the whole Afghan nation rose in revolt his fort was so sorely beset
that he and his retinue stole away in the dark, joining a Ghoorka
regiment. But the regiment was also beset, and its water supply cut
off. Pottinger fought the guns; the men repelled attacks by night
and day until worn out; dying of thirst in an intolerable agony the
regiment broke, scattering into the hills. Only a few men rallied round
Pottinger to fight through to Cabul, and he was fearfully wounded,
unable to command. Of his staff and the Ghoorka regiment only five men
were alive when they entered Cabul.
Our officer commanding at Cabul was not in good health, but his death
was unfortunately delayed while the Afghans murdered men, women and
children, and the British troops, for lack of a leader, funked. Envoys
waited on Akbar Khan, and were murdered. The few officers who kept
their heads were without authority, blocked at every turn by cowards,
by incompetents. Then the council of war made treaty with Akbar, giving
him all the guns except six, all the treasure, three officers as
hostages, bills drawn on India for forty thousand rupees, the honor of
their country, everything for safe conduct in their disgrace. Dying of
cold and hunger, the force marched into the Khoord-Cabul Pass, and at
the end of three days the married officers were surrendered with their
wives and children. Of the sixteen thousand men three-fourths were
dead when the officer commanding and the gallant Brigadier Skelton
were given up as hostages to Akbar. The survivors pushed on through
the Jugduluk Pass, which the Afghans had barricaded, and there was the
final massacre. Of the whole army, one man, Doctor Brydon, on a starved
pony, sinking with exhaustion, rode in through the gates of Fort
Jellalabad.
The captured general had sent orders for the retreat of the Jellalabad
garrison through the awful defiles of the Khyber Pass in face
of a hostile army, and in the dead of winter; but General Sale,
commanding, was not such a fool. For three months he had worked his
men to desperation rebuilding the fortress, and now when he saw the
white tents of Akbar’s camp he was prepared for a siege. That day
an earthquake razed the whole fortress into a heap of ruins, but
the garrison rebuilt the walls. Then they sallied and, led by Henry
Havelock, assaulted Akbar’s camp, smashed his army to flying fragments,
captured his guns, baggage, standards, ammunition and food. Nine days
later the bands of the garrison marched out to meet a relieving army
from India. They were playing an old tune, _Oh, but ye’ve been lang o’
comin’_.
Meanwhile the British prisoners, well treated, were hurried from
fort to fort, with some idea of holding them for sale at so much a
slave, until they managed to bribe an Afghan chief. The bribed man
led a revolt against Akbar, and one chief after another joined him,
swearing on the Koran allegiance to Eldred Pottinger. When Akbar fell,
Pottinger marched as leader of the revolted chiefs on the way to Cabul.
One day, as the ladies and children were resting in an old fort for
shelter during the great heat of the afternoon, they heard the tramp of
horsemen, and in the dead silence of a joy and gratitude too great for
utterance, received the relieving force.
XII
A. D. 1842
A YEAR’S ADVENTURES
A thousand adventures are taking place every day, all at once in the
several continents and the many seas. A few are reported, many are
noted in the private journals of adventurers, most of them are just
taken as a matter of course in the day’s work, but nobody has ever
attempted to make a picture of all the world’s adventures for a day or
a year.
Let us make magic. Any date will do, or any year. Here for instance is
a date--the twelfth of September, 1842--that will serve our purpose as
well as any other.
In Afghanistan a British force of twenty-six thousand people had
perished, an army of vengeance had marched to the rescue of Major
Pottinger, Lady Sale, Lady McNaughton and other captives held by the
Afghan chiefs. On September twelfth they were rescued.
In China the people had refused to buy our Indian opium, so we
carefully and methodically bombarded all Chinese seaports until she
consented to open them to foreign trade. Then Major Pottinger’s uncle,
Sir Henry, made a treaty which the Chinese emperor signed on September
eighth.
In the Malacca Straits Captain Henry Keppel of H. M. S. _Dido_ was busy
smashing up pirates.
In Tahiti poor little Queen Pomaré, being in childbed, was so bullied
by the French admiral that she surrendered her kingdom to France on
September ninth. Next morning her child was born, but her kingdom was
gone forever.
In South Africa Captain Smith made a disgraceful attack upon the Boers
at Port Natal, and on June twenty-sixth they got a tremendous thrashing
which put an end to the republic of Natalia. In September they began to
settle down as British subjects, not at all content.
Norfolk Island is a scrap of paradise, about six miles by four, lying
nine hundred miles from Sydney, in Australia. In 1842 it was a convict
settlement, and on June twenty-first the brig _Governor Philip_ was to
sail for Sydney, having landed her stores at the island. During the
night she stood off and on, and two prisoners coming on deck at dawn
for a breath of air noticed that discipline seemed slack, although
a couple of drowsy sentries guarded their hatchway. Within a few
minutes the prisoners were all on deck. One sentry was disarmed, the
other thrown overboard. Two soldiers off duty had a scuffle with the
mutineers, but one took refuge in the main chains, while the other was
drowned trying to swim ashore. The sergeant in charge ran on deck and
shot a mutineer before he was knocked over, stunned. As to the seamen,
they ran into the forecastle.
The prisoners had now control of the ship, but none of them knew how
to handle their prize, so they loosed a couple of sailors and made
them help. Woolfe, one of the convicts, then rescued a soldier who was
swimming alongside. The officers and soldiers aft were firing through
the grated hatches and wounded several convicts, until they were
allayed with a kettle of boiling water. So far the mutiny had gone off
very nicely, but now the captain, perched on the cabin table, fired
through the woodwork at a point where he thought a man was standing.
By luck the bullet went through the ringleader’s mouth and blew out
the back of his head, whereon a panic seized the mutineers, who fled
below hatches. The sailor at the wheel released the captain, and the
afterguard recaptured the ship. One mutineer had his head blown off,
and the rest surrendered. The whole deck was littered with the wounded
and the dying and the dead, and there were not many convicts left. In
the trial at Sydney, Wheelan, who proved innocent, was spared, also
Woolfe for saving a soldier’s life, but four were hanged, meeting their
fate like men.
It was in August that the sultan of Borneo confirmed Mr. James Brooke
as rajah of Sarawak, and the new king was extremely busy executing
robbers, rescuing shipwrecked mariners from slavery, reopening old
mines for diamonds, gold and manganese. “I breathe peace and comfort to
all who obey,” so he wrote to his mother, “and wrath and fury to the
evil-doer.”
* * * * *
Captain Ross was in the Antarctic, coasting the great ice barrier. Last
year he had given to two tall volcanoes the names of his ships, the
_Erebus_ and _Terror_. This year on March twelfth in a terrific gale
with blinding snow at midnight the two ships tried to get shelter under
the lee of an iceberg, but the _Terror_ rammed the _Erebus_ so that her
bow-sprit, fore topmast and a lot of smaller spars were carried away,
and she was jammed against the wall of the berg totally disabled. She
could not make sail and had no room to wear round, so she sailed out
backward, one of the grandest feats of seamanship on record; then,
clear of the danger, steered between two bergs, her yard-arms almost
scraping both of them, until she gained the smoother water to leeward,
where she found her consort.
* * * * *
In Canada the British governor set up a friendship between the French
Canadians and our government which has lasted ever since. That was on
the eighth of September, but on the fifth another British dignitary
sailed for home, having generously given a large slice of Canada to the
United States.
* * * * *
In Hayti there was an earthquake, in Brazil a revolution; in Jamaica
a storm on the tenth which wrecked H. M. S. _Spitfire_, and in the
western states Mount Saint Helen’s gave a fine volcanic eruption.
Northern Mexico was invaded by two filibustering expeditions from the
republic of Texas, and both were captured by the Mexicans. There were
eight hundred fifty prisoners, some murdered for fun, the rest marched
through Mexico exposed to all sorts of cruelty and insult before they
were lodged in pestilence-ridden jails. Captain Edwin Cameron and his
people on the way to prison overpowered the escort and fled to the
mountains, whence some of them escaped to Texas. But the leader and
most of his men being captured, President Santa Ana arranged that they
should draw from a bag of beans, those who got black beans to be shot.
Cameron drew a white bean, but was shot all the same. One youth, G. B.
Crittenden, drew a white bean, but gave it to a comrade saying, “You
have a wife and children; I haven’t, and I can afford to risk another
chance.” Again he drew white and lived to be a general in the great
Civil War.
General Green’s party escaped by tunneling their way out of the castle
of Perot, but most of the prisoners perished in prison of hunger and
disease. The British and American ministers at the City of Mexico won
the release of the few who were left alive.
* * * * *
In 1842 Sir James Simpson, Governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company,
with his bell-topper hat and his band, came by canoe across the
northern wilds to the Pacific Coast. From San Francisco he sailed
for Honolulu in the Sandwich Islands, where the company had a large
establishment under Sir John Petty. On April sixteenth he arrived in
the H. B. ship _Cowlitz_ at the capital of Russian America. “Of all
the drunken as well as the dirty places,” says he, “that I had ever
visited, New Archangel was the worst. On the holidays in particular,
of which, Sundays included, there are one hundred sixty-five in the
year, men, women and even children were to be seen staggering about in
all directions drunk.” Simpson thought all the world, though, of the
Russian bishop.
The Hudson’s Bay Company had a lease from the Russians of all the
fur-trading forts of Southeastern Alaska, and one of these was the
Redoubt Saint Diogenes. There Simpson found a flag of distress, gates
barred, sentries on the bastions and two thousand Indians besieging the
fort. Five days ago the officer commanding, Mr. McLoughlin, had made
all hands drunk and ran about saying he was going to be killed. So one
of the voyagers leveled a rifle and shot him dead. On the whole the
place was not well managed.
From New Archangel (Sitka) the Russian Lieutenant Zagoskin sailed
in June for the Redoubt Saint Michael on the coast of Behring Sea.
Smallpox had wiped out all the local Eskimos, so the Russian could get
no guide for the first attempt to explore the river Yukon. A day’s
march south he was entertained at an Eskimo camp where there was a
feast, and the throwing of little bladders into the bay in honor
of Ug-iak, spirit of the sea. On December ninth Zagoskin started
inland--“A driving snow-storm set in blinding my eyes ... a blade of
grass seventy feet distant had the appearance of a shrub, and sloping
valleys looked like lakes with high banks, the illusion vanishing upon
nearer approach. At midnight a terrible snow-storm began, and in the
short space of ten minutes covered men, dogs and sledges, making a
perfect hill above them. We sat at the foot of a hill with the wind
from the opposite side and our feet drawn under us to prevent them from
freezing, and covered with our parkas. When we were covered up by the
snow we made holes with sticks through to the open air. In a short time
the warmth of the breath and perspiration melted the snow, so that a
man-like cave was formed about each individual.” So they continued for
five hours, calling to one another to keep awake, for in that intense
cold to sleep was death. There we may as well leave them, before we
catch cold from the draft.
* * * * *
Fremont was exploring from the Mississippi Valley a route for emigrants
to Oregon, and in that journey climbed the Rocky Mountains to plant Old
Glory on one of the highest peaks. He was a very fine explorer, and not
long afterward conquered the Mexican state of California, completing
the outline of the modern United States. But Fremont’s guide will be
remembered long after Fremont is forgotten, for he was the greatest of
American frontiersmen, the ideal of modern chivalry, Kit Carson. Of
course he must have a chapter to himself.
XIII
A.D. 1843
KIT CARSON
Once Colonel Inman, an old frontiersman, bought a newspaper which had a
full page picture of Kit Carson. The hero stood in a forest, a gigantic
figure in a buckskin suit, heavily armed, embracing a rescued heroine,
while at his feet sprawled six slain Indian braves, his latest victims.
“What do you think of this?” said the colonel handing the picture to a
delicate little man, who wiped his spectacles, studied the work of art,
and replied in a gentle drawl, “That may be true, but I hain’t got no
recollection of it.” And so Kit Carson handed the picture back.
He stood five feet six, and looked frail, but his countrymen, and all
the boys of all the world think of this mighty frontiersman as a giant.
At seventeen he was a remarkably green and innocent boy for his years,
his home a log cabin on the Missouri frontier. Past the door ran the
trail to the west where trappers went by in buckskin, traders among the
Indians, and soldiers for the savage wars of the plains.
One day came Colonel S. Vrain, agent of a big fur-trading company,
with his long train of wagons hitting the Santa Fe trail. Kit got a
job with that train, to herd spare stock, hunt bison, mount guard and
fight Indians. They were three weeks out in camp when half a dozen
Pawnee Indians charged, yelling and waving robes to stampede the herd,
but a brisk fusillade from the white men sent them scampering back
over the sky-line. Next day, after a sixteen mile march the outfit
corraled their wagons for defense at the foot of Pawnee Rock beside the
Arkansas River. “I had not slept any of the night before,” says Kit,
“for I stayed awake watching to get a shot at the Pawnees that tried to
stampede our animals, expecting they would return; and I hadn’t caught
a wink all day, as I was out buffalo hunting, so I was awfully tired
and sleepy when we arrived at Pawnee Rock that evening, and when I was
posted at my place at night, I must have gone to sleep leaning against
the rocks; at any rate, I was wide enough awake when the cry of Indians
was given by one of the guard. I had picketed my mule about twenty
paces from where I stood, and I presume he had been lying down; all I
remember is, that the first thing I saw after the alarm was something
rising up out of the grass, which I thought was an Indian. I pulled the
trigger; it was a center shot, and I don’t believe the mule ever kicked
after he was hit!”
At daylight the Pawnees attacked in earnest and the fight lasted nearly
three days, the mule teams being shut in the corral without food or
water. At midnight of the second day they hitched up, fighting their
way for thirteen miles, then got into bad trouble fording Pawnee Fork
while the Indians poured lead and arrows into the teams until the
colonel and Kit Carson led a terrific charge which dispersed the
enemy. That fight cost the train four killed and seven wounded.
It was during this first trip that Carson saved the life of a wounded
teamster by cutting off his arm. With a razor he cut the flesh, with
a saw got through the bone, and with a white-hot king-bolt seared the
wound, stopping the flow of blood.
In 1835 Carson was hunter for Bent’s Fort, keeping the garrison of
forty men supplied with buffalo meat. Once he was out hunting with six
others and they made their camp tired out. “I saw,” says 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 would not let him for fear
he would hit a dog. I admit that I had a sort of idea that these 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! Well, 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 shots in his body and eight in his buffalo robe. The
Indians were 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.”
It was in his eight years as hunter for Bent’s Fort that Kit learned
to know the Indians, visiting their camps to smoke with the chiefs and
play with the little boys. When the Sioux nation invaded the Comanche
and Arrapaho hunting-grounds he persuaded them to go north, and so
averted war.
In 1842 when he was scout to Fremont, he went buffalo hunting to get
meat for the command. One day he was cutting up a beast newly killed
when he left his work in pursuit of a large bull that came rushing
past him. His horse was too much blown to run well, and when at last
he got near enough to fire, things began to happen all at once. The
bullet hitting too low enraged the bison just as the horse, stepping
into a prairie-dog hole, shot Kit some fifteen feet through the air.
Instead of Kit hunting bison, Mr. Buffalo hunted Kit, who ran for all
he was worth. So they came to the Arkansas River where Kit dived while
the bison stayed on the bank to hook him when he landed. But while the
bison gave Kit a swimming lesson, one of the hunters made an unfair
attack from behind, killing the animal. So Kit crawled out and skinned
his enemy.
One of his great hunting feats was the killing of five buffalo with
only four bullets. Being short of lead he had to cut out the ball from
number four, then catch up, and shoot number five.
On another hunt, chasing a cow bison down a steep hill, he fired just
as the animal took a flying leap, so that the carcass fell, not to the
ground, but spiked on a small cedar. The Indians persuaded him to
leave that cow impaled upon a tree-top because it was big magic; but to
people who do not know the shrubs of the southwestern desert, it must
sound like a first-class lie.
One night as the expedition lay in camp, far up among the mountains,
Fremont sat for hours reading some letters just arrived from home, then
fell asleep to dream of his young wife. Presently a soft sound, rather
like the blow of an ax made Kit start broad awake, to find Indians in
camp. They fled, but two of the white men were lying dead in their
blankets, and the noise that awakened Carson was the blow of a tomahawk
braining his own chum, the voyageur, La Jeunesse.
In the following year Carson was serving as hunter to a caravan
westward bound across the plains, when he met Captain Cooke in camp,
with four squadrons of United States Cavalry. The captain told him that
following on the trail was a caravan belonging to a wealthy Mexican and
so richly loaded that a hundred riders had been hired as guards.
Presently the Mexican train came up and the majordomo offered Carson
three hundred dollars if he would ride to the Mexican governor at
Santa Fe and ask him for an escort of troops from the point where they
entered New Mexico. Kit, who was hard up, gladly accepted the cash,
and rode to Bent’s Fort. There he had news that the Utes were on the
war-path, but Mr. Bent lent him the swiftest horse in the stables. Kit
walked, leading the horse by the rein, to have him perfectly fresh in
case there was need for flight. He reached the Ute village, hid, and
passed the place at night without being seen. So he reached Taos, his
own home in New Mexico, whence the alcalde sent his message to the
governor of the state at Santa Fe.
The governor had already sent a hundred riders but these had been
caught and wiped out by a force of Texans, only one escaping, who,
during the heat of the fight, caught a saddled Texan pony and rode off.
Meanwhile the governor--Armijo--sent his reply for Carson to carry to
the caravan. He said he was marching with a large force, and he did so.
But when the survivor of the lost hundred rode into Armijo’s camp with
his bad news, the whole outfit rolled their tails for home.
Carson, with the governor’s letter, and the news of plentiful trouble,
reached the Mexican caravan, which decided not to leave the protecting
American cavalry camped on the boundary-line. What with Texan raiders,
border ruffians, Utes, Apaches, Comanches, and other little drawbacks,
the caravan trade on the Santa Fe trail was never dull for a moment.
During these years one finds Kit Carson’s tracks all over the West
about as hard to follow as those of a flea in a blanket.
Here, for example, is a description of the American army of the Bear
Flag republic seizing California in 1846. “A vast cloud of dust
appeared first, and thence, a long file, emerged this wildest wild
party. Fremont rode ahead--a spare, active-looking man, with such an
eye! He was dressed in a blouse and leggings and wore a felt hat.
After him came five Delaware Indians, who were his body-guard, and
have been with him through all his wanderings; they had charge of
the baggage horses. The rest, many of them blacker than the Indians,
rode two and two, the rifle held in one hand across the pommel of the
saddle. Thirty-nine of them there are his regular men, the rest are
loafers picked up lately; his original men are principally backwoodsmen
from the state of Tennessee, and the banks of the upper waters of the
Missouri.... The dress of these men was principally a long loose coat
of deerskin, tied with thongs in front; trousers of the same, which
when wet through, they take off, scrape well inside with a knife, and
put on as soon as dry. The saddles were of various fashions, though
these and a large drove of horses, and a brass field gun, were things
they had picked up about California. They are allowed no liquor; this,
no doubt, has much to do with their good conduct; and the discipline,
too, is very strict.”
One of these men was Kit Carson, sent off in October to Washington on
the Atlantic, three thousand miles away, with news that California
was conquered for the United States, by a party of sixty men. In New
Mexico, Kit met General Kearney, and told him that the Californians
were a pack of cowards. So the general sent back his troops, marching
on with only one hundred dragoons. But the Californians were not
cowards, they had risen against the American invasion, they were
fighting magnificently, and Fremont had rather a bad time before he
completed the conquest.
It was during the Californian campaign that Carson made his famous
ride, the greatest feat of horsemanship the world has ever known. As
a despatch rider, he made his way through the hostile tribes, and
terrific deserts from the Missouri to California and back, a total of
four thousand, four hundred miles. But while he rested in California,
before he set out on the return, he joined a party of Californian
gentlemen on a trip up the coast from Los Angeles to San Francisco.
Two of the six men had a remount each, but four of them rode the six
hundred miles without change of horses in six days. Add that, and
the return to Kit Carson’s journey, and it makes a total of five
thousand, six hundred miles. So for distance, he beats world records
by one hundred miles, at a speed beyond all comparison, and in face of
difficulties past all parallel.