech. This is the stick or wheel game. Down by one of the sweat lodges a woman is kindling fires FRONTIER DAYS 135 and heating the stones in the center of the lodge and outside. She covers the frame with robes or skins, so as to keep the heat in. A bucket of water stands near the fire. Soon half a dozen young men come to the place, and, following them, an old man who carries a pipe. As they reach the lodge, they drop their blankets and creep naked beneath the covering. After a little the old man is heard singing his sacred songs and in monotonous voice praying for the success of those who are about to start on a journey which will be full of danger. The woman passes a vessel into the sweat house; the water hisses as it falls on the hot stones, and steam creeps forth from the crevices in the covering. Then there is more singing, and other low-voiced mumbling, prayers in different voices, and at length after an hour, the coverings of the lodge are thrown off, the men creep out, rise, and, all wet with perspiration and bleeding where they have cut themselves in sacrifice, file down to the stream and plunge into its cold waters. This is the medicine sweat, and the young men who have taken part in it are about to start off on the warpath. All day long the women who have remained in camp have been at work tanning hides, sewing lodges, making dried meat and pounding pemmican, and they are still busy, though soon these tasks will be laid aside for the day. As yet they are still bent double over Iw I - - soWI so 401L dftil MW i I36 FRONTIER DAYS the green hides, chipping at them with fleshers, and now and then raising themselves for a moment's rest, with one hand brushing away the overhanging hair from their foreheads, while with hands on hips they bend back to stretch themselves and ease their muscles. In the shade of the lodges sit other women, with stone hammers pounding choke cherries on flat stones. The tasks are not performed in silence. The little groups that work near to one another keep up a lively fire of gossip and jest which gives rise to abundant merriment. A woman who has an established reputation for wit is telling with monotonous unchanging voice and without a particle of expression in her face a story that overwhelms her sisters with mirth. They cackle forth shrill laughter, and exchange delighted comment, but the story goes on without interruption. The women wear sleeveless leather gowns reaching to below the knees and belted at the waist, and from this belt dangle by small chains or leather thongs the knife, fire steel, and sewing bag, which are a part of each one's equipment. The gowns of the older women are often old and worn, patched here and there, and black with blood, grease, and dirt. The clothing of the younger ones, the daughters or wives of men well to do, is handsome, being clean, tanned very white, heavily beaded and ornamented with elk tushes, trimmed with red and blue cloth, and fringed at the edges. As a rule, the younger women are better dressed and much more careful of their personal appearance than those older, though sometimes the latter are neat and give some attention to their hair. But for the women it is not all hard work. Here and there groups are to be seen sewing moccasins or fashioning for husband or children buckskin leggings, shirts, or other apparel, or ornamenting such clothing with beadwork or with beautiful stained quills of the porcupine. In these tasks much taste is displayed, savage though it be. Besides these workers, there are not a few who are tempting fortune. In some cool spot two lines of women sit opposite each other, and behind each person, or at her side, is a little pile of her possessions which she is betting on the seed game, played with plum stones and a little flat basket. Scattered about through the camp, up and down the stream and on the open ground nearly to the bluffs, are the children of these mothers. The tiniest of them-those who have been facing the fierce prairie sun only for a few weeks or months-are securely tied FRONTIER DAYS 137 to their boards-the primitive cradle-from which they gaze solemnly with unwinking eyes on this new and uncomprehended world. The boards are hung up on poles or drying scaffolds or travois, or lean against a lodge, a sage bush, or even a buffalo skull, and no attention is paid to their occupants, save now and then when they whimper and have to be nursed. Other children, a little older, have been freed from this imprisonment, and with a bit of dried or fresh meat in their hands grovel on the ground, alternately chewing at the meat and rubbing it in the dust until their faces are plentifully caked with mud. Some have already tired of their unaccustomed freedom, and cry piteously to be put back on their boards, ceasing their lamentations as soon as preparations are made to confine them again. The children old enough to walk are comical to look at, though rather troublesome to live with. The girls are mostly clad in little smocks which reach to their bare knees, but not so much can be said for the clothing of the boys. Some of them have a string tied about the waist, and some pet of his father or grandfather may have a buckskin string about his neck which carries a few beads or an amulet to keep off disease or the ghosts. Usually, however, they run about clad only in their close-fitting brown hides, which gather only a moderate amount of dirt, and which, when they tear, do not have to be mended. Coming from the direction of a large lodge and walking with downcast eyes across the circle of the camp, passes a young girl bearing in her hand a covered wooden dish. She is beautifully clad in a dress of white skins, beaded, fringed, trimmed with red cloth and ornamented with elk tushes. Her hair is shining and neatly braided behind each ear, and the paint on her face and in the parting of the hair is bright and fresh. Closely following her, walks another young girl, and after they have crossed the circle they enter a lodge, which, by its size and ornamentation and by the arms and medicine bundles which stand near it, is evidently that of an important man-some chief. The girl who carries the food is betrothed to the son of the owner of the lodge which she enters, for now-during the time between the arrangement for the marriage and its consummation-she serves her future lord with food each day, making the journey from her father's lodge to his, accompanied only by a sister or young girl friend. 138 138 FRONTIER DAYS As the sun f alls toward the western horizon the aspect of the camp begins to change; there is more activity. More people are moving about. The women begin to put aside the work of dressing hides, to kindle their fires anew, and to go to the stream for water. From up and down the creek and from over the bluff, single figures and small groups of people are approaching the camp. Some of these are women who have made long journeys to secure a supply of wood, which they bring home on their backs or piled high on the dog travois. Most of those who are coming in are men who have been off hunting on the plains, killing food. The camp is in a buffalo country and there has been a general chase. The circle of the lodge has been almost deserted during the early part of the day, for men and women alike have been off to the hunt, the men to do the killing and the women to bring the meat and hides to camp. The last of these are nowv returning in little groups, and almost every one is perched on top of the load of dripping meat borne by the horse she rides, and leading one or two pack horses still more heavily laden. All through the day more or less feasting has been going on, but this takes place chiefly toward evening. One who desires to entertain his friends has directed his wife to prepare the food for his guests, and when all is ready either sends a messenger about through the camp to invite them, or has him loudly shout out their names from his own lodge door. But little time elapses before the guests begin to arrive, and one by one to enter the lodge. Each is welcomed by the usual salutation and his seat is indicated to him, the more important men being seated furthest back in the lodge and nearest to the host's left hand. After a prayer and the sacrifice of a portion of the food, the eating begins without much waste of words. The portion set before each man is all he is to receive, he will not be helped a second time. Among some tribes 'it is not good manners for a guest to leave any food on the dish set before him, but among others, if the man does not care to eat it all, he may carry away withV74 him4%that7 whiA- ch is lf T. Usualthhot nIIx- +doik1- 4 mC"esnt +eat with 7,v+ FRONTIER DAYS 139 monial smokes-to the sky, to the earth, and to the four cardinal points-prays and then hands the stem to his left hand neighbor, who, after smoking and praying, passes it to the man next him, and so it goes from hand to hand round the circle. It is during this smoking that the formal speech-making-if there is any-takes place. The subjects touched on are as various as the speakers, and it is noticeable that each one is listened to with patience and courtesy, and is never interrupted. He finishes what he has to say before another man begins to speak. About a lodge where a feast is going on, a number of uninvited people gather to listen to these speeches, and now-for it is summer and the lodge skins are raised for airsuch listeners sitting about on the ground are in full view of the feasters. No one recognises any impropriety in such an outside gathering. If the number of guests at a feast be small, all the men sit at the right of the door-on the host's left-and the family, the women and children, are on the left of the door, in that place in the lodge which belongs to them; but if the number of guests is large, the family moves out of the lodge for the time being. As twilight falls the herds of horses from the bluffs and the upper prairies come trooping close to the camp, driven by the small boys and young men whose duty it is to attend to this. The most valuable, the swiftest, are tied to pins driven in the ground close 140 FRONTIER DAYS to the lodge door, and the others are allowed to go free and soon work back to the hills near at hand. A man who has one or more running horses that he greatly values, perhaps confines them in a tight pen of logs and poles, lashed together with thongs of rawhide. As darkness settles down over the camp, the noise increases. The shrill laughter of the women is heard from every side, partly drowned now and then by the ever-recurring feast shout. From different quarters comes the sound of drumming and singing, here from a lodge where some musicians are beating on a parfleche and singing for a dance, there where a doctor is singing and drumming over a sick child. Boys and young men are racing about among the lodges, chasing each other, wrestling, and yelling. In front of some lodge in the full light of the fire which streams from the open doorway, stand two forms wrapped in a single robe-two lovers, whispering to each other their affection and their hopes. Dogs bark, horses whinny, people call to each other from different parts of the camp. The fires shine through lodge skins and showers of sparks float through the smokeholes. As the night wears on the noises become less. One by one the fires go out and the lodges grow dark. From those where dancing is going on or a party of gamblers are playing the noise and light still come, but at last even these signs of life disappear, the men disperse, and the silence of the camp is broken only by the occasional stamp of an uneasy hoof or the sharp bark of a wakeful dog. No incident mars the quiet of the night. The moon rises and under its rays the aspect of the circle is changed. All the camp is flooded with the clear light, interrupted only where the lodges cast their long shadows, or the ground is marked with slender lines fallen from the drying scaffolds, or from the tripods which support the arms of the medicine bundles. Before each lodge stand one or two horses visible now only as dusky shapes, silent and motionless. The brilliant light of the moon, which shows so clearly objects near at hand, makes those a little further off vague and indistinct, as if seen through a mist, and in the distance the lodges of the circle fade out of sight. Close at hand is a lodge larger than those near to it, and shining white and new in the moonlight. On the cow skins are drawn many pictures which tell the history of its owner, and before the door are tied four horses, his swiftest and best. This is the lodge of Three FRONTIER DAYS 141 Suns, the chief, and on either side of it, for some distance around the circle, stand those of his immediate following, who are also his kinsmen. The night wears on, and as the day approaches the first faint sounds of life begin to be heard. Now and then faintly upon the listening ear falls the distant whistle of the wild ducks' wings as a flock of birds start on their early morning flight up the stream. From a hill near the camp come the sharp barks and dolorous wails of the coyotes, answered from different points in the camp by the voices of half a dozen alert dogs. The tied horses, which have been lying down, rise to their feet and shake themselves, and the low whinny of a mare is responded to by a shrill call from the little colt near by. In Three Suns' lodge all is quiet as yet; only the heavy regular breathing of the sleepers ranged about the walls shows that there is life there. Here and there, through some crevice between the lodge skins, a tiny thread of moonlight pierces the gloom, rendering the blackness within more intense. Only above through the wide smoke-hole is there any suggestion of light, where the sinking moon still illuminates one of the ears, and below, in the center of the floor, a dim circle of white ashes tells where the daily fire burns. iý -Now 0 N*Aýl 9 8* -% W fre. 4 * 0 b 94 000"6w,6 0,0441,:NS 0 G, 142 FRONTIER DAYS As the night grows older and the moon sets and the eastern sky begins to pale, there is movement in the lodge, a restless turning in the side where the women sleep, and the querulous voice of a disturbed child is heard. One of the women throws aside her robe, and, rising, steps to the door and looks out; then, turning, she takes from under one of the beds some tinder, dried grass, and slivers of dry wood prepared the night before. With a stick she rakes the ashes, looking for a live coal, but, failing to find one, uses her flint and steel, and strikes a shower of sparks which kindle the dry fungus. The punk is placed in the dried grass, a little blowing starts a flame, and soon the lodge is brightened by a flickering fire, and sparks begin to fly out of the smokehole. By this time two other women have risen from their couches, and while one looks after the awakening children, the other goes down to the stream for water. In the gray light, which, constantly growing brighter, now shows the whole camp, pillars of blue smoke rise from every lodge straight upward through the still cool air. Mlany women are hurrying to the stream for water; young men, close wrapped in their robes, are loosening the horses which have been tied up during the night, and they walk briskly off toward the hills. There is more or less noise and bustle-the chattering of women; the shrill calls of colts that have lost their mothers; the yell of pain from a dog that during the night has crept into a lodge to sleep warm with the children and is now discovered and driven out with blows. All these are the sounds of the awakening day. The tops of the bluffs along the river are just beginning to be touched with yellow light as the door of Three Suns's lodge is pushed aside, and the chief himself comes out. His robe hides all his person but the head and the naked feet. His face is kindly and dignified, and he talks pleasantly to the little boy of three or four years whom he carries in his arms and whose head shows above the robe beside his father's. Darting about, before and behind or by the side of the father, is another son, a lad of twelve, naked as at birth, and holding in his hand a bow and several arrows, which as he races along he discharges at various marks that present themselves-the blackbirds swinging from the tops of the sage brush, the ground squirrels which scuttle from under the tufts of grass, or even the stones which lie on the prairie. From other lodges come other men and boys, all like Three I Dpi '1.-. PO(INTS OF \VANTAGE. ALONG T11i; X\A..Tl*.R QOL'RSIS \\lVR i\IAN\TDI)HY IND)IAN BRAVE-S WHOf) X\.RNE-D IIEIR LtOFiM>CS 1INVADING\\iiS FRONTIER DAYS 1i43 Suns and his children, walking toward the river. When it is reached they drop their robes and all plunge in, the fathers taking even the smallest children and dipping them beneath the water, fromn vi they emerge squirming and kicking but silent. The older boys J.,.. into the water, and are riotously splashing about, shouting, -n. diving. Soon all again have sought the bank, and the men, donnincr their robes, return to the lodges. Here the pots have been boilinr,A for some time, and when Three Suns has put on his leggings anJ moccasins, combed out his long hair, and again belted his robe about him, his first wife sets before him a horn platter, on which are some choice pieces of buffalo meat. Then the children are served, and the women help themselves; and when all have eaten, the men sta-t off to hunt, the women set about their daily work in the camp, and the children disperse to their play. So goes the round of Indian life. Another day has begun. ~BS: u THE BLACKFEET DEFY THE CROWS By EDWIN L. SABIN ~ OUTHWEST from the Mandans there lived the Crow S S^ nation. They roved through the Yellowstone River country of southern Montana to the Rocky MNlountains; and ^ f.^ southward through the mountains into the Wind River 1^^ and Big Horn country of western Wyoming. 4'-' West from the Mandans there lived the Blackfeet nation. They roved through the Missouri country of northern Montana, and north into Canada. The land of the Crows and of the Blackfeet overlapped. The two peoples were at war, on the plains and in the mountains. By reason of their wars, the Crow nation had shrunk until they were down to seven thousand people, with many more women than men. But their warriors were tall and stately, their women industrious, their garb elegant. Their buffalo-hide lodges and their buffalo-robe clothing were the whitest, finest in the West. They had countless horses. And the long hair of their men set them high in dignity. Oiled every morning with bear's grease, the hair of a proud Crow warrior swept the ground behind him. The hair of Chief Long-hair measured ten feet, seven inches, and rolled into a bunch it weighed several pounds. When it had turned white, he worshipped it as his medicine. The Crows' name for themselves was Ab-sa-ro-ke-Sparrow Hawk People. They were of the Siouan family and cousins of the Minnetarees, the Bird-woman's captors. They had no villages, except where they camped. They were dark, as high and mighty in their bearing as the Mohawks or Senecas, were wonderful riders and looked upon the white men not as worthy enemies but as persons who should be plundered of horses and goods. In the white men's camps they were polite-and took away with From BOYS' BOOK OF INDIAN WARRIORS, by Edwin L. Sabin. Copyright Macrae-Smith Company. 144 FRONTIER DAYS 145 4;0 - them whatever they could. However, many white traders spoke well of the Crows. The name of the Blackfeet was Sik-sik-a, which means the same. It referred to their black moccasins. They were Algonquins, and in power ranked with the Iroquois of the East. The Blackfeet, the Bloods and the Piegans formed the league of the Siksika nation. They warred right and left, with the Crees, the Assiniboins, the Sioux, the Crows, the Pierced Noses, and with practically all tribes; they were hostile to the white Americans who hunted in their country; but their wars had not cut them down, for they numbered close to forty thousand people. Like the Crows their enemy-neighbors they were rovers, never staying long in one spot. They were unlike the Crows in appearance, being shorter, broad-shouldered and deep-chested. No warriors were more feared. In November of 1834, amidst the Wind River Mountains of western Wyoming five hundred Crows were ahorse, at early morning, to chase the buffalo. And a gallant sight they made as they rode gaily out; in their white robes, their long plaited hair flying, their best horses prancing under them and decorated with red streamers. Chief Grizzly Bear led. Chief Long-hair was with another band. 146 FRONTIER DAYs In this Chief Grizzly Bear band there rode a party of white beaver-hunters who were to spend the winter with the Crows. They now*were to be shown how the Crows killed buffalo. Pretty soon, while the Crows cantered on, they sighted a group of moving figures at the base of the hills two or three miles distant across the valley. Everybody stopped short to peer. Buffalo? No!I Indians, on foot and in a hurry-BlackfeetI How, from so far away, the Crows could tell that these were Blackfeet, the white men did not know. But with a yell of joy and rage, every Crow lashed his horse and forward they all dashed,.racing to catch the hated Blackfeet. The white hunters followed hard. It was to be an Indian battle, instead of an Indian buffalo-chase. The Blackfeet numbered less than one hundred. They were a war party. Were they hunting buffalo, they would have been on horseback; but even among the horse Indians the war parties were likely to travel on foot, so as to be able to hide more easily. They counted upon stealing horses, for the homeward trail. These Blackfeet had been very rash, but that was Blackfeet nature. They had sighted the Crows as soon as the Crows had sighted them, and were hustling at best speed to get back into the hills. The Crows, whooping gladly and expecting to make short work of their enemies, first made short work of the distance. Their robes were dropped, their guns loaded, their bows were strung, they spread out wider-the Blackfeet were cut off and desperately scrambling up a rocky slope-could never make it-never, never-they had halted -what were they doing? Aha! From the hill slope there arose answering whoops; a few guns cracked; and at the base and half-way up, the Crows stopped and gazed and yelled. The plucky Blackfeet had "forted." They were in a natural fort of rock wall. On either side of them a rock out-crop in a ridge four feet high extended up hill, to meet, near the top, a cross-ridge ten feet high. While half the warriors defended with guns and bows, the other half were busily piling up brush and boulders, to close the down-hill opening. Now whoop answered whoop and threat answered threat, FRONTIER DAYS 1-47 while the Crows rode around and around, at safe distance, seeking a weak place. Chief Grizzly Bear held council with the subchiefs. Away sped an express, to get reinforcements from the camp. At the first charge upon the fort, three Crows had been killed, and only one Blackfoot. That would never do: three scalps in trade for one was a poor count, to the Crows. They were five hundred, the Blackfeet were only ninety; but the Crows held off, waiting their reinforcements, while from their fort the Blackfeet yelled taunt after taunt. "Bring up your squaws! Let them lead you. But our scalps will never dry in a Crow lodge!" Here, at last, came the people from the camp; the old men, women, boys-everybody who could mount a horse and who could find a weapon; all shrieking madly until the whole valley rang with savage cries. Matters looked bad for the Blackfeet. At least two thousand Crows were surrounding them, hooting at them, shaking guns and bows and spears at them. And the Blackfeet, secure in their fort, jeered back. They were brave warriors. Chief Grizzly Bear called another council. In spite of all the gesturing and whooping and firing of guns, the Blackfeet were unharmed. The Crows had little heart for charging in, upon the muzzles of those deadly pieces with the fierce Blackfeet behind. The white beaver-hunters, not wishing to anger the Blackfeet, and curious to see what was about to happen, withdrew to a clump of cedar trees, about two hundred yards from the fort. The white men had decided to be spectators, in a grand-stand. Presently Chief Grizzly Bear and his chiefs seemed to have agreed upon a plan of battle. Had they been white men, themselves, they would have stormed the fort at once, and carried the fight to close quarters; but that was not Indian way. To lose a warrior was a serious matter. Warriors were not made in a day. And without warriors, a tribe would soon perish. "He who fights and runs away, may live to fight another day," was the Indians' motto. They preferred to play safe. Now the Crows formed in line, two or three hundred abreast, and charged as if they were intending to run right over the fort. It was a great sight. But it did not frighten the Blackfeet. 148 FRONTIER DAYS Up the hill slope galloped the Crow warriors and boys, shooting and yelling. The stout Blackfeet, crouched behind their barricade, volleyed back; and long before the Crows drove their charge home, it broke. Soon several more Crow warriors were lying on the field. The wails of the squaws sounded loudly. No Blackfeet had been hurt. The Crows changed their tactics. They avoided the fort, until they had gained the top of the hill. Then in a long single file, they tore past that end of the fort, letting fly with bullet and arrow as they sped by. Each warrior threw himself to the opposite side of his horse, and hanging there with only one arm and one leg exposed to the fort, shot under his horse's neck. It was an endless chain of riders, shuttling past the fort, and shooting-but that did not work. The Blackfeet arrows and bullets caught the horses, and once in a while a rider; and soon there were ten Crows down. The Crows quit, to rest their horses, and to talk. Their women were wailing still more loudly. War was hard on the women, too. For every relative killed, they had to cut off a finger joint, besides gashing their faces and hands with knives. In their little fort, the Blackfeet were as boldly defiant as ever. L FRONTIER DAYS 149 "Come and take us!" they gibed. "Where are the Crow men? We thought we saw Crow men among you. Come and take us, but you will never take us alive!" "What will be done now?" the white men queried of a black man who had joined them, in the clump of cedars. He was not all black. He was half white, one quarter negro and one quarter Cherokee. He had lived over twenty years in the Indian country of the upper Missouri River; mainly with the Crows. Edward Rose had been his name, when young; but now he was a wrinkled, stout old man, called Cut-nose, and looked like a crinkly-headed Indian. "The Crows are losing too many warriors. They have no stomach for that kind of work," answered the old squaw man. The Crow chiefs and braves were seated in a circle, near the cedars, and listening to the speakers who stood up, one after another. "Our marrow-bones are broken," some asserted. "The enemy is in a fort; we are outside. We will lose more men than he. Let us draw off; and when he is in the open, we can then attack as we please." "He is few; we are many. Our slain warriors and their women cry for vengeance," asserted others. "We will be called cowards if we retreat. If we charge all together we may lose a few braves, but there will be no Blackfeet left to laugh at us." These seemed to be the voices that carried. The pipe was passed around the circle, every man puffed at it, and the council broke up in a tremendous yelling. Now the end of the Blackfeet loomed large. Ahorse and afoot the Crows massed, to charge from below and on either flank. Their chiefs hastened hither and thither, urging them. The women and children shrieked encouragement. In their little fort the Blackfeet also listened to their chiefs. They showved not the slightest sign of fear. Their fierce faces glared over the ramparts. Their weapons were held firmly. The Crows had roused themselves to such a pitch that they acted half insane. Forward they charged in howling masses-but the bullets and arrows pelted them thickly, more warriors fellthey scattered and ran away. The Blackfeet hooted them. This made old Cut-nose mad. He hastened out to where the ISo FRONTIER DAYS Crows were collected in doubt what next to do, and climbed upon a rock, that they all might see him. "Listen " he shouted, "You act as if you expected to kill the enemy with your noise. Your voices are big and your hearts are small. These white men see that the Crows cannot protect their hunting grounds; they will not trade with a nation of cowards and women; they will trade with the Blackfeet, who own the country. The Blackfeet will go home and tell the people that three thousand Crows could not take ninety warriors. After this no nation will have anything to do with the Crows. I am ashamed to be found among the Crows. I told the white men that you could fight. Now I will show you how black men and white men can fight." And he leaped from his rock, and without glancing behind him he ran for the fort. The Crows did not delay an instant. Pellmell they rushed after him, caught up with him, swarmed against the brush and rock walls-the Blackfeet met them stanchly, and gave way not an inch-and the fighting was terrible. But over the barricade poured the Crows. In a moment the whole interior was a dense mass of Indians, engaged hand to hand, and every one yelling until, as said the white men, "The noise fairly lifted the caps from our heads." Guns and hatchets and clubs and knives rose and fell. The Crow women were pressing to the outskirts, to kill the wounded enemy. Gradually the weight of the Crows forced the Blackfeet back. The Blackfeet began to emerge over the upper end of the fort-their faces still to the foe. Presently all who might escape, were outside-but their enemies surrounded them at once. The Blackfeet remaining were not many. They never faltered nor signed surrender. They only sang their death chants; and forming in close order they moved along the ridge like one man, cutting a way with their knives. By the half dozen they dropped; even those who dropped, fought until they were dead. Soon the platoon was merely a squad; the squad melted to a spot; there was a swirl, covering the spot; and the spot had been washed out. Not a Blackfoot was left, able to stand. The wounded who had lost their weapons hurled taunts, as they lay helpless, until the FRONTIER DAYS II Crows finished them also. Truly had the Blackfeet yelled: "Come and take us! But you will never take us alive!" This night there was much mourning in the Crow camp. Thirty chiefs and braves had been killed, twice that number wounded, and many horses disabled. No prisoner had been brought in, to pay by torture. The Blackfeet nation would look upon the fight as their victory. So the Crow dead were buried; and into each grave of chief or brave were placed his weapons and the shaved off mane and tail of his best horse-for every hair would become a horse for him, in the spirit world. VARIOUS INDIAN WAYS By COLONEL HOMER WHEELER IV4 N THE ensuing pages, I have set down some random notes on Indian customs, manners, etc. Some of them are not well known to the white man, and will, I believe, interest my readers: Twins.-Twins are usually regarded by Indians as un earthly, and are rather feared as possessing occult power. Among some of the Oregon and other Pacific tribes they are regarded as abnormal, and one or both are killed. This is not so with the plains Indians or the Shoshones and Bannocks. I knew a brother and sister at Fort XXashakie who were twins, and both were regarded as being unusually fortunate in anything they undertook. "Red men."-It is thought by many who have studied Indian lore that the Indians were first called "red men" because of the universal custom of painting their faces and bodies, and for this purpose they used fine clays containing different kinds of iron which they themselves had found. Since the establishment of the trading stores, they bought these ochers to a great extent. Michelle, chief of the Pen d'Oreilles, said to my dear friend, Lieutenant Philo P. Clark, author of The Indian Sign Language: "I do not know exactly why we use paint. When I was young many kinds were used, black, yellow, red, and so on. We know by its use when it is hot-we do not feel the sun so severely; and when cold, the winds are not so keen and painful. "The priests tried to stop its use. I asked them if it was any worse to paint the face than it was to paint the church and if the church would last longer by being painted, why should not the Indian? I think God made all things to be used--the paint for the Indians; and this is why we use all kinds of color on face and hair when we go to war, and it gives us good luck." Blac'k paint is used by many tribes after returning from an F,-,m BUFFALO DAYS, Copyriz~ht 1925. Used by spcial permission of the publishers, The Bobbs-Merrlll Company. J 52 FRONTIER DAYS 153 expedition, that being the color for rejoicing; red paint is used in profusion in any excitement, either in war or love. The squaws usually used red for the cheeks, to enrich their beauty. War paint, so called, is only an excessive use of any color. When painting for war they use many stripes and rings of different color; but on returning only black paint is used. For courting they paint themselves as handsomely as possible. In the religious and ceremonial dances various kinds of fantastic designs were exhibited. Pipes.-The Indians' pipe has been the symbol of peace and friendship, and has always played an important part in the religious, war and peace ceremonies. To smoke the pipe of peace was essential to the preparation of every compact of friendship or treaty entered into by these people and they usually have a pipe made and used only for this purpose, the stem being from two to three feet long, one-half inch in thickness, and from one and one-half to three inches wide, decorated with eagle feathers, brass tacks, porcupine work, horse hair and ribbons. The red sandstone, procured from the pipestone quarry of Minnesota (from which the country is named), is undoubtedly the finest material for Indian pipes. When we were living in Minnesota my father visited these quarries and brought home some of this stone, from which he made pipes, paper-weights and other articles. He spoke of some of the wonderful carvings on the quarry wvalls,-lizards, snakes and other Indian gods, rabbits with cloven feet, muskrats with human feet, reptiles, etc., which required much artistic skill and a great deal of time and handwork. Eagle Feathers.-The tail feathers from "the chief of all birds," as they call the golden eagle, are highly prized, and are the chief and talismanic decoration of war bonnets. These feathers are fastened in the hair and also in the manes of their war ponies. Some tribes only allow a man who has killed some one in a fight to wear a feather of this kind on the head; that is, stuck in the scalp lock. Should two or three be worn there they indicate the number of persons killed by the wearer. Some Indians claim that this bird was created and given them by the Great Spirit (God) for its beauty, for decorating themselves, and for a special charm in battle. The Indians regard the golden eagle as an emblem of strength and courage. The wings of the bald eagle are prized for fans, and the large bones of eagles' and hawks' wings are used for whistles, the IS4 '54 FRONTIER DAYS eagle wings being most highly prized. The whistle, when skillfully played upon, has a sound exactly like that made by the bird itself, as in the case of a turkey. It is like the plaintive note of that f owl. Scalp Lock.-The plains Indians braid that portion of the hair contained in a circle about two inches in diameter, at the crown of the head. The braid is formed of three strands, and the circle is marked by pulling out the hair, and this little circular part is painted, usually with red ocher. The hair of the head is parted in the middle and the parting extends to this circle. The scalp lock seems meant to be a mark of manhood and defiance. Poisoned Arrows.-Poisoned arrows were not commonly used by the North American Indians. Lieutenant Philo Clark states that the Shoshones admitted to him that before they met the whites they used poisoned arrowheads. For this purpose the arrowheads were dipped in a compound made of ants pounded to a powder and mixed with the spleen of an animal. The mixture was then placed in the sun and allowed to decay partly. The result was such a deadly poison that if the arrows broke the skin in touching a person it was sure death. They also said the plains Indians never used poisoned arrows. Tepees.-Tepees are called "lodges" and "wigwams." From FRONTIER DAYS I'ss fourteen to thirty poles are used in a tepee, and one or two for the wingpoles on the outside; these latter for adjusting the wings, near the opening at the top of the tepee, for the escaping of smoke; the wings are kept at such angles as to produce the best draft. The best poles are made from slender mountain-pine, which grows thickly in the mountains. The women cut and trim them and carefully peel off the bark. They are then partly dried or seasoned, which requires some little time, and are first pitched for some time without covering of canvas or skin. By being thus slowly cured they are kept straight. The length depends upon the size of the tepee and varies from sixteen to thirty feet. A set of tepee poles is valuable and is worth several ponies. The Indians have a smaller lodge used while on their hunts, which is carried on the travois. When a lodge is to be pitched, three of these poles are tied together near the top and set up like a tripod. The cord with which the three poles are tied is sufficiently long for the ends to hang to the ground. The other poles, save one, are successively set up, the top of each resting against the first three, while the lower ends form a circle from twelve to seventeen feet in diameter. The tops are then bound together securely by means of the pendent cord. One edge of the tepee cloth is now made fast to the remaining pole, by means of which it is raised and carried around the framework, so as to envelop it completely. The two edges of the cover are closed together by wooden pins or keys, except three feet at the extreme top left open for a smoke hole, and an equal space at the bottom for an entrance. The spare pole is attached to one edge of the cover at the top, so that the smoke hole may be closed or opened at will. The skin of some animal, a piece of canvas, or a blanket or two are fixed to the outside of the lodge, above the entrance, so as to hang down over the latter as a sort of door. Inside, the fireplace occupies the center of the lodge. Cooking is generally done outside, except in rainy weather. When mosquitoes are unusually numerous smudges are built in the lodges. About the fireplace are spread mats, which serve as seats by day and couches by night. In permanent camps they quite frequently put up raised platforms, about fourteen inches from the ground, for couches and other purposes. The covering of a lodge is one continuous piece, made of buffalo skin (or canvas), nicely fitted together. In tanning, the skins are dressed so thin that sufficient light is transmitted into the interior 156 i~6 FRONTIER DAYS even when the lodge is tightly closed. When new they are quite white, and a village of them presents an attractive appearance. Sometimes they are variously painted, according, to the tastes of the occupants. In moving the village the large tepee poles are fastened at their smaller ends by a rope or a rawhide thong which passes over the pony's back, and the large ends of the poles drag on the ground. The poles become shafts and behind the animal the load is fastened. Small children are frequently placed in a wicker work basket fastened to these poles; and for transporting the sick and wounded the skin of a freshly killed animial, a robe or blanket, is fastened to the poles, forming a bed upon which the sick or wounded person redlines; two poles, as a rule, are used for the purpose. 1~'~~ dug - 0-1 FOUR DAYS IN A MEDICINE LODGE B ALTER I\ICCLINTOCK The reader should keep in mind that there is no correspondiny English word to express the equivalent of the word "medicine" as used by the Indians. It is also impossible for us to understand or estimate the wide range of influence which the "medicine" idea exerts upon the Indian character and habits. It has a firm hold upon their individual and tribal life. The word expresses in general that which is mysterious or supernatural. A "imedicine" man is one who is believed to exert a superior power ov'er the supernatural through his incantations and magic arts. He is, therefore, more of a magician than a medical doctor. Ht, may have the function of a medical doctor when he uses his magic arts for the recovery of the sick. To "make medicine" is to conduct mysterious ceremonies. +-'~' HE medicine-lodge of the Blackfeet Indians, who are SunT worshippers, is the ceremony that among other tribes is T called the Sun-dance. It is not, as is commonly supposed, Oila mere festal dance; it is the most important of all re-! ligious ceremonies, the occasion when the entire tribe - assembles-some to fulfil their vows to the sun, some to fast and pray, and some to find the diversions and social enjoyments which, the world over, are associated with large gatherings of people. During a sojourn of several summers in northwestern MNontana, among the Piegan division of the Blackfeet Indians, I was adopted by one of the chiefs, Mad Wolf, who was especially prominent in the sacred rites of the Blackfeet. I was baptized with an Indian name, and formally initiated as a member of the tribe. My new relationship gave me every facility for studying the origin and significance of the medicine-lodge. The following Blackfeet legend gives the tradition of the Used by permission of Harper's Magazine and Walter McClintock. '57 FRONTI ER DAYS medicine-lodge: Many years ago the Sun appeared in a dream to a beautiful young girl of the tribe, saying, "You are mine; if you marry him who is pleasing to me, you will live to be old, and will always have good luck." Many of the leading young men of the tribe wished to marry her, but each was in turn refused. Finally there came to her a young man who said: "I am poor; I have no lodge, neither robes nor horses; but I ask you to become my wife." The girl answered him: "The Sun has taken me to be his own; I; can marry no one without his permission. If you go to the lodge of the Sun, and he should consent, then I will marry you." Turning his face toward the setting sun, the young man started on his journey. He traveled many days, praying, as he went, to the birds and animals for help. He had crossed the prairies and mountains, but every evening the sun disappeared so far ahead of him that he grew discouraged, and thought that his journey would never end. Finally the animals heard his prayers, showing him the trail which led to the Big Water. There the birds also came to his assistance, carrying him to a far-away island, where he found the lodge in which the Sun lived with his wife, the Moon, and their only son, the IMorning Star. The young man was declared to be worthy by the Sun, who started him upon his homeward journey by the Milky Way, or Wolf Road, the trail said to be traveled by the spirits of FRONTIER DAYS iS9 the Indian dead. When departing he received the Sun's blessing, with the promise that, when any of his people were sick, a vow to build a medicine-lodge, as an offering to the Sun, would be rewarded by the recovery of the sick. During a recent winter of great severity, it happened that the wife of Mad Wolf was taken sick. None of the remedies of the Indian doctors helped her, and though the medicine men sang their strongest songs, the evil spirits refused to depart. One morning she struggled to the door of the lodge, and stretching forth her arms to the rising sun, she prayed: "Pity me, 0 Sun! for you know that I am pure. Give me back my strength, and before all the people I promise to build for you a medicine-lodge!" Before the snow began to melt, the squaw was well; and when, in the spring, the warm winds began to blow, true to her vow, the wife of Nlad Wolf began her preparations for the medicine-lodge. The fulfilment of her vow, which I had the good fortune to witness, gave a special interest and a deeper religious significance to the raising of this medicine-lodge. The service-berries had turned red and the grass had grown long upon the prairie, when the Indians living in the northern section of the reservation assembled near Mad Wolf's lodge, where he was making medicine for the Sun-dance. The southern section of the tribe gathered under Running Crane, who was also making medicine. In their separate camps the Indians waited patiently until they could move together to the place where the entire tribe was to assemble and the medicine-lodge was to be raised. The morning of the last day of June dawned clear and beautiful upon the prairies and mountains. I had been informed of the time and place where the Piegans would meet, and, while awaiting their arrival, had walked to the summit of the high ridge overlooking a wide expanse of rolling prairie, now covered everywhere with green grass, made rich and luxuriant by the frequent rains of early spring. At sunrise I saw a band of Indians approaching from the north, and when they came near enough I saw that they were led by Mad Wolf, and that his followers included White Grass, Chief Elk, Morning Plume, Middle Calf, Double Rider, and Bear Child. The warriors were in the van, followed by the little cayuses, or ponies, drawing the travois laden with supplies. Then came a long line of heavy wagons, in which were strange i 6o i~o FRONTIER DAYS looking medicine outfits, and lodges. The rear-guard was composed of the older men, squaws, and young girls. Each family was followed by a lot of mongrel dogs, all as gaunt and hungry-looking as a pack of prairie-wolves. The site of the encampment, which had been deserted and silent since the breaking of the last Piegan camp, twelve moons before, became a scene of bustle and confusion. A white village of Indian lodges, springing up as if by magic, immediately spread itself over a large tract of prairie. In the afternoon Running Crane came in from the south. With him were many leading men-Little Dog, Little Plume, Curly Bear, Medicine Bull, and Mountain Chief.- In this outfit were three medicine-women, so weakened by fasting that, unable to stand without assistance, they reclined upon the ground, while a tepee was erected over them. During the medicine-lodge, which lasts four days and four nights,* these consecrated women fast, and are continually praying to the Sun for their people. They may only leave the lodge during the hours between sundown and sunrise, and may only partake of a little water for their sustenance. Their faces, hair, and blankets are covered with the sacred red paint. The medicine-women are held in high honor by the Indians, for they must have led perfectly pure lives before the entire tribe, and must have been kindly disposed toward all its members. It yields great renown to a tribe to give a Sun-dance, for all of the Indians throughout the West hear of it, and some come hundreds of miles to be present. The medicine-man who is to lead the ceremonies is a great man, and it is believed that he will live long. At the medicinelodge I saw representatives f rom. many of the leading tribes of the Northwest-Crees and Bloods f rom. the north; Assiniboines, Pondres, Gros Ventres, and Sioux f rom the east; Kootenais and Flatheads from the west. During the day about fifteen hundred Indians had gathered, and there were upwards of two hundred lodges. The camp was in ""Four" seems to be the sacred number of the ]3iackfeet. The rites of the medicine FRONTIER DAYS16 the form of a circle, the circumference of which was about two miles. The natural surroundings were inexpressibly beautiful. A few miles to the west were the Rocky Mountains, over which hung a bank of heavy wind-clouds. The sun, which was sinking behind Mount Red Chief, lighted up the sombre cloud masses with a splendid coloring, while its bright rays, streaming to either side, formed a magnificent "sunburst," with the mountain-peak for its center. A dark blue haze, resembling smoke, was rapidly mounting the eastern sky-the forerunner of the coming night. Upon the surrounding ridges herds of horses were quietly feeding, wN7hile here and there could be seen a solitary Indian who had wandered off for meditation or solitude. BUFFALO BILL AND YELLOW HAND By EDWIN L. SABIN + HE war parties of Kiowas, Comanches and Southern Cheyennes from the Indian Territory reservation rode T about for a year, plundering settlers, fighting the sol44 _1diers, and trying to drive the buffalo-hunters off the range. Colonel Miles had charge of the campaign against them,!~-Sr+ which extended through the summer of 1874, and the winter, and well into the spring of 1875. Many brave deeds were done. The Southern Cheyennes surrendered first, in March. Then the Kiowas and Comanches began to appear at Fort Sill, Indian Territory, and give themselves up. Chief Quana's Antelope Eaters were the last. They surrendered in June. So the Military Department of the Missouri seemed a little more quiet; a few bands of outlaw Indians still roved in southwestern Kansas, southern Colorado, New Mexico and northern Texas, but the buffalo-hunters again established their camps as they pleased. General Sheridan, the commander of the whole western country to the Rocky Mountains, had said that the only way to bring real peace was to kill off the buffalo; then the Indians would have to stay on the reservations, or starve. Trouble now thickened in the north, especially in the Department of Dakota and in Wyoming of the Department of the Platte. Forts had been planned in Chief Red Cloud's Powder River country of Wyoming, and miners were entering the Sioux and Northern Cheyennes' hunting reserve of the famous Black Hills of South Dakota. Another railroad, the Northern Pacific, was about to cross the northern buffalo range. On their reservations in South Dakota the Sioux and Cheyennes were getting restless. Chief Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull the medicine worker stayed far outside, to hunt and fight as free men. They refused to lead their bands in, and warriors on the Dakota reservations kept slipping away, to join them. From BOYS' BOOK OF FRONTIER FIGHTERS, by Edwin L. Sabin. Copyright Macrae-Smith Company. 162 FRONTIER DAYS 163 In the spring of 1876 General George Crook, the Gray Fox, commanding the Department of the Platte, at Omaha, and General Alfred H. Terry, commanding the Department of Dakota, at St. Paul, started out to round up the Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull bands, in the Powder River and Big Horn Valley country of northern Wyoming and southeastern Montana. General John Gibbon was to close in, with another column, from Fort Ellis, Montana, on the west. Among the troops ordered to unite with General Crook's main column on the march, were the fighting Fifth Cavalry, with headquarters at Fort Hays, Hays City, Kansas, on the Kansas Pacific Railway half way between Fort Leavenworth and Denver. Their commander was Lieutenant-Colonel (Brevet IN I ajor-General) Eugene A. Carr. The Fifth were glad to go. They already had made a great record on the plains, protecting the Union Pacific and the Kansas Pacific railroads; were just back from scouting against the Apaches in Arizona; and now they eagerly unpacked their campaign kits for another round. "Buffalo Bill" Cody, their old chief-of-scouts, was sent for in the East, where he had been acting on the stage with Texas Jack. The Fifth Cavalry were to rendezvous at Cheyenne. The four companies at Fort Hays went by railroad, first to Denver and then north to Cheyenne. On the seventh of June there they were. They marched north to old Fort Laramie. Here the regiment was ordered to guard the great Sioux and Cheyenne trail that crossed country from the South Dakota reservations to the hostile Powder River and Big Horn villages. There were several skirmishes, but the traveling Indians got away. On July i the new colonel joined the regiment. He was Brevet Major-General Wesley Merritt, from General Sheridan's staff at Chicago division headquarters. As he was a full colonel, he outranked Lieutenant-Colonel Carr, and became commander. On July 6 terrible word was received from Fort Laramie. Buffalo Bill first announced it, as he came out of General Merritt's tent. "Custer and five companies of the Seventh have been wiped out of existence, on the Little Big Horn, by the Sioux. It's no rumor; General Merritt's got the official dispatch." 164 FRONTIER DAYS "What! When?" "June 25. It's awful, boys." Sunday, of last week! Twelve days ago, and they only just now heard! And while they had been longing for Indians, and envying other columns that might be having fights,-even a little jealous of the dashing Custer's rival Seventh, who were hunting Indians instead of watching a trail-this same Seventh had been battling for their lives. Of course, reinforcements would be rushed in at once. The Fifth would have their chance. And sure enough, the order came for the Fifth Cavalry to march north in earnest and find the General Crook column in the Big Horn country. The route lay from southeastern Wyoming northwest through Fort Laramie and Fort Fetterman (which was farther up the North Platte River), and on to the Big Horn. But suddenly the march was stopped. A dispatch from the Red Cloud agency of the Sioux and Cheyenne reservation said that eight hundred Cheyennes had prepared to leave on the next day, Sunday, July i6, to join Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull. There was only one thing for General Merritt to do: throw his troops across the war-trail between the reservation and the wagonroad of the white settlers to the Black Hills, and turn the runaways back. War Bonnet Creek of extreme southwestern South Dakota, west of the Red Cloud reservation, was the place where the red trail struck the white trail; Chief-of-Scouts Buffalo Bill knew it well. The troops must be there by Sunday night. It now was Saturday noon; the distance, by round-about route, was eighty-five miles; the Cheyennes had only twenty-eight to come. General Merritt resolved to get there first. So he did. With his seven companies of cavalry, about four hundred men, he swung back, leaving his wagon-train and a small escort to follow after. From one o'clock noon until ten o'clock at night he rode; at the end of thirty-five miles camped until three o'clock in the morning; led again by Buffalo Bill rode all day Sunday, and at nine o'clock unsaddled, in the starlight, at the wartrail crossing of War Bonnet Creek, twenty-eight miles from the reservation. The seven companies had traveled their eighty-five miles over hill and plain in thirty-one hours, and had won the race. The Cheyennes had not yet passed here. FRONTIER DAYS This night Lieutenant Charles King of K troop was in charge of the outposts stationed toward the southeast, and covering the trail from the reservation. At dawn he moved his posts farther on, to a steep little hill, from which the viewv was better. Mluch farther, two miles in the south and southeast, there was a high ridge, breaking the trail f rom the reservation. The Cheyennes would cross it. In the southwest, or to the right from the outpost hill, there was the Black Hills wvagon-road, from which the cavalry had ridden to the War Bonnet here. Lieutenant King and Corporal Wilkinson of the guard lay upon the hill slope, watching the morning brighten upon the wvar-trail ridge. It was nearing five o'clock, of July 17. The Cheyennes would be coming soon. "Look, Lieutenant! There they are! The Indians!" Yes, at last! Five or six mounted figures had appeared atop the distant ridge. The number increased rapidly. But they did not come on. They galloped wildly back and forth, dodging the slopes that opened to the wvest, and seeming to care not at all that they might be seen f rom the north. Evidently they knew nothing of the cavalry camp. It was concealed f rom. them, by the outpost hill and by the bluffs along the W~ar Bonnet. Then wvhy didn't they hasten on, if they were in a hurry to join Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, and share in the plunder to be gained from the fights? At five o'clock they dotted the ridge on a f ront of three miles. They were fascinated by something in the west. What? Colonel Merritt and Lieutenant- Colonel Carr had been notified. They arrived at the hill, and they also scanned with their field-glasses. And still "What ails the rascals?" That was the question. It took half an hour of waiting and wondering, to solve the problem. Then-the wagon train! The wagon train under Lieutenant and Quartermaster William P. Hall had trundled into sight, comngint cmp y rhelak IllIV06s roadtowar1the ightin th 166 i66 FRONTIER DAYS they could not see inside the wagons; they would meet a double surprise-one from the cavalry gathered at the War Bonnet, the other from the infantry riding in the wagons. "Have the men had their coffee?" General Merritt asked, not a whit excited. "Yes, Sir," replied Lieutenant and Adjutant William Forbush. "Then let them saddle up and close in mass under the bluffs." Buff alo Bill Cody had arrived on the hill, with two other scouts: Tait, and "Chips" whose real name was Charley White. "Chips" imitated Buff alo Bill in every way; seemed to think that Bill made the world. He was Buffalo Bill's understudy. Scout Cody did not wear buckskin, to-day. He wore one of his stage costumes-a Mexican suit of short black velvet jacket trimmed with silver buttons and silver lace, and black velvet trousers also with silver buttons down the sides, and slashed f rom the knee dowvn with bright red. His brown hair was long and curling. "What in thunder are those vagabonds down yonder fooling about?" he growled, on a sudden. What, indeed? Something new had cropped out. From the ridge in the southeast a long ravine ran down, crossed in front of the hill and met the wagon-road trail at the right of the hill. It and the road formed a V; the two arms of the V were separated by a stretch of high ground, and the hill was at the point of the V. Where the ravine headed at the base of the ridge a mile and a half southeast, thirty or forty Indians had collected, all ready to dash on. But why? As, see! Lieutenant Hall had sent two cavalry couriers forward, with dispatches for General Merritt. Two miles distant they were galloping hard, up the road, bent upon reaching the War Bonnet. The Indians knew. The warriors in the ravine were about to follow it down to the trail and kill the couriers. The couriers could not see the Indians, on account of the high ground between. The Indians could not now see the couriers, for the same reason. But the Lieutenant King party of the hill could FRONTIER DAYS 167 west side of the hill. It might have been a pretty race to watch, had life not been the stake. But what to do? The couriers should not be sacrificed, of course; yet to send the cavalry forward now would spoil the bigger game. Buffalo Bill exclaimed, his eyes bright, his face aglow. "General! Now's our chancel Why not let our party mount here out of sight, and we'll tend to those fellows, ourselves!" "Good! Up with you, then. King, you stay here and watch until they're close under the hill; then give the word. Come down, every other man of you, where you won't be seen." Besides the general and Lieutenant King, the party on the hill numbered Adjutant Forbush, Lieutenant Pardee, old Sergeant Schreiber, Corporal Wilkinson, the four privates of the picket, the general's orderly private, Scouts Buffalo Bill, Tait and "Chips": twelve in all. They will charge the thirty Cheyennes; or some of them will. Alone, Lieutenant King watched, careful to lie flat and poke only his head over the brow of the hill. Much depended upon him. If he signaled too soon, the Cheyennes would wheel and escape. If he signaled too late, they would have passed in front of the hill and attacked the two couriers. He waited. On the farther side of the slope Buffalo Bill, Scouts Tait and "Chips" and the five privates were mounted and set for a charge. Eight, to turn the Cheyennes! Just behind Lieutenant King were the general and the two lieutenants of his staff, crouching, ready to repeat the signal. And behind them were Sergeant Schreiber and Corporal Wilkinson, on hands and knees, to pass the signal back to Buffalo Bill, at the base of the hill, and then join the fight or their company. The Cheyennes swiftly approached, swerving through the winding ravine, intent upon striking their unconscious prey. Their feathers, their pennoned lances, their rifles, their trailing war bonnets, their brass and silver armlets, their beaded leggins, were plain to Lieutenant King's field-glasses. He might read the legend painted on the leader's shield. He let them come. They were within five hundred yards; they were within three hundred yards; they were within two hundred yards. He did not need his glasses, now. He might see them slinging their rifles and poising their lances. It was to be lance work; they did not wish to 168 FRONTIER DAYS alarm the wagon train with gun-shots. One hundred yards! Half a minute more and they would be rounding the point where the ravine bordered the hill slope, and would be upon the two couriers. Ninety yards "Ready, general!" "All right. When you say." "Now! Into 'em!" "Now, men!" It occurred in an instant. With cheer and thud and scramble Buffalo Bill's little detachment had spurred from the covert of the hill. The carbines spoke in a volley. General Merritt is first to the top of the hill, to gaze; Corporal Wilkinson bounds beside him, takes quick aim and fires at the Cheyenne leader in the cloud of dust below. The leader (he is a young chief) had reined his pony in a circle sharply out and to the left; he notes the group on the hill-he notes everything; he ducks to the far side of his horse and still at full speed shoots back from under his mount's neck. The bullet almost grazes General 'Merritt's cheekl Down in front there was lively work for a few minutes, as Buffalo Bill's little command charged in. The Cheyennes scattered, astonished; they turned for their main body. "Look!" Lieutenant Forbush cried. "Look at the ridge!" Pouring down the ridge, all the Cheyennes were coming, to the rescue and the attack. "Send in the first company," General Merritt ordered; and with his adjutant galloped away. The real fight was about to begin. Out upon the plain the Buffalo Bill men were chasing the Indians, knowing that the cavalry would soon follow. At a short distance the Cheyennes made another stand. Their young chief cantered out in front of them, his hand raised. He called clearly to Buffalo Bill. "I know you, Pa-he-haska (Long Hair). If you want to fight, come and fight me." He rode boldly up and down along his line, waiting. Buffalo Bill galloped forward alone. "Stand back," he ordered, of the men. "Fair play." The young chief saw him coming, and with a shout gladly hammered to the meeting. They had started one hundred and thirty yards apart. They each rode at top speed for fifty yards, when from FRONTIER DAYS 6 169 thirty yards, as they swerved, they fired. Down plunged Buffalo Bill's horse; he had only stepped in a badger-hole. Down also plunged the chief'is pony; but he was dead and the bullet that had killed him had passed through the chief's leg, first. They sprang to their feet. They were now twenty yards apart. The young chief tottered-they fired together, again; they had to act very quickly. The chief missed; Buffalo Bill had shot true. He leaped forward, as the chief reeled, and sank his knife to the hilt. All was over in a moment. A great howl of rage arose from the Cheyennes. They charged, for revenge. They were a fraction of a minute too late;- the cavalry were coming. As Troop K, Lieutenant King's company, tore past, Buffalo Bill waved his captured war bonnet. "First scalp for Custer!" he shouted. Custer and the Seventh Cavalry were to be avenged. Seeing troop after troop of blue-shirts spurring over the divide and down, the Cheyennes, every one of their eighteen hundred, turned in flight. Away they went, the cheering troopers hard after, back up the trail for the reservation. The pursuit was so hot that they threw aside their blankets, rations, whatever they might drop. They lost several ponies and two warriors besides the young chief, but they wvon the race and were in their reservation by noon! Here they hid their guns and their ammunition, wNashed off their paint; and when at seven o'clock that evening General ]Merritt's tired column filed in, they were strolling about, in their f resh blankets, perfectly peaceful. Nevertheless, they and all the other Indians on the reservation were keen to see Pa-he-haska, the white man wvho had killed the skillful young chief Yellow Hand in single combat. HUNTING THE BUFFALO By HARLAN B. KAUFFMAN 4P TO 1870 there had been little demand for buffalo hides U among the white people, West or East; they had not yet learned their value. Most of the skins had been obtained from the Indians by the post-traders--legitimate trading, jj so-called. Besides the post-traders there was a class of men who lived chiefly by exchanging with the Indians for buffalo robes, guns, ammunition and whisky. It is safe to say that both "outfits" cheated the Indians. The post-trader was recognized by the post-commander and kept under wk~ages men familiar with the Indians and their methods of trading. These sub-traders mingled with and often intermarried with the Indians; and were authorized to assemble the chiefs of the tribes at intervals for the purpose of fixing schedules. After a feast furnished by the trader the price for each buffalo robe would be agreed upon, and this price would hold good for the season-often longer in times of peace. A fine robe often brought seven pint cups of brown sugar, or so many pieces of pipe clay ornaments for the breast, or German silver ornaments for the scalp-lock, or a couple of yards of cloth for a breechclout; a gaily colored blanket often brought three or four good hides. This desultory trading had not diminished the vast herd of the buffaloes. During the first seventy years of the past century the buffaloes ranged over an enormous territory-from the Gulf north nearly to Hudson Bay, and from the Mississippi westward to the Rockies. There were always buffaloes in the Rockies, but few as compared 170 FRONTIER DAYS 17I from the time the destruction began, the buffaloes were almost entirely exterminated; a wholesale slaughter of big game that has never been equalled. Now there are not more than a few wild buffaloes left on this continent, and most of these live under protection in the National Parks. The destruction of the buffaloes was chiefly the work of the skin hunters-not the Indians or settlers. Most of the killing by the Indians had been done from horseback, with very little damage to a herd. The Indian with his native aversion to work, never hunted on foot. With the completion of the Union Pacific Railway in 1869, and the consequent inrush of settlers to the West and Southwest, there sprang up an immense demand for buffalo robes and hides. To meet this demand there arose a class of hunters, unique in the history of big game killing. There men, killing buffaloes as little for the sport of it as the Easterners who slaughtered them by the hundreds from the car windows of the Union Pacific and left them to rot on the plains, hides and all, were intent only on the profit to be made from the sale of the hides. Necessarily they were a hardy and efficient lot. A hunter with sufficient capital generally outfitted himself with a couple of wagons, ten or twelve head of horses, and three or four partners. The outfit (outfit is one of the most fre 172 FRONTIER DAYS quent words in the expressive vocabulary of the West, and it is hard to find a substitute that will do as well) usually camped on some stream or near a spring, and in the early morning the hunter climbed the highest point and scanned the country. Having sighted a herd of buffaloes, he noted the direction of the wind and the lay of the country, and if the distance were not too great, started out on foot, keeping himself under cover and following the course of a ravine if possible. If no cover afforded, it was necessary to get down on hands and knees at once, and crawl within range-rather a ticklish job, as more often than not a rattlesnake barred the path. In this event there were two alternatives: stare the snake out of countenance until he retreated, or crawl slowly around him. The latter was the safer choice; with care not to get nervous and jump, for the day's work would then be over. A crawling man had a peculiar fascination for watching buffalo, but the sight of a man erect would stampede them in an instant. The matter of range depended upon the judgment of the hunter and his ability as a shot -anywhere from two hundred to four hundred yards. The first shot had to be a dead one, for then the beasts would behave much like cattle, gathering around the unlucky member of the herd, pawing and bellowing, but not, for a few moments, stampeding. Then would come quick work for the hunter, his success depending upon the number of shots he could get in before the herd would break to run-still lying flat on his stomach and shooting from that position. A buffalo could carry a surprising amount of lead, so long range shooting after the band would stampede was not very effective. In hunters' parlance the foregoing is known as a "stand," and the ability to kill a large number of buffaloes at one stand made the successful hunter. Sometimes when a herd broke from a stand the hunter's partners came up on horseback and gave chase. Their part was to rope and stake down as many calves as possible, thus causing the mothers of the respective calves to drop out of the herd and stay with their offspring whence they could be killed at leisure. It was useless to follow a stampeding herd far on horseback, as the buffalo, in spite of his bulk, covers ground swiftly; and on a down grade has considerable advantage of the horse, because of his huge shoulders and short, stocky forelegs. The record for the greatest number of buffaloes killed at one stand seems to have been held by Charlie Rath (in the Southwest)-one of the best FRONTIER DAYS 173 hunters of his day, and one of the twenty-eight who fought at Adobe Walls. Rath shot 107 head of buffaloes at a single stand on the Canadian river in '73. James Hanrahan's record was 52, and no doubt many good hunters equaled that. Hanrahan had that year given up his position as Government wagon master, to enter the more lucrative field of skin hunting. The buffalo hunters used the old Sharps rifle.55 calibre, and weighing fourteen pounds; the heaviest and most accurate rifle ever made. Nowadays a Sharps is very hard to find, even as a curiosity. The careful hunter always loaded his own shells. Firing a heavy charge, a Sharps would kill at fifteen hundred yards, a necessary power, for the neck of a buffalo bull offers more resistance to a bullet than a pine board. Against an army of hunters equipped with such formidable weapons the buffaloes had little chance. The slaughter was tremendous. Hanrahan says that he has often seen enough buffalo carcasses scattered around a single camp at the close of the hunting season to keep the city of Salt Lake in meat for a monthand it all went to waste. The hides netted the hunters all the way from three to five dollars apiece, rarely more than that in the '70's. Now of course an overcoat made from buffalo skins can scarcely be obtained at any price. The mercenary killing of the buffaloes seems most unsportsmanlike to the big game hunter of to-day. Yet in the words of Hanrahan, "No set of pioneers from Boone down ever lived in such constant danger of their lives. Not a day out of hunting but the two uppermost thoughts in their minds were: to make a big kill, and what they should do if the Indians attacked them-and generally the latter was the paramount idea. The hunter while approaching his game always kept one eye open to the military advantage of the ground in the event of an ambush, and he felt safer after he had killed several buffaloes, which might serve as a barricade in an emergency." There was no little danger from the buffaloes themselves. A wounded bull sometimes charged the smoke in headlong anger, and it took steady nerve and accurate shooting to finish him in time. The buffalo is surprisingly agile for his bulk, and a maddened bull has been known to gore a horse to death before the frightened animal could evade him. The hunters were also in danger from stampeding herds. All animals that go in herds are subject to wild fits of terror, during which they become completely 174 '74 FRONTIER DAYS mad and rush blindly over obstacles, often to their death. The cowboys were compelled to be perpetually on guard against stampedes among their cattle. One of the Indian's favorite methods of killing buffaloes was to stampede a herd over a cliff, and pick out the carcasses they wanted. The only traces of the buff aloes to be seen to-day are the whitened skulls that dot the plains here and there, and the trails or ruts formed by the passing of countless individuals in single file. Many of these are so deep that a horseman riding in them can touch their edges with his stirrups. These old trails are still followed in riding across uneven country, because the buffaloes, like cattle, always took the easiest course, instinctively. The encroachment of the white people after the easy transportation afforded by the railway, and the killing of the buffaloes by the skin hunters were bitterly resented by the Indians. The Indians of the plains had been almost wholly dependent upon the buffaloes for their living. Buffalo meat was their chief food: at the close of the hunting season they cut it into strips, dried it or "jerked"~ it, and subsisted on it during the winter. They used the skins for their clothing, for their beds, for covering their wickiups, and even for shields. The war shield of a brave was made of two thicknesses of the neck of a buffalo bull, so tough that it would turn a bullet f rom any rifle but a Sharps. Yet the Indians had killed only enough buf - faloes for their needs; they had never depleted the herds. Small wonder that the red men fought the coming whites with such desperation, for the extermination of the buffaloes meant the loss of his chief means of subsistence. Yet the passing of both the Indian and the buffalo was inevitable. The great development of the West could never have begun until their occupancy ended. CHIPS FROM AN INDIAN WORKSHOP By BENJAMIIN P. AVERY URING a journey along the high Sierra, at various points D from Lake Tahoe to Mlount Shasta, the writer was interested in observing the evidences of Indian handicraft. There is no reason to believe that any tribes permanently lived at great elevations in the Sierra Nevada, if anywhere within the deep snow-line. In the summit valleys, about the lakes, and at the sources of streams, where these wild children of Nature would find it most convenient and pleasant to live, the elevation above the sea is from,0o00 to 7,500 feet, and the snow falls in winter to a depth of ten to twenty feet, continuing on the ground from November or December, when the fall commences, until June or July. Most of the lakes at this season are frozen and covered with snow; even the smallest streams are often banked over with snow; and the game has fled to the lower portions of the range. But while the high Sierra was not the constant home of the Indians, they resorted to it regularly in the summer season, extending from June to July to November, except where they were denizens of the great lower valleys, which supplied them with all they needed in every season, and were, moreover, occupied by the less warlike tribes, who were seldom able to cope with their hereditary foemen of the mountains. The summit region of the Sierra Nevada furnished good fishing in its lakes, and some of its streams. Deer, and mountain-quail, and grouse abounded. Huckleberries, thimbleberries, wild plums, choke-cherries, gooseberries, and various edible roots were tolerably plentiful. The furry marten, weasel-like animals, woodchucks, and squirrels were tempting prey. The water was better and the climate cooler than those at a lower elevation. Hence this region was the resort of Indians from both slopes of the range, and often the possession of a picturesque valley by lake or river was decided by battle between tribes from Nevada and California. The Hetch-Hetchy Valley, or ''Little Yosemite," for instance, was, up to a very recent date, disputed ground between the By permission from OVERLAND MONTHLY. 17S 176 FRONTIER DAYS Pah-Utahs, from the eastern slope, and the Big Creek Indians, from the western slope, who had several fights, in which the Pah-Utahs (commonly called Piutes) were victorious. As the mountain Indians, and those of the Nevada plateau, were comparatively nomadic in their habits, they left few or none of those large black mounds, indicating long and constant residence, which were left so abundantly by the mud-hut builders of the Sacramento basin. Pieces of bark stripped from fallen pines or firs, and slanted on end against tree-trunks or poles, with a circle of stones in front for a fire-place, were the usual shelter of the California mountain tribes, except that in the northern extremity of the State, where the winter climate is more rigorous, some of the tribes-notably the Klamaths and their congeners-built log-huts, employing bark and brush shelters only in their summer fishing and hunting excursions. Speaking generally, therefore, the mountain Indians have left few traces of themselves, except the stone implements which are occasionally unearthed, or still found in the possession of the wretched remnants of once powerful tribes. Along the summit of the Sierra Nevada there is scarcely any memento of them to be found, except the arrowheads shot away in hunting or fighting, or the broken arrowheads and chips from the same to be gathered at places which have evidently been factories of aboriginal weapons. The most notable find of this latter sort made by the writer was at the Summit Soda Springs-a most picturesque spot at the head of the northernmost fork of the American River, nine miles south of Summit Valley Station on the Central Pacific Railroad. Here, at an elevation of about 6,300 feet above the sea, the river breaks through a tremendous exposure of granite, which it has worn into narrow gorges several hundred feet deep, except where it runs rapidly through valley-like glades of coniferous woods, in which the new soil is covered with a rank growth of grasses, flowering plants, and shrubs-where the deer come to drink at the salt-licks, and the piping of quails is constantly heard, alternatipg with the scolding cry of jays and the not unpleasant cawv of the white-spotted Clark crow. Just in the rear of the public house kept at this locality, the river tumbles in slight falls and cascades over slanting or perpendicular walls of richly colored granite, shaded by beautiful groves of cedar and yellow pine, which grow in the clefts of the rock to the very edge of the stream, and crown the FRONTIER DAYS'7 177 dark cliffs above. On the rounded tops of the ledge overlooking these foaming waters, on both sides of the stream, the Indians used to sit, chipping away with stone upon stone, to make arrowheads. This was their rude, but romantic workshop; and the evidences of their trade are abundant on the sloping rock, in the coarse granite soil which forms the talus of the ledge, and in the blackened litter of their ancient camp-fires. Before these deposits had been disturbed by visitors to the springs, fragments of arrowheads and chips of the materials composing them could readily be found upon the surface, where not covered by bushes. Their flat shape and light specific gravity caused them to wash to the top, and one had only to look carefully, lightly raking with finger or stick the superficial gravel, to find many a curious specimen. In this peculiar quest many persons, including ladies, who cared nothing for the scientific or artistic suggestions of the simple objects sought, developed a strong interest. It kept them out of doors with Nature; it gave them a pretext for remaining in the air by a lovely scene; it aroused that subtile sympathy which is excited in all but the dullest minds by the evidences of human association with inanimate things, and particularly by the relics of a race and a life wN1hich belong to the past. The Indians who congregated at this point, summer after 178 178 FRONTIER DAYS summer, whether from Utah or California, employed in arrowhead making every variety of flint rock, of slate, spar, and obsidian or volcanic glass. The larger heads were made of slate and obsidian, which materials served also for spear-heads, used formerly in spearing fish, and commonly from two to four inches long. Obsidian seems to have been better adapted for all sorts of heads than any other material. It could be shaped with less risk of breaking in the process, and could be chipped with flint to a much sharper edge on the point. The points of some of the small obstinate heads gathered by the writer are so keen, even after long burial or surface floating, that a slight pressure will drive them into the skin of the finger. The greater number of small arrowheads found, as well as the larger proportion of chips, consisted of the flints, including jasper and agate, variously and beautifully colored and marked; of obsidian, of chalcedony, of smoky quartz, and feldspar; very rarely of quartz crystal, and in only one instance of cornelian. While the larger heads measure f rom an inch and a half to two, three, or four inches in length, wvith a breadth of half an inch to an inch or an inch and a half at the widest part, the smaller heads measure only from three-quarters of an inch to an inch in length, their greatest breadth being seldom more than half an inch. The latter were evidently intended for small game chiefly, and especially for birds and squirrels. The workmen seem to have had more difficulty in making them, for they are often found broken and imperfect. This was due not alone to their size, but also chiefly to the difference in material when the small vein-rocks were used, these breaking with a less even fracture, and being full of flaws. Persistence in the use of such uncertain material, when obsidian was so much better adapted to the purpose and equally abundant, would seem to have been dictated by a rudimental taste for the beautiful. A collection of the jasper, agate, chalcedony, and crystal chips and heads presents a very pretty mixture of colors, and the tints and markings of these handsome rocks could not but have influenced their selecion by.*%.%the Indi AmTrans, who1-1 spe-NC "a fil ntnuponthei r Iman"-Ipulat IoIn f an ne FRONTIER DAYS 179 arrows were carried. Here is the tip of a beautifully cut jasper head. We can fancy the chagrin of the Indian maker when an unlucky blow from his stone implement, or an unsuspected flaw in the flint, caused it to break off. In one instance several fragments of the same head of this material were found and fitted together. There is some reason to suppose that the selection of the above materials may occasionally have been decided by the superstitious attribution to them of occult qualities. Nearly all aboriginal tribes, and even some civilized races, have attached a peculiar sanctity and potency to certain stones, and the Chinese to this day give a religious significance to the jade. It is uncertain, however, to what extent such notions obtained among and influenced the simple savages of California. None of the rocks used at this Indian workshop were obtained in the locality. The writer was able to trace their origin to the shores of Lake Tahoe, across the western crest of the Sierra, and not less than twelve or fifteen miles from the Soda Springs by any passable trail. There they are so abundant as to have partly formed the beautiful gravel beaches for which the lake is famous. The obsidian proceeded from the ancient craters that adjoin the lake, the source of those enormous ridges of volcanic material which form its outlet, the canion of Truckee River. Doubtless the flints, I................................. I g 7 INS 180 FRONTIER DAYS slates, and obsidian of this region formed objects of barter with the lower country Indians, who seem to have anciently used them, for the writer remembers seeing arrowheads of such materials among the Sacramento Valley tribes sixty years ago. On the Lake Tahoe beaches are sometimes found spearheads of obsidian five inches long, with perhaps an inch of their original length broken off, generally at the barbed end. On the shore of the Ice Lakes, in Anderson Valley, the writer picked up a skillfully cut and very sharp spearhead of grayish-white flint, which must have been over four inches long before the barbed end was lost. Similar materials to the above were used, and still are used to some extent, by the mountain Indians in the northern Sierra, as far as Mount Shasta, the rocks of the crest furnishing them everywhere along the line of volcanic peaks which dominate the range. About the flanks of Mlount Shasta, especially on the McCloud River side, obsidian is very plentiful, and, with some beautifully variegated flings, seems to have been most used. The writer found extensive chippings of it at several points on the head-waters of the Sacramento, notably at Bailey's Soda Springs, thirteen miles south of Strawberry Valley, 'where the Castle Rocks-fantastic crags of granite-push up through the slates and lavas of the neighborhood 2,500 feet above the river. Here, as at the Summit Soda Springs, nearly four hundred miles to the south, the Indians had chosen one of the most charmingly picturesque spots for an arrowhead factory. But here something else than an instinct for the beautiful moved them in their choice of locality for there is fine trout and salmon fishing in the river. Again, the snow-fall is not so great on the Sacramento as to drive the Indians away in the winter. Its bank is their preferred home at all seasons. There they still fish and hunt, and are more nearly in a primitive condition than their kindred farther south, who are now few in number and more or less domesticated with the Whites. Of course, since the Indians of the Sierra Nevada came into familiar contact with the Whites, they have adopted fire-arms, in preference to bows and arrows, when they can obtain them, and even where they retain the latter are very apt to use metal or artificial glass in making arrow and spear heads. Going back to the days before the Pale-face invaded their land, one can easily recall groups of these aborigines, seated on the picturesque lake and river FRONTIER DAYS 181 -spots they always chose for their homes or summer resorts-sorting out the beautiful stone they had procured for arrowheads, and chipping away slowly as they chatted and laughed, while the river sung, or the cataract brawled, or the piny woods whispered, as musically and kindly to them as to us. DIGGING IN ON BEECHER'S ISLAND By EDWIN L. SABIN cw + *HEY had come-the Dog Soldiers and their alliesl As if sprung from the very ground, they were charging in, down the valley slope at the rear of the camp, in across the level on the east, up the river between, all in the dusky pink of the morning. They yelled and cavorted, + their war bonnets streamed, their lance tufts tossed above their painted shields, they shook guns and bows, the earth trembled to the drum of the ponies' hoofs. Only the back trail, down river, to the north, was open. It would lead through the narrow end of the valley, and Colonel Forsyth was too wise a soldier to take it. The enemy would have asked nothing better; they hoped to force him and his fifty upon it and pocket them in the gorge. "Ste'adyl Hold them off, menl Deploy your skirmishers, Beecherl" he shouted. He had been thinking rapidly. He remembered the Fetterman affair, of 1866, when just outside of Fort Phil Kearney in northern Wyoming Captain William J. Fetterman, Captain Fred H. Brown and seventy-nine men had been surrounded and killed by Chief Red Cloud's Sioux; had been ridden down in one last great charge. The Captain Fetterman detachment had been caught in the open. This was a similar case, for in all the valley there was no refuge except "How about that island, Grover?" he asked quickly, while the men shot fast and the warriors began to gallop in a circle. "It's all we can do," said Scout Grover. "On foot, to the island, boys! Don't delay. Lead your horses. Tie them to the bushes and we'll fight from there." So in good order, cove red by the skirmishers, they fell back across the first channel, to the little island. It was sixty yards long and only twenty yards wide; the up-stream half was the higher, of From BOYS' BOOK OF' BORDER BATTLES. Copyright MIacrae-Smith Company. x82 FRONTIER DAYS 183 gravel and sand and willow brush. The down-stream half was low and almost bare, with one cottonwood tree as a sentinel. Scout Jack Stillwell and two other crack shots ran across the lower end and hid in a sand wash of the east bank-a natural rifle pit-to keep the enemy away from there. The rest tied the horses to the willow bushes, in a circle, and made ready to fight from inside the circle. They had managed to bring one mule with the extra ammunition, but they had left the medicine packs and all the camp stuff. "Lie flat, boys. Now, fire slowly, aim well, keep yourselves covered, and above all, don't waste a single cartridge," Colonel "Sandy" directed. Here they were, fifty-one surrounded by nobody knew how many warriors. As the morning grew brighter, Scout Grover estimated that there were one thousand. Colonel "Sandy" thought that there were not more than four or five hundred. They moved so quickly that it was hard to tell. But the truth is that there were at least seven hundred. The island was a piece of luck for the scouts. The enemy could not sneak upon it; the sandy strip on both sides was open to the deadly fire of the repeating carbines. Chief Roman Nose, the Cheyennes afterward said, was angry that his men had not seized the island themselves. He sent two hundred of his best shots to crawl through the grass and weeds to the brush of the banks; lying there they poured bullets and arrows into the white fort. That was a terrible fire. Scout William Wilson was killed, first, but the sharpshooters aimed principally at the horses. The scouts used the ammunition boxes and the horse bodies as breastworks; the bullets and arrows came in over. A great many Indian women and children had gathered upon the bluffs to the east; they shrieked and waved and urged the death of the white men. Brave Colonel Forsyth walked among his scouts, leading his horse and talking to them. They begged him to lie down, like the rest, but he would not. "Fire slowly. Choose your marks. Don't throw away a single bullet. That's right-dig when you can, but keep down," he said. 184 184 FRONTIER DAYS "Part of you dig pits, large enough for one or two, while the others shoot. " Old Doctor Mooers was using his carbine. Lieutenant Beecher, Sergeant McCall and Chief Scout Sharp Grover seconded their colonel with cautioning words. The men dug, while they lay flat; wielded knives and tin cups and fingers and toes, scooping out little hollowN-s in the sand. The sun rose in the clear sky, flooding the island with light and showing the Indian women and children upon the bluffs, and the puffs of smoke from the red skirmishers, and the hissing arrows twinkling in, and the bonneted horsemen of Chief Roman Nose riding around and around, yelling triumphantly. Colonel "Sandy" uttered an exclamation, and sank. A bullet had entered his right thigh and glanced upward, making a painful wound. But he staggered to his feet again; hobbled about, directing and encouraging. Now he paused, and stooped to speak to a man w~ho seemed to be getting nervous. A second bullet struck him -tore into the calf of his left leg, and through the large bone, and out. The bone was broken sheer in two. So he crawled with hi's elbows and lay beside Scout Grover. The Indians were blowing an artillery bugle in the distance. From the bank somebody shouted, in good English: "There goes the last horse down!" This was true. Every animal had been killed. The fifty-one white men had been put af oot. Doctor Mooers' pit was large enough for two men. He had Colonel "Sandy" dragged to him, but could do nothing for him, yet. Nine o'clock had arrived. The sun burned, the air was blue with powder smoke. The circling warriors had disappeared. Roman Nose had withdrawn them up the river, around a bend that concealed them from the island. They were five hundred. The chief medicine man told them that the white men's bullets should not +I% M"' harmn thm-holCmltbeoe eahigthm hsMed Icine V A FRONTIER DAYS and bows deluged the rifle pits with bullet and arrow, preparing the way for the charge. That was good tactics. Colonel "Sandy" and Sharp Grover and Lieutenant Beecher knew what was to occur. Orders were passed for the men not to reply to the firing, but to keep every carbine and revolver loaded, and wait. The colonel propped himself with his shoulders against the end of his pit, the better to see. A bullet ripped across his forehead; must have fractured his skull; gave him a blinding headache, but he could not attend to that. Doctor Mooers was shot through the temples. He acted unable to see, or speak, but he was alive. Lou McLaughlin had a ball in his chest. He fought on. The island was a hot place. Look I Here came the charge-first at a canter around the bend up stream, to the southwest. Eight ranks of horsemen, sixty warriors front, extending clear across the stream bed and upon the level ground on right and left! The riders were stripped and painted and feathered, their ponies were painted and decorated with streamers, they brandished bow and lance and gun and shield. And well before them all, there rode Roman Nose. He sat, bronze and magnificent, upon a splendid chestnut horse. Upon his head there was a great war bonnet, with two buffalo horns for its crest and an eagle-feather tail floating far behind. About his waist he wore a crimson officer's sash presented to him in the peace Council at Fort Ellsworth. In one hand he carried a Spencer repeating carbine. At the left of the front line there rode the chief medicine man, painted hideously, and chanting. The women and children upon the bluffs were shrieking and singing louder than ever; medicine drums were being beaten; the bugle was pealing; and the fire from the banks doubled. But the scouts upon the island waited, as they had been ordered to. Colonel Forsyth, tortured with his head and his legs, gazed cool and tense. Sharp Grover and the other men chewed hard, moistening their dry lips, clutching their guns and peering over the sand mounds and between the horse bodies. At a ringing whoop from Roman Nose and a flourish of his carbine the red cavalry broke into a gallop. The eight ranks charged, faster and faster, filling the river bed where it widened in 186 FRONTIER DAYS the approach to the island. The sand flew, the thud of hoofs and the yells of the riders drowned the singing, in a few moments the first rank was near-the firing from the banks ceased, to let the charge through-Roman Nose, leading at full speed, was only fifty yards away, with his warriors pressing after"Nowl" shouted Colonel "Sandy," bracing himself to level his own carbine. His scouts surged to their knees. "Crash!" The carbine levers clicked, jamming fresh cartridges into the chambers. Again: "Cr-r-rash!" The front rank of ponies and warriors had been torn to fragments, but the other ranks were coming on. "Cr-r-rash!" The scouts were working levers and pulling triggers as rapidly as they could. A fourth time"Cr-r-rash!" The red horde broke like a wave dashing against a reef. Horses were swerving and running wild, some riderless, some bearing wounded warriors; horses were prone and kicking, warriors were lying dead, the river bed was in a turmoil. Down toppled the medicine chief, on the left. Roman Nose! Where was Roman Nose? There, at the fore, turned in his saddle and shaking his carbine with lifted arm while he whooped his braves to the charge again. "Cr-r-rash 1" The fifth volley drove through and through from front to rear. The charge slackened-no, it rallied-the Dog Soldiers lashed their ponies, hammered with their moccasined heels, obeyed Roman Nose and followed him. Their leaders were within ten yards of the end of the island. The scowling faces could be seen over the sights; every wrinkle was plain. "Cr-r-rash 1" Down went Roman Nose, at last, in mid-leap, just about to plant his pony upon the island itself. Down went many another. The shattered ranks behind tried to stop, and could not. They parted - "Cr-r-rash!" The carbines were empty; the Indians streamed by, veering FRONTIER DAYS I87 outward on either side, hanging low upon their ponies, racing for the prairie and for life. Cheering, the scouts sprang to their feet and fired shot after shot at close range of their revolvers. That completed the rout. The warriors bolted up the banks and into the valley on right and left. The time had seemed like an hour, but the whole business was over in two minutes. Now the cries of the women upon the bluffs changed to wails. The flower of the Cheyenne nation had been slaughtered, Sioux and Arapaho had fallen. The Indians in the grass and brush along the banks were furious. They reopened the terrific fire of bullet and arrow. The scouts replied, searching the coverts for every movement, every puff of smoke. After a time the enemy withdrew. There was a lull. "Can the Indians do better than that charge, Grover?" Colonel "Sandy" asked anxiously. "I've lived on the plains ever since I was a boy, general, and I never saw such a charge as that. I think they've done their level best," Scout Grover declared. "All right, then; we're good for 'em," announced plucky Colonel Forsyth. Young Lieutenant Beecher crept unsteadily to him. "I'm fatally wounded, general," he said, "I'm shot in the side." "Oh, no, no, Beecher! It can't be as bad as that." "Yes, sir. Good night." So Lieutenant Beecher buried his face in his arm, to die like a soldier. He murmured the name of his mother. That was all. Pretty soon he became unconscious. He was past hope. So was poor Doctor Mooers, sightless and speechless. Of the three officers, only Colonel Forsyth was able to command, and he had been wounded three times. He called for the roll of the loss among the men. Scouts William Wilson and George Culver were dead. Old Louis Farley appeared to be fatally hurt, but was still fighting. Lou McLaughlin had been shot through the chest. Howard Morton had been shot through the back of the head, and one eye was destroyed, but he could aim with the other eye. Frank Herrington had been struck in the forehead by an arrow from an Indian boy; it had stuck fast; a comrade had cut off the shaft, and left the point 188 i88 FRONTIER DAYS in; then a bullet had glanced across and taken the point with it. Frank had bound his handkerchief around his head and fought on. Sergeant McCall was wounded. Lad Hudson Farley had been shot through the shoulder, but he said nothing about it until after dark. In all, two officers and four scouts were dead or dying, one officer and eight scouts were disabled, and eight other scouts were wounded. That made twNenty-three out of the fifty-one. The river bed and the prairie were strewn with ponies and not a few warriors. Thirty-five bodies could be counted. Roman Nose lay where he had fallen, with his sash not the only crimson showing against the bronze. Three warriors were stretched within twenty feet of the rifle pits. They had charged clear upon the island and part way into it! Scout Jack Stillwell and his two partners ran in and joined the company. Jack said that he had killed Roman Nose-had pulled upon him and knew that the ball had struck. The squaws were wailing in a chant that rose and sank and rose again. Tom-toms were being beaten. The Indians had assembled-matters looked like another charge. A chief appeared to be rallying the warriors. The scouts saved their ammunition; did not shoot, at that distance. Sharp Grover asserted that the chief was urging the warriors to try again. "Once more," he was saying, "and we will bring the wNhite dogs' scalps to our lodge fires." Scout Grover stood up, put both hands to his mouth, and shouted at the top of his lungs, in Sioux. "Hello, old fellow! Got any more people for killing? This is pretty tough, hey?" The chief stared in astonishment. "You speak straight," he shouted back. The island men busied themselves enlarging their pits, binding wounds as best they could with handkerchiefs and strips of clothing, and~ diggirng an trench to the water. FRONTIER DAYS 9 189 Now the Indians rode around and around in a wide circle, shaking their fists and their weapons, and hooting and threatening. Another medicine man capered, upon his pony, away off toward the bluffs. Six of the best shots on the island aimed high, so as to be sure to reach him, and pulled triggers together. With a great yell he tumbled like a stone; his pony ran for the bluffs, and the women shrieked louder than ever. About three o'clock a third attack was made. The Indians hoped that by this time the island men would be so exhausted by heat and thirst and wounds that they could not resist. The whole force of wvarriors rushed by horse and foot across the valley, from either side, to storm both ends of the island. The scouts wvaited, received them wvith bullet after bullet from the repeaters; caught them as they vaulted into the dry bed; and although several did gain the low foot of the island not one stayed there alive. This discouraged the enemy. The Cheyennes, Sioux and Arapahoes ranged themselves at long shot, and sat and rested, or dashed back and forth. The island was suffering-Colonel Forsyth was in torment from his head and legs. Nevertheless "We're all right, boys," he said. "Not a shot has been wasted. The advantage is ours. First, we've beaten them off; they know they can't lick us. Second, we can get water by digging only a few,7 feet. Third, for food, horse and mule meat is lying around loose in any quantity. And last, we've plenty of ammunition. So we'll win out yet. Now while we've time let's connect all the pits with a parapet of the saddles and ammunition boxes and horse carcasses. Put the saddle blankets down for the wounded, and be cutting strips of meat from the animals, to dry. And start a well. One thing's certain: those Indians won't attack us at night. They never do. It isn't Indian custom. So we'll have peace till morning, and a chance to rest. After dark we'll send two men out, for Fort Wallace, to get help They can.&W r % % Otakemy iel m p ad-cmpasand Iv %IA*%ft%*%- 0 %Z *Wt.ý% %^_ 3 ThA1 o-inkA.they'1 19o FRONTIER DAYS Scouts Pete Trudeau and Jack Stillwell were selected. They set out at midnight, in their stockinged feet, walking backward so that their tracks should mingle with the in-pointing moccasin tracks in the sand. To-night a heavy thunder shower drenched the island. It helped. The men lay quietly, with guards posted. They did not dare to light fires. The Indian camp was wailing and chanting. Before full daylight a party of mounted warriors again approached the island. They acted as though they thought that the white men might have abandoned it and were trying to escape by the trail down the river. This would have pleased the Cheyennes and all; they had left the down river route open, still, for a bait. The scouts crouched close; waited; gave them a volley that killed two and scattered the others. There were no more attacks to-day. The island was under siege, at long range. The men dug their well deeper; they strengthened their breastworks; gathered arrows and twigs and boiled a little horse flesh, for the wounded, in an old pickle jar that was in Colonel Forsyth's saddle-bags. Even if Scouts Trudeau and Stillwell had won free it would be some days before they reached Fort Wallace, and two or three days longer before help arrived. To-night Scouts Pliley and Whitney were started out. They were forced back, before morning; could not find a hole. This night most of the Indian bodies disappeared; the Indians had been heard, creeping to them and dragging them away. Roman Nose had vanished. Only the three bodies near the breastworks remained. On the third day the Indian women had left the bluffs; but the warriors stayed, watchful. A party of them advanced with a white flag. "Sign to them to keep off," Colonel Forsyth ordered of Scout Grover. "Tell them this is no peace commission. Shoot the first fellow who comes within range." It was thought that the Indians hoped to be given the three bodies. To-day the island men buried their own dead, while the Indians fired at long range. Lieutenant Beecher and four scouts were tucked to rest beneath the sand. Doctor Mooers moaned occasionally. He could not last much longer; lay stupidly, but seemed to know where I AV, (4 -I 1 iL SNITBRLJI'()UIET AN D CANT I N\iNI L N I FOR 'I"If INDIAN RARLL \NTl RIP FIUR1H Ai 'ILR IDARK FRONTIER DAYS 191 he was, for once in a while he reached and touched Colonel Forsyth's foot. Scouts Pliley and Donovan volunteered to try again with a message for Fort Wallace. It was brave men's duty. The chances were that Scouts Trudeau and Stillwell had been captured. Then the Indians would be looking for other messengers-and capture meant torture. How was it possible for any white man to cross the one hundred miles of plains without being caught? Colonel "Sandy" wrote a courageous dispatch. He dated it at Delaware Creek, but he really was on the Arikaree River-which shows that he had entered unknown country. On Delaware Creek, Republican River, Sept. I9, I868. To Colonel Bankhead, or Commanding Officer, Fort Wallace: I sent you two messengers on the night of the I7th instant, informing you of my critical condition. I tried to send two more last night, but they did not succeed in passing the Indian pickets, and returned. If the others have not arrived, then hasten at once to my assistance. I have eight badly wounded and ten slightly wounded men to take in, and every animal I had was killed save seven which the Indians stampeded. Lieutenant Beecher is dead, and Acting Assistant Surgeon Mooers probably cannot live the night out. He was hit in the head Thursday, and has spoken but one rational word since. I am wounded in two places, in the right thigh and my left leg, broken below the knee. The Cheyennes numbered 450 or more. Mr. Grover says they never fought so before. They were splendidly armed with Spencer and Henry rifles. We killed at least thirty-five of them, and wounded many more, besides killing and wounding a quantity of their stock. They carried off most of their killed during the night, but three of their men fell into our hands. I am on a little island, and have still plenty of ammunition left. We are living on mule and horse meat, and are entirely out of rations. If it was not for so many wounded I would come in and take the chances of whipping them if attacked. They are evidently sick of their bargain. "Bring all the wagons and ambulances you can spare," Colonel Forsyth added. "I can hold out here for six days longer, if absolutely necessary, but please lose no time."~ This night of September nineteenth Scouts Pliley and Donovan 192 192 FRONTIER DAYS took the message out. They did not return; when day dawned they were still absent. They must have got a little way, for no shots nor shouts had been heard. The Indians in sight gradually lessened. The island men ventured to steal to their former camp; they scraped some grains of coffee f rom, the ground and brought in a couple of camp kettles. The mule and horse meat was spoiling rapidly, but they sprinkled gunpowder upon it to kill the odor, and cooked it. A coyote wandered near. They shot him and ate him. Between times they gathered at their colonel's pit and talked things over with him. He remained true to his name "Sandy"never was downcast, never gave up, never asked for extra attention. Colonel "Sandy's" thigh was hurting him cruelly. He begged the men to cut the bullet out. They would not; it lay close against the large artery there, and they were afraid that he would bleed to death. Then he cut it out, himself, with his razor, and felt better. Once they lifted him upon a blanket, so that he might survey the country. A skulking Indian shot, and they dropped him upon his broken leg. The bone ends were driven through the flesh and he f elt worse. September twenty-second, the sixth day, dawned, and no rescue was in sight. By the sun and the rains and the night chill and the flies, the wounded were suffering dreadfully. The meat was sickening; the whole place reeked with the carcasses. Even the unwounded were growing weak. So Colonel "Sandy" called the men to him, and spoke. "You know the situation as well as I do, boys. Some of us are helpless, but aid must not be expected too soon. Our messengers may not be able to get through to Wallace, or they may have lost their way and be delayed. You have stood by me like heroes. I don't ask you to stay and starve. We can't live on this horse meat forever. The Indians have gone; we've given them such a lesson that I don't think they'll a1ttack agar#i~n. Those of yuswho re strong FRONTIER DAYS 193 "Not much, sir! We've fought together, and if need be we'll die together l" Not a man left the island. The message to Fort Wallace had said: "I can hold out here for six days longer, if absolutely necessary." The six days would expire on September twenty-fifth. The men swiftly grew weaker. The dried meat all was gone, the cooked meat had been eaten; only the carcasses remained. Soon the island was upon the shortest of short rations. Every mouthful of soup had to be swallowed with eyes and nostrils closed tight. By the evening of September twentyfourth no one was strong enough to leave the island, afoot, even if he planned to. Matters looked very dubious. Scouts Trudeau and Stillwell had been out seven nights and days; and this was the eighth day for the island. The morning of September twenty-fifth, the ninth day, was clear and hot, after a beautiful sunrise. Dark moving objects were seen upon the hills far to the south. "Injuns!" "They've come back!" The men stared with bleared, swimming eyes. "Well, we'll get some fresh horse meat, anyhow." They were still gritty, those Forsyth scouts. "Wait! Isn't that a dog? Looks like Doctor Fitzgerald's greyhound." Doctor Fitzgerald was the post surgeon at Fort Wallace. Scout Sharp Grover leaped to his feet and flung his carbine into the air. "By the Heavens above us, boys, there's an ambulancel It's the soldiers! We're rescued." The black troopers of Company H, Tenth United States Cavalry, under Captain and Brevet Lieutenant-Colonel Louis H. Carpenter, poured down the hill slope and across the valley. Scouts Trudeau and Stillwell had reached Fort Wallace; so had Scouts Pliley and Donovan. Scout Donovan was guiding the "brunettes," and Stillwell was coming with Colonel Bankhead. The starved island men feebly cheered; they had no words to waste-they rushed the foremost riders, clung to the saddles and tore at the saddle pockets, crazy for food. But Colonel Forsyth 194 FRONTIER DAYS Unable to rise, burning with fever and gaunt with hunger, he half lay in his pit, pretending to read a tattered old book. It was a paper bound copy of "Oliver Twist." He dared not join in the excitement; he wvas afraid that he would break down-he had to be the soldier and the commanding officer. Colonel Carpenter galloped in. Colonel "Sandy" closed his book, looked up wvith a wvan smile, and stretched out his quivering hand. "Welcome to Beecher's Island, colonel." PRAIRIE BATTLEFIELDS By GEORGE BIRD GRINNELL +* N N THE historic period, the Indian has always been a I I warrior. Urged on by the hope of plunder, the longing ' for reputation, or the desire for revenge, he has raided the White settlements and made hostile excursions against those of his own race; and each war party that set out + endeavoured to injure as much as possible the enemy it attacked. As each woman might fight or be a mother of warriors, and each child might grow to be a warrior or a woman, women and children were slain in war as gladly as men, for the killing of each individual was a blow to the enemy. It helped to weaken his power and to strike terror to his heart. But the Indian has not always been a warrior. Long ago, there was a time when war was unknown and when all people lived on From THE STORY OF THE INDIAN, by George Bird Grinnell. Copyright by D. Appleton and Company, Publishers, New York. 195 9g6 FRONTIER DAYS good terms with their neighbors, making friendly visits, and being hospitably received, and when they in turn were visited, returning this hospitality. The Blackfeet say that "in the earliest times there was no war," and give a circumstantial account of the first time that a man was killed in war; the Arickaras have stories of a time when war was unknown, and tell about the first fighting that took place; and in like manner many of the tribes, which in our time have proved bravest and most ferocious in war, tell of those primitive days before conflict was known. Previous to the coming of the whites there were no general or long-continued wars among the Indians, because there was then no motive for war. No doubt from time to time quarrels arose between different tribes or different bands of the same tribe, and in such disputes blood was occasionally shed, but I do not believe that there was anything like the systematic warfare that has existed in recent years. The quarrels that took place were usually trivial and about trivial subjects-about women, about the division of a buffalo, etc. Real wars could have arisen only by the irruption of one tribe into the territory of another, and the land was so broad and its inhabitants so few that this could have occurred but seldom. It is difficult for us, with our knowledge of improved implements of war, to comprehend how bloodless these early wars of the Indians must have been. A shield would stop a stone-headed arrow, and at a slightly greater distance a robe would do the same. Their stone-headed lances were adapted to tearing and bruising rather than to piercing the flesh, and their most effective weapon was no doubt the stone warclub, or battleax, which was heavy enough, if the blow was fairly delivered, to crush in a man's skull. In those old days, we may imagine that in many, if not in most, of the battles that took place, the combatants, however anxious they may have been to kill, were forced to content themselves with beating and poking each other, giving and receiving nothing more serious than a few bruises. Those who have witnessed fights in modern times between considerable bodies of Indians armed with ironpointed arrows, knives, and hatchets, will remember how very trifling has been the loss of life in proportion to the numbers of the men engaged. Such battles might go on for half a day without loss of life on either side, but when one party acknowledged defeat FRONTIER DAYS 197 and turned to run, the slaughter in the pursuit might be considerable. In these wars between different tribes, the greatest losses usually occurred when one party was surprised by another, the attacking party killing a number of men at the first onslaught, and perhaps in the ensuing panic. If, however, those attacked rallied and turned to fight, the assailants, unless they greatly outnumbered their enemy, often drew off at once, satisfied with what they had accomplished in the surprise. The story of the last great fight which took place between the three allied tribes of Pawnees and the Skidi tribe, just previous to the latter's incorporation into the Pawnee nation, is an example of this, and has never been told in detail. It gives a good idea of one view of Indian warfare, shows that they had some notions of strategy, and also brings out in strong relief the common sense and benevolence of the Kit'ka-hah-ki chief. The story was told me many years ago by an old Chaui, substantially as given below. He said: It was long ago. At that time my father was a young man. I had not been born. Many years before, the three tribes of Pawnees had come up from the south, and had found the Skidi living in this country. Their villages were scattered along the Broad River (the Platte) and the Many Potatoes River (Loup). There were many of them, a great tribe. But there were many more of the Pawnees than there were of the Skidi. When our people first met the Skidi, we were friendly; we found that we spoke a language almost the same, and so we learned that we were relations-the same people-so we smoked together and used to visit each other's villages, and eat together. We were friends. But after a while, some of the Skidi and some of the Chaui got to quarrelling. I do not know what it was about. After that there were more quarrels, and at last a Skidi was killed; and soon after that the people were afraid to go near the Skidi village, and the Skidi did not come near the Chaui village for fear they might be killed. One time in the winter, a party of men from the Chaui village, which then stood on the south side of the Broad River, just below the place of the Lone Tree (now Central City, Neb.), crossed the river to hunt buffalo between the Platte and the Loup. WVhen they were killing buffalo, a war party of the Skidi attacked them and 198 FRONTIER DAYS fought them, and killed almost all of them. Some of the Chaui got away and went back to their village and told what had happened, and how the Skidi had attacked them. Now at this time the Chaui and the Skidi tribes were about equal in numbers, and the Chaui did not feel strong enough to attack the Skidi alone. They were afraid, for they knew that if they did this, it might be that the Skidi would defeat them. The Kit'ka-hah-ki tribe were living on the Mluch Manure River (Republican), and the Pita-hau-i'rat on the Yellow Bank River (Smoky Hill). To these two tribes of their people the Chaui sent the pipe, telling them what had happened, and asking them for help against the Skidi. Each of the tribes held a council about the matter. All the best warriors and the wise old men talked about it, and each one gave his opinion as to what should be done; and they decided to help the Chaui. The two villages moved north and camped close to the Chaui village, and all the warriors of all three tribes began to get ready for the attack. By this time it was early summer, and the Platte River, swollen by the melting of the snows in the mountains, was bank full-too deep and swift to be crossed either by wading or swimming. So the women made many "bull boats" of fresh buffalo hides and willow branches, and in these the Pawnee warriors crossed the stream. The main village of the Skidi was on the north side of the Loup River, only about twenty miles from that of the Chaui. The crossing of the Pawnees was accomplished late in the afternoon, and a night march was made to a point on the south side of the Loup, several miles below the Skidi village. Here they halted and distributed their forces. One hundred men, all mounted on dark-colored horses, were sent further down the stream, and were told what to do when morning came. The remaining warriors hid themselves, half in the thick timber which grew in the wide bottom close along the river, and half in the ravines and among the ridges of the sandhills above this bottom. Between the sandhills and the timber was a wide, level, open space. The Pawnees were so many that their lines reached far up and down the stream. When daylight came, the one hundred men who had been sent down the stream came filing down from the prairie one after another. Each man was bent down on his horse's neck and covered FRONTIER DAYS I99 with his buffalo robe, so that at a distance these one hundred riders looked like one hundred buffalo, coming down to the water to drink. The spot chosen for them to pass could be seen from the village of the Skidi. In that village, a long way off, some one who was watching saw these animals, and called out to the others that buffalo were in sight. It was at once decided to go out and kill the game, and a large force of Skidi set out to do this. They crossed the river opposite the village, and galloped down the bottom on the south side. In doing this, they had to pass between the Pawnees who were hidden in the timber and those in the sandhills. They rode swiftly down the river, no one of them all suspecting that anything was wrong; but after they had passed well within the Pawnee lines, these burst upon them from all sides and charged them. Attacked in front, on either side, and in the rear-taken wholly by surprise, and seeing they were outnumbered-the Skidi tried to retreat, and scattering, broke through the lines wherever they could and ran, but all the way up that valley the victorious Pawnees slaughtered them as they fled. They took a good revenge, and killed more than twice as many of the Skidi as those had of the Chaui. At last the Skidi who were left alive had crossed the river and reached their village, and had told their people what had happened, and how they had been attacked and defeated, and had lost many of their men. All the warriors who were left in the village armed themselves, and came to the river bank to meet the Pawnees when they should cross, determined to die there fighting for their homes. When the Pawnees reached the crossing, a part of them wanted to ford the river at once and attack the Skidi village and kill all the people in it, so that none of the Skidi should be left alive. The chiefs and head men of the Pita-hau-i'rat and the Chaui wanted to do this, but the Kit'ka-hah-ki chief said: "No, this shall not be so. They have fought us and made trouble, it is true, but now we have punished them for that. They speak our language, and they are the same people with us. They are our relations, and they must not be destroyed." But the other two tribes were very bitter, and said that the Kit'ka-hah-ki could do as they liked, but that they were going to attack the Skidi village, burn it, and kill the people. For a long time they disputed and almost quarrelled as to what should be done. At length the Kit'ka-hah-ki chief got angry, and said to 200 FRONTIER DAYS the others: "My friends, listen to me. You keep telling me what you are going to do, and that you intend to attack this village and destroy all these people, and you say that the Kit'ka-hah-ki can do what they please, but that you intend to do as you have said. Very well, you will do what seems good to you. Now I will tell you what the Kit'ka-hah-ki will do. They will cross this river to the Skidi village, and will take their stand by the side of the Skidi and defend that village, and you can then try whether you are strong enough and brave enough to conquer the Kit'ka-hah-ki and the Skidi, fighting side by side as friends." When the Chaui and the Pita-hau-i'rat heard this, they did not know what to say. They knew that the Skidi and the Kit'ka-hah-ki were both brave, and that together these two tribes were as many as themselves. So they did not know what to do. They were doubtful. At last the Kit'ka-hah-ki chief spoke again, and said, "Brothers, what is the use of quarrelling over this. The Skidi have made trouble. They live here by themselves, away from the rest of us. Now let us make them move their village over to the Platte and live close to us, so that they will be a part of the Pawnee tribe." To this proposition all the Pawnees, after some talk, agreed. They made signs to the Skidi on the other bank that they did not wish to fight any more, they wanted to talk now, and then they crossed over. They told the Skidi what they had decided to do, and these, cowed by their defeat and awed by the large force opposed to them, agreed to what had been decided. The Pawnees took for themselves much of the property of the Skidis-many horses. This was to punish them for having broken the treaty. Also they made many of the Skidi women marry into the other Pawnee tribes, so as to establish closer relations with them. Since that time the Skidi have always been a part of the Pawnee nation. Cunning is matched with cunning in the following story, told me by the Cheyennes: About the year 1852 the Pawnees and the Cheyennes had a fight at a point on the Republican River, where there was a big horseshoe bend in which much timber grew. A war party of each tribe was passing through the country, and the scouts of each discovered the other at about the same time, but neither party knew that its presence had been detected. The Cheyennes, however, sus FRONTIER DAYS 201 pecting that perhaps they had been seen, displayed great shrewdness. They went into the timber, built a great fire, ate some food, and then cut a lot of logs, which they placed by the fire and about which they wrapped their blankets and robes, so that they looked like human figures lying down asleep. Then the Cheyennes retired into the shadow of a cut bank and waited. Toward the middle of the night, after the fire had burned down, the Pawnees were seen coming, creeping stealthily through the brush, and wvhen they had come close to the fire, they made an attack, shooting at the supposed sleepers, and then charging upon them. As soon as they were in the camp and were attacking the dummies, the Cheyennes began to shoot, and then in their turn charged, and in the fight which followed eighteen or nineteen Pawnees were killed. The old Cheyenne who told me this, chuckled delightedly, as he remarked, "The Cheyennes often laugh at this now." THE BAD MEDICINE MAN By HAMLIN GARLAND lr ^HE agent had never seen Gray Eagle, the Medicine Man T" |' of Coyote Canion, but reports from time to time came to. - him which gave the old man a bad name. Aglar, the Scaptain of the native police, spoke of him often, always W f ~in the same terms, "His heart is bad, Little Father." --.= ~ "What does he do?" asked the agent one morning as Aglar entered to make his report. "All manner of evil," replied Aglar. "His ways are filled with bad thoughts, and at night he works much dark magic." "But what does he do?" "He can shoot pellets of poison through the air into men's bodies and kill them instantly." The agent laughed. "You are crazy." "It is true as I say, Little Father." "Well, go bring him in. Let me see him." The three Indians looked at each other significantly, then at the agent, sitting behind his desk half-absorbed in other matters. At length Aglar, a handsome young fellow of thirty, cautiously inquired: "What will you do with him, Little Father?" The agent carelessly replied, "Oh, I don't know, hang him, mebbe." The three officers leaped to their feet with sudden joyous excitement. "Ah! It is good. He is to die, the evil one," they exclaimed to each other. The agent was suddenly aware of the mistake he had made in speaking so carelessly. He hastened to explain. "I want to see him. I will talk with him-if I find he has killed people he will be punished by the Great Father. If I find him harmless I will let him go again. I have no power to hang any one. Only the Great Used by permission of THE INDEPENDENT. 202 FRONTIER DAYS 203 Father can do that, but I will see if he is bad." But nothing he could say removed the impression his hasty words had made on their minds; speaking carelessly, he had spoken truthfully, such were their thoughts. "Now, you mark what I say-Aglar-I want to see this man alive. Go bring him in, and I will talk with him." Aglar looked askance. "\Ve are afraid, Father. He is a great magician. He will shoot beads into our bodies so that we will sicken and die." "Oh, nonsense!" But Aglar persisted. "It is true as I speak it, Father. He has made many sick in that way, and no one can cure them." "Turn this way," commanded the agent. The Indian turned and faced his chief. He was six feet in height, and built like a racer, and the agent looked at him for a moment before he began to speak. "Aglar, this magician you say is a little man, and old. I am ashamed of you. If you can't bring him in to me I don't want you to be my policeman any more. Take off the star on your coat, and hand your revolver over to me. Come, be quick. I will give them to some one who is willing to carry out my orders." The young man's face grew both sad and ashamed. He hesi 204 FRONTIER DAYS tated, and at last said: "Don't do that, Father, don't take my star away, the people would laugh and point the finger at me." "Then do as I say-bring this old man in so that I may talk to him and find out his mind." The three policemen silently withdrew, and the agent resumed his composition of a report to the Department, and the whole matter passed out of his mind. One dark night, some two weeks later, a courier came to his bedroom window and tapped, calling: "Little Father, listen!" "What is it?" the agent called. "Gray Eagle is dead." "Dead-who killed him? When?" "About midnight-Aglar came to my hogan and said-ride to the Little Father and tell him Gray Eagle is dead." The agent lay in silence thinking rapidly. He recalled his hasty words, and the pleased smiles of the three policemen and a feeling of blameworthiness came over him. He lay so long in silence that the courier spoke again. "Are you sleeping, Father?" "No, I am thinking. This is bad business. Ride back and tell Aglar and Gray Man and Sam Black to come tomorrow at noon, and bring everybody who saw the killing." "All right, I go." "Here's a nice mess," thought the agent. "Those cursed donkeys took my joke in dead earnest, and they've wiped out an objectionable doctor. I don't know that I blame 'em much; but, all the same, it isn't exactly the thing to be encouraged. I've got to raise a severe row about this or they'll be killing off some of my clerks or policemen. I must give somebody a big scare about this." He then turned over and went to sleep, while the faithful policeman was riding back up the cation in the cold and bleak dawn. What was a policeman for but to send on lonesome trails. After breakfast next day the agent called his chief clerk in, and said: "Miller, you must help me hold court to-day. An old medicine man has been killed, I think by Aglar, but I can't punish him for two reasons. One is, I think the old man needed killing, and the second is, I let some words fall a couple of weeks ago by way of a joke which these chaps took for encouragement. But we FRONTIER DAYS20 205 must make an awful example of them, someway. They must be impressed with the seriousness of taking human life." The clerk smiled. "All right, governor, they shall tremble. Who was the victim, Gray Eagle?" "Yes, do you know him?" "Oh, yes; the old sinner used to come down to the agency occasionally. He has made a lot of trouble up the cafion. He was alwvays meddling, as near as I can find out. He needed killing all right." "Well, that doesn't excuse us. We must stand for law and order." Miller grinned and wvent away whistling. By noon the people began to assemble. The word had passed quickly-Gray Eagle was dead, and the Little Father was about to judge the case. A great throng of people came down from Coyote Cafion, families came in wagons, the box completely filled with women seated on the bottom, While young men, bold and handsome, rode on ponies. Everybody seemed pleased to think Gray Eagle, the bad medicine man, was dead. The women chattered among themselves of the evil deeds he had wrought, and the old men most gravely detailed the miseries he had inflicted on them, and soon the agent's big office overflowed with men, women and children as eager to see the trial as the people of a Western town to see a hanging. The clerk came across the square, picking his teeth and deeply musing. He replied, but gruffly, to the polite greetings of the old men, and when he reached the door of his office he turned and harshly addressed the throng: "How many of you saw this shooting?" No one spoke. "Well, then, get out o' here. I don't want you hanging around my door. This is no place for you-go home. If I want you I'll send for you."? The people muttered and looked at each other, and at last began to mVA.&^Ie%,slowly, awayV %T,0.,They werelu 7accus -fI-IQtorNMed ito beinrng r dePred 206 FRONTIER DAYS those who know about the killing." Nevertheless, his voice softened a little for White-hairs, a thoughtful and honorable old man whose dignity and reserve made him ashamed of his own ill-temper. The people within made way for the agent, and spoke smilingly to him as he passed. "What are you all in here for? Do you think this a concert. Get out, every one of you. I'll call the ones I want! Go out into the waiting-room-Miller, clear 'em out-curse 'em, they'll sit on my desk next." He made a swift sign which stopped Aglar-"You sit down. I want you, and you too, Big Knee-Lame Wolf, you stand at the door and call the people in as I want them." Rapidly, silently, the Indians left the room. Before the fire an old woman cowered, warming her hands. She was still handsome, though very wrinkled and very thin. Her eyes were beautiful, and her broad, full brow indicated unusual powers, but her mouth was bitter and her manners sullen. "See here, mother," said the agent, "didn't you hear what I said?" She looked at him calmly. "Yes, I heard." "Then why don't you get out?" "I am the mother of Gray Eagle. I wish to hear what is said. In my hogan my son lies silent-your soldiers have killed him. I left off my mourning. I am here to see what you will do to those who killed my son, who was old and lame." The agent shrank a little from the blaze of her eyes. "Oh-very well, you can stay where you are." He looked at his clerk with intent to be humorous, and said: "I suppose in point of fact she is what they call chief witness for the State." "She's a smart old beast, you bet," replied the clerk. "The men all know old Yellow-Hand. I reckon she taught the son all the deviltry he knew." "How old is she?" "Nobody knows. She don't know herself. Gray Eagle was about sixty, so she must be eighty-five." The agent took his seat behind his desk, and the clerk and his assistants ranged themselves near. The guards at the door looked on with impassive faces, but their eyes sparkled with excitement. Eli0 r/" '7. 000 WO 001 Oft I lo xi Ole, FRONTIER DAYS 207 Aglar appeared sullen and a little anxious, but apparently did not see the old woman. The agent said sharply: "Well, now, Yellow-Hand, what have you to say about the killing of your son?" The old woman did not rise, she turned on her seat, and snapped: "Nothing! These men," she swept her hand round toward the policemen, "killed my son. If the Father does not punish them he is a coyote." "Who killed Gray Eagle?" "Aglar, Big Knee and Lame Wolf." "How do you know?" She remained silent. "Did you see them?" "No, I did not see them." "How do you know?" "They hated my son. They said you had told them to kill him. My son went to visit Aglar's sister-he was killed there. I found him lying in the sagebrush; there were three bullet holes in his body. They shot him." "When was that?" She made the sign for sunrise. "Who told you he was dead?" "Big Knee." "When?" "Just before sunrise." "Why did your son visit Aglar's sister?" "She was sick, and he went to drive away the evil spirits." "Who asked him to come?" "She did-Aglar's sister." "Did Aglar ask it?" "No." "Did any one see the shooting?" "I did not hear of any one. Big Knee came-I ran to find my son, now he lies cold-he cannot hear me. He was a good son and a wise man, and now they have killed him, the wolves." "Big Knee!" called the agent. The policeman came forward. He was a small man with a boyish, smiling face. "Did you see Gray Eagle killed?" "No." 208 FRONTIER DAYS "Do you know who did it?" "He's lying, of course," said Miller to the agent. "When did you find out that he was killed?" "About the middle of the night." "Who told you?" "Aglar's father." "What did he say?" "He said, 'Go tell the Little Father that Gray Eagle is dead'." "Did he say who killed him?" "No; he said tell the Little Father." "It was you who tapped on my window?" "Yes." "Go and send Aglar's father in to me." A word at the door brought an old man to view. He was grayflaired, with a rugged Scotch-Irish type of face. His eyes were grave, and his lips moved nervously as he drew near and stood waiting. "Long Moggasen: last night Gray Eagle was killed in your daughter's hogan. Did you see the shooting?" "Little Father, I did not; that is the truth." "What do you know about it, anyway? You were there in the hogan?" "Yes, Father; but I was sleeping, I was very tired. I heard loud voices, and before I could throw my blanket from my face I heard shots-one-two--three. When I ran out no one was to be seen by Gray Eagle-he was in the bushes and drawing his breath hard. While I looked at him he died. That is all I know, Little Father." The agent said to Miller, "All the same, he knows Aglar did it." The old woman at the fire uttered a croak like a crow-"You are a liar-you conceal the truth. Your son killed Gray Eagleyou know it-but you conceal it." The old man turned a calm glance at her and seemed about to speak, but closed his lips again and kept silence. "Long Moggasen, you are a good man, you always tell the truth. You are the kind of Indian the Great Father likes. Aglar, your son, has been a good policeman. This old woman says he killed Gray Eagle. I don't know this. I am trying hard to find out the FRONTIER DAYS 209 truth. It is a very bad thing to kill a man. The Great Father hangs men who do that, for he says if one man kills his enemy then another man may kill, too, and so by and by no man would be safe. There must be law. His law is you must not kill. If a man does wrong you must come and tell me, and I will tell the Great Father at Washington, and he will punish the evil man. Now, you must help me find out who did this bad thing. You must tell me who killed the Gray Eagle." The old man listened with almost painful interest, and it was plain he felt the gravity of the agent's words and the force of his appeal; but at the end he sat in silence, and at last said: "It is the truth-I do not know." "Very well, you may go," said the agent, kindly. As the questioning went on Aglar lost his look of subserviency. He ceased to be uneasy and sly, and his face became stern and his frame uplifted with singular dignity. His hand sought the star on his coat now and again nervously but not unsteadily. The questions of the agent seemed to be drawing the rope ever tighter about his limbs. Always he asked, "Did Aglar do it?" Suddenly he rose, and when the agent turned to look he was smitten with amazement. In place of the sullen, commonplace policeman stood a tall 210 FRONTIER DAYS young Indian, towering in majesty. His eyes were like fire-lit topaz, his voice deep and stern, and he abruptly began: "Little Father, you need not ask any more questions. I killed Gray Eagle. I will you the truth about it. My father did not lie. I will not lie. Gray Eagle was a bad man. I will tell you how it is. He killed many people with his poison beads which he sent into them in the night and afar off. He was a coyote-his feet made no noise in the night, and he walked abroad and breathed into the faces of little children and they died. My mother has seen this. He flew like the owl when there is no moon, and he caused women to be sick, and I have seen him make many horses lame. He laughed when we asked him to let us alone. "He had little powders which he put into food, and the ones who ate broke out in sores and the white doctor could not do them good. Nevertheless, my sister being very sick, my father thought to have him come. Blind Hawk was giving my sister medicine when Gray Eagle came in. My mother was very angry, because she did not like Gray Eagle-and my father asked him to go away, but the evil man laughed and would not go. He sat down by my sister's side and began to sing his song. "Now my sister was better. Blind Hawk had thrown the evil spirit out. She had eaten a good supper, and was sleeping when this bad man came in. He sat there a long time-so long that my father and mother, being old, fell asleep, but I watched. I saw the evil shine in his eyes-he was a cat. "At last he rose and put a powder between the lips of my sister and went out. Then my sister rose up, saying: 'He has poisoned me! I am burning up,' and she ran round in a circle like a dog that is crazy, and at last she fell on the floor and died in great pain. "Then, Little Father, I remembered your words and the evil of the man-and though he was a mighty wonder-worker, I ran forth where he was mounting his horse and I laid hands on him and pulled him to the ground. I killed him, and my heart was glad when I found he was not so strong as I feared. His magic power was taken away, for he had done a shameful deed-he had killed my sister, and his spirits would not help him. I shot him, Little Father, because I wanted to show that he was weak and wicked, and because I loved my sister, and that is the truth of it. You may do as you will with me-I am ready to suffer." The agent looked about him. The old woman at the fire rose, FRONTIER DAYS 211 and there was a stern dignity in her bearing, and her eyes were black pools of hate as she reached her crooked arm toward the murderer, and cried: "He lies; my son did no evil." Aglar did not flinch, his shoulders squared, and his head was rigid. "Little Father, I have told the truth, this is as I say. He was a bad man and I killed him. He poisoned my sister and many others. I killed him that he should do no more ill." "Dog-you lick the white man's foot. Go!" snarled the old woman, as she moved toward the door. "Let her go," commanded the agent, and the guard shoved aside to let her pass. "Aglar, take off your star." Aglar started slightly, and his body relaxed. "Off with it!" said the agent, harshly. The man undid it, and extended it in his open palm. The agent took it. "Now, your revolver." He unbuckled his belt. "Now your uniform." Aglar stripped himself to his calico shirt. Each moment made him sadder and less heroic. "Now you are no longer Aglar the police captain, you are only Left Hand. I do not know what will be done with you. The Great Father must decide. You can go till I hear from him. You must be here on the first day of next new moon and I will tell you what you are to do. Now go!" Aglar did as he was bid, but at the door he turned and, stretching his hand toward him with a gesture that silenced every lip, he said: "You punish me for your bad deeds. You lie and I go naked. You have the heart of a prairie dog-you dive in a hole when a man coughs. At one time you are brave; you say I will hang Gray Eagle, another day you say I will hang Aglar, because he kills a man who has poisoned many people. One day you say, 'Aglar, you are to prevent evil': Aglar kills a man so that he shall not slay women and children, and then you say, 'Aglar, I take away your star.' You are a liar and have two faces, one toward Washington, one toward the red men. Prairie dogl" As he went out no one spoke, and no one pointed at him in scorn, for they considered him a brave young man. He had killed a great conjurer, and he had silenced the Little Father. Besides he was once more Left Hand, a chief, and not a soldier for the white man. MAKING BUFFALO ROBES By ROBERT A. GIBBS MONG the Indians, the squaws did most of the hard work. A lt was their task, therefore, to cure the skins and to preA serve the meat. As buffalo robes were in great demand in the East, the squaws spent much time in making them. The hard and incessant labor that was necessary to tan ~~them properly by the Indian method cannot be realized by those who have never seen the work go on day by day. The first step was to spread out the pelt, or undressed hide, on the ground, where it was made fast by means of wooden pins driven into the earth through little cuts in the edge of the hide, the flesh side of the skin being uppermost. It would then be worked over by two or three squaws. The tools used in dressing the buffalo skin were often very crude; sometimes simply sharp stones or buffalo bones were used. I ý From WESTERN TALES, by Robert A. Gibbs. Used by special permission. 212 its rit-k tovi'l -,!at. L FRONTIER DAYS 213 Occasionally a better tool, such as a draw knife or the shaver used by coopers, was employed. The purpose of this work was to free the hide of every particle of flesh. In this way its thickness was reduced nearly one-half and sometimes even more. When this "fleshing," as it was termed, had been satisfactorily accomplished, the hide was thoroughly moistened with water in which buffalo brains had been steeped. For ten days the hide would be kept damp with this brain water. Once each day the hide would be taken up and every portion of it rubbed and re-rubbed by the squaws, who used only their bare hands, until it seemed as though the skin of their palms would be worn off. There seemed to be no definite rule as to the length of time needed to cure a hide. The squaw would work until it was satisfactorily tanned, which might require a week or two or perhaps even longer. Occasionally a robe was painted and decorated with the extremely crude materials that the Indians employed. The results attained were frequently greatly to the credit of the untutored wives and daughters of the tribe. By this work the price of the robe was increased, but as a rule the Indians kept the robes that they had so decorated, instead of exchanging them for the coveted sugar, coffee, and calico for which they usually traded. Back in the forties the Indians would camp near a trading post and come in when they had trading to do. They settled their little disputes themselves. For amusement they had pony races with each other and with mountaineers who came in with pelts, and enjoyed a good time generally. The old trading posts, on the outskirts of civilization in those days, were interesting places. Not many Indians would be let into a fort at one time, and those who were in had to exhibit good behavior or they would be put out. There have been more than 40,000 robes sent out from a single post as the result of one year's work. There was more money in the trade then than at a later period, when enterprising traders began to go among the Indians with their wares; for as soon as the merchants put themselves at the mercy of the Indians in the Indian villages, they had to give up so much of their stocks as presents in order to avoid being robbed, that there was very little profit left for them. 214 FRONTIER DAYS The table of currency used in the Indian trade was something like this: Ten cups of sugar make one robe. Ten robes make one pony. Three ponies make one tepee. The above table, however, was only a general standard to go by. Ten cups of sugar was not invariably the price of a robe. Some robes would bring more than ten cups and some might be sold for only five or six. When a trader had secured his robes, he would make a rude sort of press with upright saplings and a chain. With this he would squeeze the robes together as tightly as possible so as to make a compact mass of them before loading them into wagons, preparatory to taking them back to the East. Even fifty years ago buffalo robes were found in every sleighing party in the East and buffalo coats were worn to a great extent there, also. The wolves that prowled around the herds were patient. They would watch near the herds, keeping at a respectful distance. When a buffalo became sick or wounded or left the herd, the coyotes were about him in a moment, all prepared to do full justice to his juicy meat. The grey wolf, however, would hold them off. He was larger and stronger, and insisted upon the first seat at the table. His appetite satisfied, he would retire and permit the coyotes to pick the bones. There was usually a large number collected to join the feast. Ravens would also hover over the spot, swooping occasionally to seize some fragment. The feast usually ended in a fight in which the coyotes alone participated. The grey wolf seemed to be protected by his size, as he looked with admiring gaze at the fracas. SITTING BULL By WILLIAM F. CODY ("Buffalo Bill") - F ALL the Indians I encountered in my years on the Plains QO the most resourceful and intelligent, as well as the most Sdangerous, were the Sioux. They had the courage of Sdare-devils combined with real strategy. They mastered,? the white man's tactics as soon as they had an opportunity to observe them. Incidentally they supplied all thinking and observing white commanders with a great deal that was well worth learning in the art of warfare. The Sioux fought to win, and in a desperate encounter were absolutely reckless of life. But they also fought wisely, and up to the minute of closing in they conserved their own lives with a vast amount of cleverness. The maxim put into words by the old Confederate fox, Forrest: - < SK -g ' j - ~-----'~ct i..00-. *,.. From THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF BUFFALO BILL, by William F. Cody. Used by permission of Cosmopolitan Book Corporation. 215 V6 216 FRONTIER DAYS "Get there fustest with the mostest,"7 was always a fighting principle with the Sioux. They were a strong race of men, the braves tall, with finely shaped heads and handsome features. They had poise and dignity and a great deal of pride, and they seldom forgot either a friend or an enemy. The greatest of all the Sioux in my time, or in any time for that matter, was that wonderful old fighting man, Sitting Bull, whose life will some day be written by a historian who can really give him his due. Sitting Bull it was who stirred the Indians up to the uprising whose climax was the massacre of the Little Big Horn and the destruction of Custer's command. For months before this uprising he had been going to and fro among the Sioux and their allies urging a revolt against the encroaching white man. It was easy at that time for the Indians to secure rifles. The Canadian-French traders to the north were only too glad to trade them these weapons for the splendid supplies of furs which the Indians had gathered. Many of these rifles were of excellent construction, and on a number of occasions we discovered to our cost that they outranged the army carbines with which we were equipped. After the Custer massacre the frontier became decidedly unsafe for Sitting Bull and the chiefs who were associated with him, and he quietly withdrew to Canada, where he was for the time being safe from pursuit. There he stayed till his followers began leaving him and returning to their reservations in the United States. Soon he had only a remnant of his followers and his immediate family to keep him company. Warily he began negotiating for immunity, and when he was fully assured that if he would use his influence to quiet his people and keep them from the warpath his life would be spared, he consented to return. He had been lonely and unharppy in Canada. An accomplished FRONTIER DAYS 217 made between his people and the white men, and could recite their minutest details, together with the dates of their making and the names of the men who had signed for both sides. But he was a stickler for the rights of his race, and he devoted far more thought to the trend of events than did most of his red brothers. Here was his case, as he often presented it to me: "The White Man has taken most of our land. He has paid us nothing for it. He has destroyed or driven away the game that was our meat. In 1868 he arranged to build through the Indians' land a road on which ran iron horses that ate wood and breathed fire and smoke. We agreed. This road was only as wide as a man could stretch his arms. But the White Man has taken from the Indians the land for twenty miles on both sides of it. This land he had sold for money to people in the East. It was taken from the Indians. But the Indians got nothing for it. "The iron horse brought from the East men and women and children, who took the land from the Indians and drove out the game. They built fires, and the fires spread and burned the prairie grass on which the buffalo fed. Also it destroyed the pasturage for the ponies of the Indians. Soon the friends of the first White Men came and took more land. Then cities arose and always the White Man's lands were extended and the Indians pushed farther and farther away from the country that The Great Father had given them and that had always been theirs. "When treaties were broken and the Indians' rights were infringed, no one could find the white chiefs. They were somewhere back toward the rising sun. There was no one to give us justice. New chiefs -of the White Men came to supplant the old chiefs. They knew nothing of our wrongs and laughed at us. "When the Sioux left Minnesota and went beyond the Big Muddy the white chiefs promised them they would never again be disturbed. Then they followed us across the river, and when we asked for lands they gave us each a prairie chicken's flight four ways (a hundred and sixty acres); this they gave us, who once had all the land there was, and whose habit is to roam as far as a horse can carry us and then continue our journey till we have had our fill of wandering. "We are not as many as the White Man. But we know that 218 FRONTIER DAYS this land is our land. And while we live and can fight, we will fight for it. If the White Man does not want us to fight, why does he take our land? If we come and build our lodges on the White Man's land, the White Man drives us away or kills us. Have we not the same right as the White Man?" The forfeiture of the Black Hills and unwise reduction of rations kept alive the Indian discontent. When, in 1889, Congress passed a law dividing the Sioux reservation into many smaller ones so as to isolate the different tribes of the Dakota nation a treaty was offered them. This provided payment for the ponies captured or destroyed in the war of 1876 and certain other concessions, in return for which the Indians were to cede about half their land, or eleven million acres, which was to be opened up for settlement. The treaty was submitted to the Indians for a vote. They came in from the woods and the plains to vote on it, and it was carried by a very narrow majority, many of the Indians insisting that they had been coerced by their necessities into casting favorable ballots. Congress delayed and postponed the fulfillment of the promised conditions, and the Indian unrest increased as the months went by. Even after the land had been taken over and settled up, Congress did not pass the appropriation that was necessary before the Indians could get their money. Sitting Bull was appealed to for aid, and once more began employing his powerful gift of oratory in the interest of armed resistance against the white man. Just at this time a legend whose origin was beyond all power to fathom became current among the red men of the north. From one tribe to another spread the tidings that a Messiah was to come back to earth to use his miraculous power in the interest of the Indian. The whites were to be driven from the land of the red man. The old days of the W'est were to be restored. The ranges were to be re-stocked with elk, antelope, deer, and buffalo. Soon a fever of fanaticism had infected every tribe. Not alone were the Sioux the victims of this amazing delusion, but every tribe on the continent shared in it. There was to be a universal brotherhood of red men. Old enmities were forgotten. Former foes became fast friends. The Yaquis in M\exico sent out word that they would be ready for the great Armageddon when it came. As far north as Alaska there FRONTIER DAYS 219 were ghost dances, and barbaric festivities to celebrate the coming restoration of the Indian to the lands of his inheritance. And as the Indians danced, they talked and sang and thought of war, while their hatred of the white man broke violently forth. Very much disquieted at the news of what was going on, the War Department sent out word to stop the dancing and singing. Stop it! You could as easily have stopped the eruption of Mount Lassenl Among the other beliefs that spread among the Indians was one that all the sick would be healed and be able to go into battle, and that young and old, squaws and braves alike, would be given shirts which would turn the soldiers' bullets like armor-plate. Every redskin believed that he could not be injured. None of them had any fear of battle, or any suspicions that he could be injured in the course of the great holy war that was to come, the Ghost Dance War, which ended Sitting Bull's career, and which preceded the surrender of the North American Indians a short time later. THE BIGHORN By GENERAL RANDOLPH B. MARCY *HE bighorn or mountain sheep, which has a body like the T deer, With the head of a sheep, surmounted by an enormous pair of short, heavy horns, is found throughout the Rocky Mountains, and resorts to the most inaccessible peaks and to the wildest and least-frequented glens. It clambers over '-almost perpendicular cliffs with the greatest ease and celerity, and skips from rock to rock, cropping the tender herbage that grows upon them. It has been supposed by some that this animal leaps down from crag to crag, lighting upon his horns, as an evidence of which it has been advanced that the f ront part of the horns is of ten much battered. This I believe to be erroneous, as it is very common to see horns that have no bruises upon them. The old mountaineers say they have often seen the bucks engaged From THIRTY YEARS OF ARMY LIFE ON THE BORDER, by General Randolph 1B. Marcy. Biy permission of Ha~rper and Brothers, Publishers. 220 FRONTIER DAYS 221 in desperate encounters with their huge horns, which, in striking together, made loud reports. This wviii account for the marks sometimes seen upon them. The flesh of the big-horn, when fat, is more tender, juicy, and delicious than that of any other animal I know of. In its habits the mountain sheep greatly resembles the chamois of Switzerland, and it is hunted in the same manner. The hunter traverses the most inaccessible and broken localities, moving along with great caution, as the least unusual noise causes them to flit away like a phantom, and they will be seen no more. The animal is gregarious, but it is seldom that more than eight or ten are found in a flock. 'When not grazing they seek the sheltered side of the mountains, and repose among the rocks. ORIGIN OF THE MEDICINE PIPE By GEORGE BIRD GRINNELL ~ HUNDER-you have heard him, he is everywhere. He Sroars in the mountains, he shouts far out on the prairie. He strikes the hig rocks, and they f all to pieces. He hits a tr ee, and it is broken in slivers. He strikes the people, adthey die. He is bad. He does not like the tower0%ing cliff, the standing tree, or living man. He likes to strike and crush them to the ground. Yes!I Yes!1 Of all he is most powerful; he is the one most strong. But I have not told you the worst; he sometimes steals women. Long ago, almost in the beginning, a man and his wife were sitting in their lodge, when Thunder came and struck them. The man was not killed. At first he was as if dead, but after a while he lived again, and rising looked about him. His wife was not there. "Oh, well," he thought, "she has gone to get some water or wood," and he sat a while; but when the sun had disappeared, he went out and inquired about her of the people. No one had seen her. He searched throughout the camp, but did not find her. Then he knew that Thunder had stolen her, and he went out on the hills alone and mourned. When morning came, he rose and wandered far away, and he asked all the animals he met if they knew where Thunder lived. They laughed, and would not answer. The Wolf said: "Do you think we would seek the home of the only one we fear? He is our only danger. From all others we can run awvay; but from him there is no running. He strikes, and there we lie. Turn back! go home!I 222 FRONTIER DAYS 223 Then, when he had finished eating, the Raven said, "Why have you come?" "Thunder has stolen my wife," replied the man. "I seek his dwelling place that I may find her." "Would you dare enter the lodge of that dreadful person?" asked the Raven. "He lives close by here. His lodge is of stone, like this; and hanging there, within, are eyes,-the eyes of those he has killed or stolen. He has taken out their eyes and hung them in his lodge. Now, then dare you enter there?" "No," replied the man. "I am afraid. What man could look at such dreadful things and live?" "No person can," said the Raven. "There is but one old Thunder fears. There is but one he cannot kill. It is I, it is the Raven. Now I will give you medicine, and he shall not harm you. You shall enter there, and seek among those eyes your wife's; and if you find them, tell that Thunder why you came, and make him give them to you. Here, now, is a raven's wing. Just point it at him, and he will start back quick; but if that fails, take this. It is an arrow, and the shaft is made of elk-horn. Take this, I say, and shoot it through the lodge." "'Why make a fool of me?" the poor man asked. "My heart is sad. I am crying." And he covered his head with his robe, and wept. "Oh," said the Raven, "you do not believe me. Come out, come out, and I will make you believe." When they stood outside, the Raven asked, "Is the home of your people far?" "A great distance," said the man. "Can you tell how many days you have traveled?" "No," he replied, "my heart is sad. I did not count the days. The berries have grown and ripened since I left." "Can you see your camp from here?" asked the Raven. The man did not speak. Then the Raven rubbed some medicine on his eyes and said, "Looki" The man looked, and saw the camp. i.;-v.s close. He saw the people. He saw the smoke rising from the lodges. "Now you will believe," said the Raven. "Take now the arrow and the wing, and go and get your wife." So the man took these things, and went to the Thunder's lodge. He entered and sat down by the door-way. The Thunder sat within 224 FRONTIER DAYS and looked at him with awful eyes. But the man looked above, and saw those many pairs of eyes. Among them were those of his wife. "Why have you come?" said the Thunder in a fearful voice. "I seek my wife," the man replied, "whom you have stolen. There hang her eyes." "No man can enter my lodge and live," said the Thunder; and he rose to strike him. Then the man pointed the raven's wing at the Thunder, and he fell back on his couch and shivered. But he soon recovered, and rose again. Then the man fitted the elk-horn arrow to his bow, and shot it through the lodge of rock; right through that lodge of rock it pierced a jagged hole, and let the sunlight in. "Hold," said the Thunder. "Stop; you are the stronger. Yours the great medicine. You shall have your wife. Take down her eyes." Then the man cut the string that held them, and immediately his wife stood beside him. "Now," said the Thunder, "you know me. I am of great power. I live here in summer, but when the winter comes, I go far south. I go with the birds. Here is my pipe. It is medicine. Take it, and keep it. Now, when I first come in the spring, you shall fill and light this pipe, and you shall pray to me, you and the people. For I bring the rain which makes the berries large and ripe. I bring the rain which makes all things grow, and for this you shall pray to me, you and all the people." Thus the people got the first medicine pipe. It was long ago. PIKE'S PEAK OR BUST By EDWIN L. SABIN NDon the head-waters of the River Plate, in those mounA tains of thc north, I found virgin gold, sir. I carried some of it in my bullet-pouch for months, but it was of no use to me, among the Indians and wild animals, and I threw it way. The Spanish here in Santa Fe' have asked me ~ again and again to lead them to the place, and I have refused, because that is now United States territory. The gold belongs to my own country." "I saw no gold in those parts where I was," replied the ragged young army officer. "Whether I penetrated to the heads of the River Plate I do not know, but I saw only ice and snow." The date was early 1807. In Santa Fe' of Spanish New Mexico, where Americans wivere great curiosities, James Purcell, the American carpenter, and Captain Zebulon Montgomery Pike, the United States Army officer, were talking together. They both were unwilling "guests" of the Spanish authorities. The year before, Captain Pike had been sent out from St. Louis, With a party of soldiers, by the United States Government to explore through the southern portion of the new Territory of Louisiana and up the River Arkansas to its head in the mountains. After having reached the Grand "Mountain, or Pike's Peak, and tried to climb it, he had followed the river into the wintry gulches and valleys beyond; and while in camp in what is now southern Colorado he had been arrested by Spanish soldiers from Santa Fe', They informed him that he was across the line of uNew Mexico. ButJaesPurel%.la, eade0mndresI 9 0sedle aMxcn 226 FRONTIER DAYS Finally the fierce Sioux drove him and his Indian friends off the plains and into the high mountains of central Colorado. Traveling south he arrived at Santa Fe-and had not been able to get out again! Yes, sir; he had found gold in those mountains, upon the headwaters of the River Plate (by which he meant the South Platte of Colorado); but he was doing well here in Santa Fe as a carpenter, and he did not intend to take the Spaniards up there. Captain Pike made little of the find by James Pursley, as he spelled the name. His own memory of those Stony or Shining Mountains was that of cold and starvation. In his opinion white men could not live there nor upon the dry, bare plains either. Gold there would be of no more use to the United States than it had been to James Pursley, the hunter. Fifty years pass. No one has looked for the gold of the River Platte. James Purcell has long been buried between the dusty covers of Captain Pike's report. The explorers of the plains and mountains, the American trappers and traders who for twenty-five years gathered furs there, and the emigrants who crossed in the north and in the south, had no time for gold. For almost ten years the gold seekers bound for California have FRONTIER DAYS 227 been toiling over the Great Divide without stopping to look for gold. Some might say, peering southward at the snowy peaks and dark timber: "Now, I reckon there's likely to be gold in those mountains, too." And then others would say: ".Mebbe. But we got to go on. We're bound for Californy and we hain't time to fool. G'lang, Buck! Spot!" For thirty and more years the traders on the Santa Fe Trail up the Arkansas River had been sighting the southern Rockies. and had gone on to trade for hides and silver and gold in MIexico. John C. Fremont the Pathfinder has crossed and recrossed the mountains in north and in south; but his reports do not mention gold. Government expeditions had crossed, in north and south; had marched along the foothills, had camped upon the site of the Denver that was to be; and had paid no attention to James Purcell's gold. The Mormons or Latter Day Saints of Brigham Young broke the trail to Salt Lake, and settled there in their State of Deseret. They were but a comma in the blank page of 2,000 miles between the MIissouri River and the California mountains. Then, seven years later, in 1854, the eastern half was divided into the Territories of Kansas and Nebraska. Kansas extended from the Missouri River to the summits of the Rocky Mountains. Nebraska extended not only west to the Rocky Mountains but north to Canada. Settlers hastened to cross the Missouri River. Kansas became the battle ground between the men who wished to make it a free state, and men who wished to make it a slave state. Iowa, a free state, would attend to Nebraska; but Kansas was bordered by Missouri, a slave state, and the fight centered upon "bleeding Kansas." Towns now spread westward for fifty miles. Those other 600 miles to the Rocky Mountains were unused except by the Indians, the traders, and a few army posts. White men who attempted to settle and to live, in any numbers, away out here, would either starve or freeze to death. Then, after fifty years, the gold of James Purcell, the first American in the Rocky Mountains---of Captain Pike's James Pursley of Santa F--was found again. That did the business. A new Land of Gold glistened in the horizon, and who cared what kind of a land it was? iMen will go anywhere, for gold. Who brought back the word, in this year 1857? Indians! Not 228 228 FRONTIER DAYS white men, but Indians: Cherokee Indians of the Indian Territory which is Oklahoma. And again Georgians started the rush, just as in California it had been Isaac Humphreys the miner from Georgia wvýho was the first outsider to make for the Sutter mines at Sutter's mill. The Cherokees were not wild Indians. They had been removed from Georgia to the Indian Territory. It was upon their lands in Georgia that the best of the Georgia gold mines had been located. Therefore they knew the value of gold. They were as liable to the gold f ever as the white men were. With the Cherokees also it was "Ho, for California!." In parties they set out, from their towns in the Cherokee Nation of the Indian Territory, to join the great mix-up beginning with the Days of Forty-nine. Their route took them up the Arkansas River, and over the old Trapper and Trader Trail that ran north along the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains, to strike the main Overland Trail in Wyoming. While they traveled along the foothills, they hunted and prospected. Going out, they would find a little gold in the sands of the creeks flowing into the Platte River, but not enough gold to make them stay; coming back from California, they would find a little, but still not enough to hold them. Their talk, however, spread. Cherokees upon a visit to friends and relatives in Georgia carried it there. William Green Russell of the Georgia gold mines heard it. He was married to a Cherokee woman, had been to California and had not made his pile; he knew that trail along these foothills, remembered the streams, and he decided to go there. This was in the summer of 1857. William Green Russell of Georgia gathered a few friends, and started for the mountains beyond the western plains. He spent the winter upon the Missouri frontier and among his Cherokee acquaintances of the Cherokee Nation. When in the spring of j858 he again traveled on he had united with a larger party formed in the Nation. There now were FRONTIER DAYS 229 company from Georgia and the Indian Territory marched up the Arkansas River to find that gold in the land of the plains Arapahoes and the mountain Utes, when from the town of Lawrence, Kansas, another party started-a party of twenty young men, bound, they said, "for the gold region in the vicinity of the Rocky Mountains in Kansas!" They, too, had become excited over the rumor. Out went the Lawrence young men, two of them taking their families along. They prospected all around Pike's Peak but had no luck. Mrs. Holmes climbed to the top of the peak. They laid out a town, El Paso, where Colorado Springs now is. But no one came to buy lots. Therefore they took the trail north, for the Platte River, seventy-five miles, and discovered William Green Russell and his two long-whiskered brothers, with several of the other men, in camp beside the Platte River fifteen miles out from the foothills. This party also had found little except a few dollars a day in gold washed from the mouth of a dry creek here. The Cherokees and most of the white members of the crowd had quit and gone back home. Well, things did not look very good., The Lawrence party went on, northward down the South Platte, and built a camp of log cabins. They named this the Town of Montana. But who would travel 600o miles, to buy lots and to build, in the remote Pike's Peak region where no crops were raised and the climate was said to be nine months winter and three months late fall? People kept coming, nevertheless. The magic word "Gold" was borne upon the breezes throughout the Missouri River border, and eastward still. The returning members of the William Green Russell and the Cherokee party had shown their little quills of gold flakes, had traded at stores in the Kansas settlements and towns, had talked of the Pike's Peak gold, and newspapers were printing stories. Another gold field! At Pike's Peak in the Rocky Mountains! A chance to make a fortune! A chance to get in on another California! The people grabbed at that. The year 1857 had been a tough year: a year of hard times, of bank failures and business failures and crop failures, and of tight money. Everybody felt poor, and dissatisfied, and ready to move on for a fresh start at something new. There ought to be plenty of room and plenty of opportunities out in this Pike's Peak boom. 230 FRONTIER DAYS Accordingly, while the Pike's Peakers waited, other people began to turn up. A party from Iowa arrived, with a wagon. They were led by D. C. Oakes. But they did not buy any lots in "Mlontana"; they went on up the Platte, to the Placer Camp diggings of the Russell party; and turning back made their own camp five miles north on the west side of the mouth of another dry creek named Cherry Creek, which joined the Platte from the south-east..\Iore parties arrived; among them another from Iowa. They were not interested in the town of Montana, but threw in with the Oakes party at the mouth of Cherry Creek. Pretty soon all the Russell camp people moved to this place and the town of Auraria was organized. It was named for a town in Georgia where one of the Russells had lived. More towns were being laid out here, "6oo miles from nowhere." It cost nothing to lay out a town where land was free. These Aurarians went right ahead. They scarcely had named the new town when they held a convention to form a new Territory. Kansas Territory appeared to be a long way off, across those plains inhabited mainly by Indians, buffalo and prairie dogs. They gave their new Territory of the "Pike's Peak gold mines" the name of Jefferson, and elected a delegate to Congress from the "Territory of Jefferson." But to play safe, in case that Congress did not realize the importance of the "Territory of Jefferson," they also announced the County of Arapahoe, to include the whole of Western Kansas, and sent a representative to the Kansas legislature. Auraria, of the Cherry Creek diggin's of the Pike's Peak gold mines in the Territory of Jefferson or else in the County of Arapahoe, bragged of 200 citizens not counting the Arapahoe Indians. Montana City, down the Platte, saw itself in the lurch. Nobody came, to buy lots and to settle upon them. Cherry Creek was getting the business. Something had to be done. A squad of the Montana City men took a look at Auraria, and promptly started another town, opposite, on the east side of Cherry Creek. This they named St. Charles. Montana City died. Those of its settlers who did not go back home for the winter moved to Auraria or St. Charles. Now there were two towns, separated only by the dry bed of Cherry Creek. They formed an island in a great sea of desert. Auraria was the larger, but St. Charles, on the east side, was the FRONTIER DAYS 231 better located for it was the first to be struck on the trail up the South Platte River. Moreover it had, or supposed that it had, a pull with the Indians. John Smith and Jack Jones had been offered lots and membership in the town real estate company if they.would come over from Auraria; and they had come. John Smith was an Indian-trader who had been living with the Cheyennes down on the Arkansas River. The Cheyennes called him "Blackfoot," because he at one time had been a trapper and trader among the Blackfoot Indians. He had brought his Cheyenne wife and their children, and an outfit of trading goods, up to the Cherry Creek diggin's, and had opened a sort of store in Auraria. Jack Jones' real name was William McGaa. He was said to be the son of an Irish nobleman, and he had been well educated; but he had become a trader among the Arapahoes. He also moved across to St. Charles, with his Arapahoe wife and their children, and his Arapahoe relatives and friends. After having laid out their town, the St. Charles settlers decided to go east for the winter. They left only John Smith and Jack Jones and the Indians to hold St. Charles. But after going a short distance they began to fear that new-comers would jump their townsite. Charles Nichols was appointed to return and put up a building, as an improvement, and hold the fort. Charles Nichols returned. There were only Indian tepees and flimsy shacks to mark St. Charles; he could get nobody to help him build, and he threw down a square of four logs, as token of settlers' rights, and intention to build. Meanwhile the gold excitement was spreading in eastern Kansas. Governor James W. Denver, of Kansas Territory, grew curious about what was going on out there in that Pike's Peak region, which was no "Territory of Jefferson" but was Kansas Territory. Western Kansas had already been divided into counties, by the Kansas legislature. This Cherry Creek was in Montana County, as well as he could see by the map. He thought that it was high time to extend his authority into "Arapahoe County"; he appointed a probate judge, a sheriff, and a chairman for the board of supervisors, who should go to the county seat of "Arapahoe County" and organize matters. They set forth; were over-taken by a company of gold-seekers 232 FRONTIER DAYS from Leavenworth; at Cherry Creek the Leavenworthers sized up Auraria and St. Charles. Auraria was rather too large to handle; but St. Charles had nothing except Indian tepees, a couple of Indian-traders, and one white man pretending to stand guard over four logs. Therefore they claimed the land, organized a town, and upon motion of Trader Jack Jones (or William McGaa) named it Denver for his old friend Governor Denver. And in honor of Jack Jones himself they named one street McGaa Street. William McGaa was proud of this; and when the street was changed to Holladay Street he never got over the blow. Denver began to boom. Henri Murat and Mrs. Murat arrived. Henri Murat was a Frenchman and a descendant, he said, of the great Marshal Murat who had been the famous cavalry leader under Napoleon and had been made King of Naples. "Count" Murat trimmed beards at a dollar a face, and "Countess" Murat washed shirts and socks. Denver boasted of having royal blood among its citizens; but Auraria, with its head-start, kept ahead. It had far the most houses, and the most of the business. Then, on Christmas Day, everybody turned out to see six large freight wagons loaded with goods pull in from the south. They were brought by Dick Wooton, a celebrated trapper and trader who had built a toll road over Raton Pass to New Mexico. He stood Christmas treat out of his barrels, and commenced to erect a business block. This proved to be a story and a half high, and beat anything in Denver across the creek. "Uncle Dick" had brought his wife, a Spanish woman. That made five white women on Cherry Creek. All that Fall people had continued to drift in to Auraria and Denver, so that during the winter there may have been half a thousand, counting the Indians. Then, in the spring, William McGaa and his Arapahoe wife added a baby. And soon after that other astonishing things happened. II Little gold had as yet been found. The William Green Russell outfit had gathered a small stake; Russell had left for the States, in company with D. C. Oakes, one of the men from Iowa. FRONTIER DAYS 233 When Mr. Oakes reached home, he set about advertising the Pike's Peak country, for he intended to go back and engage in business. The more people there, the better for him. And besides, he was a California Forty-niner, he had talked with the Georgia miners of the Russell party, and he believed that plenty of gold would be found in these mountains. He put together William Green Russell's journal and a lot of his own information and ideas, and issued them in a pamphlet titled "Pike's Peak Guide and Journal." Copies of this pamphlet went through all the country from the Missouri River to the Atlantic coast. The people of the States fairly ate it up. They were ripe for any adventure. Times were still hard, the California craze was over and many folks had come back poorer than when they had gone out, more gold was needed, that Pike's Peak region sounded pretty good, it wasn't so far as California, a fellow could go out and back in one summer if the Injuns didn't get him, there ought to be plenty gold off yonder, it would be a nice trip, anyhow; and so forth and so forth. The newspapers printed wild stories, all referring to "Pike's Peak." Why, the ridges of gold circled the Peak like the stripes on a barber's pole. The miners built themselves small flat-boats, up on top. The bottoms of the boats were open, with sharp blades set into the cross braces. The miners slid down the Peak, in the boats; 234 FRONTIER DAYS the blades in the bottom braces planed off the gold, which curled up in shavings inside the boat; and by the time the foot of the Peak had been reached a boat might have gathered a ton of the golden shavings! The little quills of gold dust that arrived in Leavenworth and Lawrence and Council Bluffs and St. Joseph and other western border towns were magnified to barrels for the imagination of the eager people in the States. An Ohio man advertised a line of steamboats for Pike's Peak by the Platte River route. He did not know that the Platte River was a mile wide and an inch deep. An old German in Council Bluffs collected all the meal sacks that he could get together. "What are you going to do with these, Adolph?" "Fill dem mit gold at Pike's Peak." "Oh, but you can't do that." "Yes, I vill, even if I haf to stay dere all summer." Early in the spring of 1859 the rush began. It was called the Pike's Peak Rush, for to the majority of the people everything out there-Cherry Creek, Denver, Auraria, the upper South Platte, all Western Kansas-was Pike's Peak. The Days of Forty-nine were thrown into the shade by the Days of Fifty-nine. Not merely 40,000, but 150,000 "pilgrims" set out, during 1859, to try their fortunes in a new country. By thousands the wagons and carts gathered at the jump-off points of Leavenworth, Kansas; St. Joseph, Missouri; and Council Bluffs, Iowa, to start as soon as possible. The steamboats up the Missouri from St. Louis were gorged with Pike's Peakers and their freight. Some of the prarie Argonauts had brought their families. It was reckoned that the distance to the mines was 700 miles, there were no mountains to cross, the going was all nice and level, buffalo and antelope would furnish meat, the trip would be a picnic, and out in that Western Kansas where lands could be had for nothing a man might find business if he didn't find gold. The wagons and carts bore signs: "Pike's Peak or Bust," "Root Hog or Die," "Lightning Express," "From Pike County to Pike's Peak," and so forth. One of the "Pike's Peak or Bust" wagons became stalled, half FRONTIER DAYS 235 way. The gear had dried up and fallen apart, all the animals had died or had been stolen by the Indians; and when last seen the owner was sitting upon the wagon-tongue, smoking his pipe and waiting for something to happen. Underneath his "Pike's Peak or Bust" slogan he had written, with charcoal: "Busted by Thunder!" In March the trails across the plains were lined with emigrant outfits. There was the white-topped prairie schooner drawn by oxen and mules and horses. There were partners with a hand-cart and taking turns pushing and riding. There were men trudging with packs strapped upon their backs or slung from the ends of poles carried across their shoulders. There was a man with a wheelbarrow load of supplies and a "boarder" to help pay his expenses. There was a man using an ox for a pack animal. There were carts with sails, like a land-going lugger. They all were bound-where? Why, to the "Pike's Peak gold mines," the "Cherry Creek diggin's," the "gold fields of Western Kansas." The Pike's Peak "pilgrims" had a choice of three routes: the Oregon and California trail up along the Platte River through southern Nebraska, and then by the South Platte Fork to Cherry Creek; the Santa Fe Trail up along the Arkansas River through Kansas and then north by the trail that the Cherokees had taken; and a new route by way of Fort Riley, and northern Kansas. The outfits gathered at Council Bluffs and St. Joseph usually took the Platte River route; the Leavenworth and the parties below usually took one of the two other routes. That was a hard trip, of five to seven weeks, by any route. The Great Plains of the buffalo and Indian country were not level. They were rolling land. The old roads were rutted, and dusty or muddy. These Pike's Peakers met with the same storms and break-downs and thirst and hunger that the Forty-niners had met. Companies trying short cuts lost their way. Many grew discouraged early, and quit, fifty to Ioo miles out; either turned back or else squatted upon the first likely looking land and took up a farm claim. In this way Kansas was being settled. Others stacked their supplies under a piece of canvas and opened a "grocery store." The stock of one such store in central Kansas was canned sardines, pickled oysters, smoking tobacco and whisky! The discouragement spread. People were returning from the "mines"; they said that it all was a trick to get folks out there to buy 236 FRONTIER DAYS goods and worthless land; the gold really had come from California; the D. C. Oakes pamphlet was a lie, and the whole business was a swindle. Soon, along the Platte River route especially, the people who had traveled half way encountered whole companies of other pilgrims on their way east. The majority of these had not gone to the diggin's; they had heard the news that the boom was a big hocuspocus, and they were making for home, and looking for D. C. Oakes. The panic increased. Presently the column of angry men traveling east was almost as large as the column of hopeful pilgrims traveling west. Household furniture and supplies were dumped upon the ground, so that better time could be made back to the Missouri River. Where is D. C. Oakes? We ought to hang D. C. Oakes. D. C. Oakes was coming, with a sawmill that he intended to set up in the mountains. He noticed a mound at the roadside, with a buffalo shoulder-blade gleaming whitely like a head-stone. Somebody's newly made grave! He paused to read the words scrawled upon the shoulder-blade. Here lies the body of D. C. Oakes, Killed for aiding the Pike's Peak hoax. He was recognized. Indignant home-goers and out-goers surrounded him, threatening to bury him without any fooling. He showed them his sawmill equipment, as proof that he was on his way, himself, and was intending to stay. He would not have put his money into his sawmill if he did not have faith in the Pike's Peak country. They finally let him pass on, but they vowed that his guide-book was a patch of lies, just the same. Of the 15o,ooo people who this year of 1859 started across the plains for the mines of Western Kansas at least 50,000 turned back. Nevertheless, by the end of April the vanguard of 1,200 gold seekers and settlers were camped around Denver and Auraria of Cherry Creek. They were suspicious, and bewildered. Pike's Peak was not here; it was away down in the southward, ioo miles away. Jokers whom they had met had told them that they should beware of a man with buckskin patches on his pants-he was the leading swindler and scoundrel of the diggin's, and they had better steer clear of him or he would take them in for the limit. FRONTIER DAYS23 237 But when they peered around, to locate him and fight shy of him, they sawN buckskin patches stitched upon the trousers of almost every man in the camp!I Auraria was still the larger division of the camp, and a newspaper was already being published. Near the middle of April a young surveyor by the name of William N. Byers arrived; he had packed a printing press outfit clear across the plains; that same night he set it up, in the second story of the Uncle Dick Wooton "business block," and in twenty-seven hours he issued the first edition of the weekly Rocky MAountain INews. Even though it ran short of print paper and had to be printed upon brown wrapping paper the Cherry Creek Rocky Mountain News proved to be a great boomer for the diggin's; for, as it said: Hurrah for the land where the moor and the mountain Are sparkling with treasures no language bath told; W~here the waves of the river, the spray of the fountain, Are bright with the glitter of genuine gold. To be sure, little gold had been found in the "moor"~ and the "fountain," and the people were rather hard up, while wvaiting. The farmers despaired of raising any crops upon such dry, poorlooking land; and they, and the gold seekers who scattered into the stream beds and the gulches, had to live on wild meat, and on flour and other staples bought at high prices. But this very spring a convention was held in Aurarna to form a State-the State of Jefferson. The delegate sent to WVashington last Fall had been turned down by Congress-had spent his own money and had only been laughed at by the Congressmen as a crazy Westerner. However, the State of Jefferson, or at least the Territory of Jefferson, had to be. And then, in May, what should appear other than a stage coach f rom, the Missouri River: the first coach in a line that was to make daily trips across the Plains!I 238 FRONTIER DAYS Missouri, people generally journeyed by ox-team or mule-team and wagon, or horseback, clear to Utah and California. On the Overland or California Trail Hockaday & Liggett operated mail and passenger stages from St. Joseph in Missouri to Salt Lake and Sacramento. But they had no stations, ran only twice a month, used light wagons, stopped and grazed and rested their mules on the way, and took three weeks to reach Salt Lake. 'Enormous Conestoga or Pittsburgh wagons, and "Murphies" made in St. Louis, hauled by eight to twelve yoke of oxen carried freight across the plains, to Santa Fe by the Santa Fe Trail, and to Fort Laramie and Salt Lake by the Overland Trail. The wagons were twenty feet long and as high as a box-car, and could be loaded with from 5,0oo00 to 7,00ooo pounds. The big freighters of the plains were Russell, Majors & Waddell, of Leavenworth. They had the contract for hauling 16,oo000,000 pounds of Government supplies, over the Salt Lake trail; used 3,500oo wagons, 40,oo000 oxen, r,ooo mules and 4,000 men. When they hired a man to work for them they gave him a Bible and required him to sign a pledge not to drink, swear, fight or gamble while he was in the service of the company. This was a new wrinkle in teaming and some of the men occasionally exploded; but the wagons went through. The rush to Pike's Peak filled William Russell with a great idea. Why not put on a line of stagecoaches between Leavenworth and the new mines? Make it a daily passenger express line-a coach either way every day, in quick time by the shortest route! That would be a fine stroke of business-would be the last word in plains transportation. But Alexander Majors, his partner, felt dubious. The scheme demanded a row of stations for almost 700 miles through the Indian country; fifty or more coaches, a bevy of high-class mules, and quantities of hay, grain and other supplies for the stations and the station-keepers. He feared that the line would not pay, especially if the Western Kansas boom blew up. Mr. Russell, who was a portly, determined man, went ahead. He formed a partnership with a friend, John S. Jones, and as Jones & Russell they made the plunge. Fifty Concord wagons were ordered from the Abbot-Downing Company of Concord, New Hampshire. One thousand thorough FRONTIER DAYS 239 bred Kentucky mules were purchased. Surveyors and workmen were sent out, with wagons of supplies, to mark a new trail through northern Kansas and establish stations every ten to fifteen miles. The fifty brand-new coaches arrived by steamboat up the Missouri River and were unloaded upon the levee at Leavenworth. They were not the regulation round-bodied coaches but were of wagon shape, with a heavy canvas top supported by posts, open sides that could be enclosed by canvas curtains, and a canvas boot at the rear, for baggage. They were painted red, and along the top ran the legend: "Leavenworth & Pike's Peak Express." They had three seats, cross-wise; each seat would hold three passengers. The preparations had been made in double-quick time. Three hundred thousand dollars had been spent or promised by notes when, on the last day of April, I859, amid cheers, the first Leavenworth & Pike's Peak coach for the Western Kansas Gold Diggings, drawn by four glossy mules, dashed at a gallop out of Leavenworth. It had only one passenger: Henry Villard, an Eastern newspaper man, who was going to Cherry Creek to write up the gold mines for the Cincinnati Daily Commercial. The fare to Denver was $Ioo; short fare was twenty-five cents a mile; letters were carried at twenty-five cents each and express at one dollar a pound; the average running time was set at Ioo miles each twenty-four hours; the through time, in good weather, should be six days. Twenty-five miles beyond Fort Riley, which was 130 miles from Leavenworth, the road petered out; but the surveyors had marked the stage trail with stakes and piles of sod and buffalo droppings for the 5oo miles to Denver. Denver was reached in seven and one half days, or in the afternoon of May 7. The red-shirted miners and the settlers crowded to welcome this first Pike's Peak stage. They eagerly grabbed their letters and the newspapers. Their latest news was five weeks old. They had been getting their letters at fifty cents apiece, by special messenger from Fort Laramie, 230 miles up north, where Pike's Peak mail had been dropped off twice a month by the stage for Salt Lake. The return stage from Denver pulled into Leavenworth upon May 21. It brought only about $3,000 in gold-only $3,000, as a showing of a whole winter's mining at the new diggin'sl A banner 240 FRONTIER DAYS on the coach said: "The gold mountains of Kansas send greetings to her commercial metropolis." A gaily decorated coach had been dispatched to escort it in; and the banner of this coach said: "Leavenworth hears the echo from her mineral mountains and sends it on the wings of lightning to a listening world." Big words, these. The crowd that gathered to see the coaches draw up in front of the Planter's Hotel cheered as the Cherry Creek crowd had cheered. Henceforth, for several weeks, the Leavenworth & Pike's Peak Express red-painted stages, in pairs for protection against the Indians, plied back and forth through Kansas. Twice every twentyfour hours the emigrants plodding with their wagons or afoot over the stage road drew aside to let the galloping coaches, one pair from the east, one pair from the west, pass in a cloud of dust or a spatter of mud. Jones & Russell did not make a go; the expenses were $I,ooo a day and they could not meet the notes that they had given for the equipment. Russell, Majors & Waddell took the whole outfit over; moved the line up to the Platte River Overland route, which was a better road; bought out the Hockaday line to Salt Lake, and under the brand-new name Central Overland California & Pike's Peak Express-the C. O. C. & P. P.-ran to Salt Lake 'as well as to Denver. Yes, and rolled into Salt Lake, 1,200 miles, in ten days, with stages running every day. All that was big business and very expensive business; so that, what with the wear and tear and the Indian attacks, the symbol C. O. C. & P. P. came to mean "Clean Out of Cash & Poor Pay." But how about the gold in the Pike's Peak country? Would the new population be able to stick in this camp that depended upon gold alone? IV When Henry Villard arrived he found things very dull. His report to his paper dealt with sober facts. As yet there was little out here to keep the boom going. People were toiling in at the rate of several hundred a day; almost as fast as they arrived they pulled out, for the "mines," or else for home again. There was a procession both ways, of those coming and those going. FRONTIER DAYS 241 The great majority of the pilgrims were green at mining, they did not know what to do or where to head for next; in Denver and Auraria they had to sleep in the open, or in tents, and the houses already occupied were of logs or of rough lumber, with dirt floors and sod roofs and no windows; the only food was buffalo and antelope meat, bacon, canned vegetables, and flapjacks; provisions were high, town lots were being traded for revolvers or a few pounds of flour, picks and spades could be bought for fifteen cents from emigrants who had no use for them. Western Kansas was not California. The diggin's h'ad yielded little. Two or three strikes had been made, but not nearly enough to stake the crowd to a living. Last winter George Jackson, from Missouri, while hunting in the mountains forty miles west, had dug into the ground with his butcher knife, and had panned out gold in his tin cup; and in April had made up a party to locate claims. But a mob rushed there, like locusts; every inch of the gulch had been grabbed at once, and the bulk of the people were left out in the cold. Those were the Jackson Diggin's, on the South Fork of Clear Creek, yonder; the camp had been named Idaho, and Idaho Springs on account of the hot soda springs near it. As a rule, prospectors were not earning wages. The golden dreams were buncombe; and here the people were, "6oo miles from nowhere," in a country that produced mainly yarns. The outlook seemed to be very bad. It was a case of getting back to the States or of staying here dead broke. On May 13, which was his second Sunday in camp, Henry Villard (in later years he was a Civil War correspondent in the field and president of the Northern Pacific Railroad) was sitting in the one-story, dirt floor, log stage office, talking with Agent Fox and Joseph Heywood. They three had agreed that Denver and Auraria were "busted" flat, when a bearded, booted miner stumped in. His name was Wilkes Defrees, of Indiana; he had been up in the hills and had come down for his mail. "Well," said Henry Villard, "what luck? Counting on pulling out for other diggings, or for home?" "No, sir," answered the miner. "I'm satisfied. There's gold enough in these mountains if you only know where to look for it." "What makes you think so?" Agent Fox asked. "That's all 242 FRONTIER DAYS right, for talk, but the people here can't live on talk. We've got to have the gold." "Maybe you'll feel more satisfied yourself," said the miner, "if I tell you I'm in from a place where we're taking out a dollar in gold to the pan of dirt, and can trace the streaks of quartz running up the sides of the mountains." "You are! A new strike, you mean?" "Yes, sir; and a big one. We've a world of gold-bearing quartz." "We don't question your word," said Agent Fox; "but of course we'd feel more satisfied if we saw the color." "Here it is." Miner Defrees fished out a bottle of gold-dust. "'And here's the quartz." Joseph Heywood, who had been in California, took a piece of the quartz, and went outside with it to look at it through a magnifying glass. He called back. "Come here, Fox. This is as fine quartz as I ever saw in the richest mines of California! If there's a good vein of this, the country is made." Other persons were coming in for their mail and for gossip. They asked Wilkes Defrees all kinds of questions. How far was the place? How big were those diggin's? Why hadn't he told of the FRONTIER DAYS 243 strike before? Did he have something to sell, and did he expect to lead folks out on a wild-goose chase into the mountains? Defrees grew angry. "I'm telling the gospel truth. Anybody who wants to can follow me back tomorrow. I'll guarantee you all a dollar a pan; you can bring a rope along and if I'm proved to be a liar you can swing me up. A committee went back with him, to what he called the Gregory Mine, up the north fork of Clear Creek which was a stream flowing out of the western foothills into the South Platte a few miles north of Denver. When in five days one of the committee returned, he brought a bottle of gold, and said that the story was true. The gold was there, plenty of it, not merely in the dirt, but in out-crops of quartz as far as had yet been explored! Only thirty miles straight across country from Cherry Creek, and sixty by trail! There the gold had been, all the time; there it still was l Prospects had been opened, down the creek, toward the mouth at the Platte, and had panned out a little; George Jackson had hunted up the South Fork, fourteen miles from the creek mouth, and had located his crowded diggin's; the trouble was, that no one had tackled'the North Fork, opposite. Not until John Gregory had explored into the mountains. Who was John Gregory? John Gregory was not a real Pike's Peaker. That is, he had not started from home for Pike's Peak. He was another of those Georgians, but he had started from Georgia last August to go to the reported gold mines of the Fraser River away up in British Columbia of the Pacific Coast, 4,00ooo miles. He was a wiry red-headed and red-whiskered man; had worked his way as Government teamster, from Leavenworth to Fort Laramie. Then he had had to winter in at Fort Laramie, and there had heard of the Pike's Peak excitement. The Pike's Peak country was nearer than the Fraser River was, and he decided to prospect down there, first. He struck the foothills and dug around till he came to lower Clear Creek, and a prospectors' camp named Arapahoe. This February he went up the creek, through a wild, icy, snowy canyon-prospected for eighteen or twenty miles, and felt as though he were the first white man ever to have been in there; almost froze 244 FRONTIER DAYS to death, and when, near the head of a side gulch on the north fork of the creek, seven miles from the main creek, he found good color, and things looked promising, a blinding snow storm drove him out. Back at Arapahoe, after the weather had settled he got a man to grub-stake him-that is, to outfit him on shares; and he took Defrees and several other men up to his gulch. It was a hard trip, over rocks and ridges, and into high country. But there, in the side gulch, they saw streaks of quartz uncovered by the melting snows and they started to dig into the sides of the gulch. Gregory left the other men digging, and said to Wilkes Defrees his partner: "You come with me, Wilk. We'll go higher up." They climbed higher up the slope of the gulch, until John Gregory said: "Here's a good-looking spot. Stick your shovel in, Wilk. Give me some of the dirt in this pan." It seemed to him that they were about at the source of the traces that the other men were finding, below. Wilk had dug into a soft place, of rotted leaves and rock. John took the pan, half full, and slid down to a muddy trickle of water, where he washed the dirt. He peered, and he let out a hoarse cry. The pan now held half an ounce of yellow flakes. He scrambled up, for a second pan of dirt. It proved to be another eight dollar pant They had found the richest gold field in the history of Colorado! After they all had staked out claims, they went to bed; but John Gregory was so excited that he talked all the evening, and he talked, without stopping, away into the night; he kept Defrees awake until three in the morning, and when Defrees got up for breakfast Gregory was still talking. This was the great strike of Gregory Gulch, made May 6, 1859, 8,000 feet high in the lonely Rocky Mountains. Red John Gregory, bound for the Fraser River in British Columbia, was responsible for it, and the pictures of the riches that should be his almost turned his brain. Gregory Gulch settled the fortunes of the "Pike's Peak Country" of Arapahoe County, Western Kansas Territory, which soon was to become Colorado. When down on Cherry Creek the word spread that the Gregory FRONTIER DAYS 245 Diggin's were the real thing, and that the store-house of the Rocky \Iountains had been opened, the people threw their hats into the air, and capered in the streets, and shouted the glad tidings. "Hooray, hooray!" "We're all right now." "You bet! The stuff is here, after all." "The country's safe. We shan't starve." And away they went, upon a stampede like the stampede out of San Francisco and Monterey ten years before. Denver and Auraria were almost emptied. By horse and mule and ox-team and afoot they pushed, in a race for Gregory Gulch: across the Platte and on westward to ford Clear Creek, and up over the foothills and up, up, into the first mountains, higher and yet higher, by winding trail where twenty oxen could scarcely haul one wagon and a sack of flour. On top, 9,ooo feet up, they had to break a trail across a broad ridge of rolling country densely timbered with pines, and on the other side they dropped into Clear Creek Canyon again and its side canyon of Gregory Gulch. Henry Villard the newspaper correspondent joined the first of the rush. He rode a mule borrowed from the Express Company, and carried his provisions strapped behind the saddle. Editor Byers 246 FRONTIER DAYS of the Rocky Mountain News, astride a horse, closely followed him. Within a couple of days wild Gregory Gulch was peopled as though men had sprung up from the very earth. Other diggin's were deserted. Five thousand miners crowded the dark stream bed and the steep slopes of the Gulch, and the over-flow reached for five miles. The Gulch was a mass of bough huts and dug-outs and stumps and felled trees, and of men toiling with spades and picks like a huge flock of blackbirds pecking for worms. The altitude of 8,0oo feet brought on headaches and nausea and shortness of breath, but this was a small matter when men were looking for gold. Still the people boiled out of the plains, into the golden mountains; 500oo pilgrims in a day passed through Denver, until 30,000 had headed into the Clear Creek region. The lodes or veins extended on and on. The pay-dirt of the new diggin's appeared to be endless. Upon that dirt the foundations of the new empire of Colorado were built. From that dirt and from the quartz was taken out the capital which helped men to become prominent citizens of the nation. Gold from the Gregory district enabled the cabinet-maker and inventor George M. Pullman to complete his Pullman sleeping car. Two weeks after the first stampede, or early in June, two other Eastern journalists arrived by stage in Denver. They were the famous Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, and Albert D. Richardson of the Boston Journal. They had hastened out to make reports upon the Pike's Peak mines, so that the East should know the truth. Wagons in a line a quarter of a mile long were waiting to be ferried across the Platte, at two dollars and a half each, by Traders John Smith and William McGaa; and the trail onward to the Gregory Diggin's was a constant procession of outfits all heading for the "mines." Henry Villard had just come down. He returned to Gregory Gulch with Mr. Greeley and Mr. Richardson. Horace Greeley, a mild, chubby, rosy-faced man, had been hurt in his knee on his trip across the plains when the red coach had upset in a stream. On the way to the diggin's his mule soused him in the ice-cold Clear Creek, and the trail proved very rough, but the miners along FRONTIER DAYS 2. 247 the route cheered "Horace Greeley," and in the Gulch he was called upon f or a speech. The first mass-meeting in the Rocky Mountains was held: of men with untrimmed hair and beards, in buckskin and in flannel shirts and wool trousers, perched upon logs and stumps and in trees, while the shadows of evening deepened and bonfires were lighted. Fifteen hundred people listened to Horace Greeley of New York. He advised the men not to drink or gamble, and told them that he was satisfied with their mines and would try to get a railroad built through to the Pacific Ocean. Back in Denver he urged the people to plant potatoes. He wrote to the Tribune, praising the country, and advising "Go West, young man, go West," to Nebraska or Kansas or Pike's Peak, and grow up with the country. H-e went on, to California by stagecoach; but first he and the two other newspapermen signed a statement to be sent East, saying t~hat the gold regions of the Rocky Mountains were an actual fact, and that they had seen with their own eyes. The Eastern papers made a great deal of fun of this; and asserted that the miners had fooled Horace Greeley by "salting" or doctoring the mines with other gold. And when he and Albert Richardson wrote to their papers that this Western Kansas would grow crops of grain and vegetables, enough to support thousands of settlers, they were laughed at. Now Cherry Creek boomed. Oyster cans and buckskin sacks of gold from the mountains furnished money. Supplies poured in; sawmills were set up, and turned out lumber; hardware and windows and doors were freighted in. An opera-house was opened. Several banks were opened; one of them issued gold coins. Brick buildings began to rise. Lots were staked off for miles around. The future Denver was able to stand alone. It was not like San Francisco, which had a harbor, and a settled country around it. It was planted here by itself, 6oo miles from civilization; in a land 248 FRONTIER DAYS coming, by daily Pike's Peak stages and by wagon and saddle and foot. In August Cherry Creek had grown from I,ooo people to 5,000 and 20,000 more were rummaging through the mountains. The gold seekers crossed the main range and explored upon the other side, in what was then Utah; they opened trails beyond Pike's Peak, in the southward. (The great mountain region of Colorado was being settled by white men's camps that speedily grew into towns. The camps and towns were not so oddly named as those in California. To be sure there were Shirt-tail Camp and Bob-tail Camp, and Humbug Gulch which panned rich after having been tried out three times and abandoned. There were the Pound Diggings, named for a miner Daniel Pound but rumored to yield a pound of gold a day, per man. When the rush set in the name was changed to Tarry-all. There were not enough claims for all who "tarried"; and the disappointed miners found other diggings not far away and named them Fair-play. Tarry-all and Fair-play were given a neighbor camp named Buckskin Jo, in honor of the prospector in buckskin who discovered the pay dirt. Here, in South Park at the heads of the South Platte River, James Purcell's gold had been found at last. Not a few of the Pike's Peakers seeking their fortunes went broke. Placers, or dirt and gravel washings, are called poor-man's diggings, because they are easily worked. Only a gold-pan or a rocker is needed, and at night every man knows what he has made, in the clean-up. But the gold in the quartz is a different proposition; that requires blasting and crushing and reducing, and since many of the new-comers knew little of real mining they did not understand how to make the most of what they found. This fall thousands of the Pike's Peak "Fifty-niners" traveled back to the States; some of them carried gold, more of them didn't. But the next year, I860, a great pilgrimage again crossed the plains. In April the Pony Express, of mail riders galloping in relays night and day between the Missouri River and the Sacramento River of California, was started. Through time, for the 2,000 miles, was ten days, nine days, eight days, and, once, seven days and seventeen hours. The route sent down a branch to Denver, from the Overland FRONTIER DAYS24 249 Trail in the north. Time to Denver from St. Joseph of the M~issouri River, 66o miles, three days. The gold production for 183-9 in Western Kansas was $500,000; in i86o it jumped to $3,250,000. Denver and Auraria united to become Denver City-"The Queen City of the Plains." The Pike's Peak Gold Region was still the independent Territory of Jefferson, relying chiefly upon its own laws. In fact, there wvere several sets of laws; the Territory of Jefferson laws, the County of Arapahoe laws, the Kansas laws, and the mining camps' laws. A man in trouble under one set of laws could appeal to another set. But in the last of February, 1861, Congress finally formed Western Kansas into a regulation Territory of the United States. A number of names was proposed-Jefferson, Arcadia, and Idaho which nearly wvon out. But Congress decided upon "Colorado," in tribute to the great Colorado River of the West, which had its headwaters in the Rocky Mountains. One of these, the Grand River, rose in the new Colorado Territory itself. Colorado Territory then contained only a little more than 25,000 citizens, by best count. In 1876 it was admitted as a State. Denver grew steadily. It drew flies., There had been no flies upon the plains until the wagon trains brought them from the East. 25o FRONTIER DAYS It drew all kinds of people, too. Its streets rivaled those of early San Francisco. Broadcloth and buckskin, merchants, teamsters, miners, trappers, Americans, Frenchmen, Germans, Indians, Mexicans, half-breeds, mingled in them. One thousand Arapahoes at a time camped within its limits, to marvel at the white-man's big Queen City of the Plains. Traders John Smith and William McGaa wandered off, but "Count" and "Countess" Murat stayed, and did a thriving business at barbering and washing clothes. Jim Beckwourth, the celebrated mulatto beaver trapper and trader and squaw-man who was a Crow chief of Wyoming, traveled down, with "Lady Beckwourth" his dark wife, to parade the streets. Kit Carson rode in, from the Arkansas River or from the Overland Trail, to see the sights. Two heads of wheat, from seed sown by accident out of a bag, proved that something besides buildings and people would grow out here. Soon grain, potatoes, pumpkins, and turnips weighing fourteen pounds rivaled the crop of gold. Ox teams for which there was no feed were turned out to starve to death during the winter; in the spring they were found fat and hearty-had lived well upon the sun-cured native grasses of the open range. By this, beef upon the hoof was discovered, for the West. Great herds of cattle were driven in, and took care of themselves. The Pike's Peak Rush settled the plains. Along the line of the daily stages through Kansas and Nebraska ranches were started, the stations became towns; the Kansas Pacific Railway was planned, straight from Kansas City to Denver, though the Indian country: for Denver, away out at the foot of the mountains, was the big supply depot upon which the people of that new West might depend. As to John H. Gregory, who had saved the day for the Pike's Peak boom and is called the James Marshall of the Rocky Mountains: he sold out his own claims for $22,00ooo, and that same summer the owners cleaned up $24,000. Like James Nlarshall he was above grubbing again for himself; but, smarter than James Marshall, he prospected for other men at $200 a day and let them do the developing. This Fall of I859 he went back to Georgia with $30,000. He returned to the mines, but could never settle down to real work. And early in 1862 he stepped out of a hotel in Illinois and was not seen again. & A MU16. N. Ilk, I-- " vz All I' ra9 ' %~Logic C Air 44% NIM~ b-z ,/IIJ -Th 'p. f-f.' 1 - -* dr,- / hA. &Li 0 I to ro I m ' W paA4 SA I. I' V K.0vi,, ':"" a R'.' - 4.n