scalped the herders on guard, stampeded the cattle and rushed the
camp, so that the white men were driven to cover under the river bank.
Keeping the Indians at bay with their rifles, the party marched for the
settlements wading, sometimes swimming, while they pushed a raft that
carried a wounded man. Always a rear guard kept the Indians from coming
too near. And so the night fell.
“I, being the youngest and smallest,” says one of them, “had fallen
behind the others.... When I happened to look up to the moonlit sky,
and saw the plumed head of an Indian peeping over the bank.... I
instantly aimed my gun at his head, and fired. The report rang out
sharp and loud in the night air, and was immediately followed by an
Indian whoop; and the next moment about six feet of dead Indian came
tumbling into the river. I was not only overcome with astonishment, but
was badly scared, as I could hardly realize what I had done.”
Back came Frank McCarthy, the leader, with all his men. “Who fired that
shot?”
“I did.”
“Yes, and little Billy has killed an Indian stone-dead--too dead to
skin!”
At the age of nine Billy Cody had taken the war-path.
In those days the army had no luck. When the government sent a herd
of cattle the Indians got the beef, and the great big train of
seventy-five wagons might just as well have been addressed to the
Mormons, who burned the transport, stole the draft oxen and turned the
teamsters, including little Billy, loose in the mountains, where they
came nigh starving. The boy was too thin to cast a shadow when in the
spring he set out homeward across the plains with two returning trains.
One day these trains were fifteen miles apart when Simpson, the wagon
boss, with George Woods, a teamster, and Billy Cody, set off riding
mules from the rear outfit to catch up the teams in front. They were
midway when a war party of Indians charged at full gallop, surrounding
them, but Simpson shot the three mules and used their carcasses to make
a triangular fort. The three whites, each with a rifle and a brace of
revolvers were more than a match for men with bows and arrows, and the
Indians lost so heavily that they retreated out of range. That gave
the fort time to reload, but the Indians charged again, and this time
Woods got an arrow in the shoulder. Once more the Indians retired to
consult, while Simpson drew the arrow from Woods’ shoulder, plugging
the hole with a quid of chewing tobacco. A third time the Indians
charged, trying to ride down the stockade, but they lost a man and a
horse. Four warriors had fallen now in this battle with two men and a
little boy, but the Indians are a painstaking, persevering race, so
they waited until nightfall and set the grass on fire. But the whites
had been busy with knives scooping a hole from whence the loose earth
made a breastwork over the dead mules, so that the flames could not
reach them, and they had good cover to shoot from when the Indians
charged through the smoke. After that both sides had a sleep, and at
dawn they were fresh for a grand charge, handsomely repulsed. The
redskins sat down in a ring to starve the white men out, and great was
their disappointment when Simpson’s rear train of wagons marched to the
rescue. The red men did not stay to pick flowers.
It seems like lying to state that at the age of twelve Billy Cody began
to take rank among the world’s great horsemen, and yet he rode on the
pony express, which closed in 1861, his fourteenth year.
The trail from the Missouri over the plains, the deserts and the
mountains into California was about two thousand miles through a
country infested with gangs of professional robbers and hostile Indian
tribes. The gait of the riders averaged twelve miles an hour, which
means a gallop, to allow for the slow work in mountain passes. There
were one hundred ninety stations at which the riders changed ponies
without breaking their run, and each must be fit and able for one
hundred miles a day in time of need. Pony Bob afterward had contracts
by which he rode one hundred miles a day for a year.
Now, none of the famous riders of history, like Charles XII, of Sweden;
Dick, King of Natal, or Dick Turpin, of England, made records to beat
the men of the pony express, and in that service Billy was counted a
hero. He is outclassed by the Cossack Lieutenant Peschkov, who rode one
pony at twenty-eight miles a day the length of the Russian empire, from
Vladivostok to St. Petersburg, and by Kit Carson who with one horse
rode six hundred miles in six days. There are branches of horsemanship,
too, in which he would have been proud to take lessons from Lord
Lonsdale, or Evelyn French, but Cody is, as far as I have seen, of all
white men incomparable for grace, for beauty of movement, among the
horsemen of the modern world.
But to turn back to the days of the boy rider.
“One day,” he writes, “when I galloped into my home station I found
that the rider who was expected to take the trip out on my arrival had
gotten into a drunken row the night before, and had been killed.... I
pushed on ... entering every relay station on time, and accomplished
the round trip of three hundred twenty-two miles back to Red Buttes
without a single mishap, and on time. This stands on the record as
being the longest pony express journey ever made.”
One of the station agents has a story to tell of this ride, made
without sleep, and with halts of only a few minutes for meals. News had
leaked out of a large sum of money to be shipped by the express, and
Cody, expecting robbers, rolled the treasure in his saddle blanket,
filling the official pouches with rubbish. At the best place for an
ambush two men stepped out on to the trail, halting him with their
muskets. As he explained, the pouches were full of rubbish, but the
road agents knew better. “Mark my words,” he said as he unstrapped,
“you’ll hang for this.”
“We’ll take chances on that, Bill.”
“If you will have them, take them!” With that he hurled the pouches,
and as robber number one turned to pick them up, robber number two had
his gun-arm shattered with the boy’s revolver-shot. Then with a yell he
rode down the stooping man, and spurring hard, got out of range unhurt.
He had saved the treasure, and afterward both robbers were hanged by
vigilantes.
Once far down a valley ahead Cody saw a dark object above a boulder
directly on his trail, and when it disappeared he knew he was caught
in an ambush. Just as he came into range he swerved wide to the right,
and at once a rifle smoked from behind the rock. Two Indians afoot
ran for their ponies while a dozen mounted warriors broke from the
timbered edge of the valley, racing to cut him off. One of these had a
war bonnet of eagle plumes, the badge of a chief, and his horse, being
the swiftest, drew ahead. All the Indians were firing, but the chief
raced Cody to head him off at a narrow pass of the valley. The boy was
slightly ahead, and when the chief saw that the white rider would have
about thirty yards to spare he fitted an arrow, drawing for the shot.
But Cody, swinging round in the saddle, lashed out his revolver, and
the chief, clutching at the air, fell, rolling over like a ball as he
struck the ground. At the chief’s death-cry a shower of arrows from the
rear whizzed round the boy, one slightly wounding his pony who, spurred
by the pain, galloped clear, leaving the Indians astern in a ten mile
race to the next relay.
After what seems to the reader a long life of adventure, Mr. Cody had
just reached the age of twenty-two when a series of wars broke out
with the Indian tribes, and he was attached to the troops as a scout.
A number of Pawnee Indians who thought nothing of this white man,
were also serving. They were better trackers, better interpreters and
thought themselves better hunters. One day a party of twenty had been
running buffalo, and made a bag of thirty-two head when Cody got leave
to attack a herd by himself. Mounted on his famous pony Buckskin Joe
he made a bag of thirty-six head on a half-mile run, and his name was
Buffalo Bill from that time onward.
That summer he led a squadron of cavalry that attacked six hundred
Sioux, and in that fight against overwhelming odds he brought down a
chief at a range of four hundred yards, in those days a very long shot.
His victim proved to be Tall Bull, one of the great war leaders of
the Sioux. The widow of Tall Bull was proud that her husband had been
killed by so famous a warrior as Prairie Chief, for that was Cody’s
name among the Indians.
There is one very nice story about the Pawnee scouts. A new general had
taken command who must have all sorts of etiquette proper to soldiers.
It was all very well for the white sentries to call at intervals of the
night from post to post: “Post Number One, nine o’clock, all’s well!”
“Post Number Two, etc.”
But when the Pawnee sentries called, “Go to hell, I don’t care!” well,
the practise had to be stopped.
Of Buffalo Bill’s adventures in these wars the plain record would only
take one large volume, but he was scouting in company with Texas Jack,
John Nelson, Belden, the White Chief, and so many other famous frontier
heroes, each needing at least one book volume, that I must give the
story up as a bad job. At the end of the Sioux campaign Buffalo Bill
was chief of scouts with the rank of colonel.
[Illustration: COLONEL CODY
(“Buffalo Bill”)]
In 1876, General Custer, with a force of nearly four hundred cavalry,
perished in an attack on the Sioux, and the only survivor was his
pet boy scout, Billy Jackson, who got away at night disguised as an
Indian. Long afterward Billy, who was one of God’s own gentlemen,
told me that story while we sat on a grassy hillside watching a great
festival of the Blackfeet nation.
After the battle in which Custer--the Sun Child--fell, the big Sioux
army scattered, but a section of it was rounded up by a force under the
guidance of Buffalo Bill.
“One of the Indians,” he says, “who was handsomely decorated with all
the ornaments usually worn by a war chief ... sang out to me ‘I know
you, Prairie Chief; if you want to fight come ahead and fight me!’
“The chief was riding his horse back and forth in front of his men, as
if to banter me, and I accepted the challenge. I galloped toward him
for fifty yards and he advanced toward me about the same distance, both
of us riding at full speed, and then when we were only about thirty
yards apart I raised my rifle and fired. His horse fell to the ground,
having been killed by my bullet. Almost at the same instant my horse
went down, having stepped in a gopher-hole. The fall did not hurt me
much, and I instantly sprang to my feet. The Indian had also recovered
himself, and we were now both on foot, and not more than twenty paces
apart. We fired at each other simultaneously. My usual luck did not
desert me on this occasion, for his bullet missed me, while mine struck
him in the breast. He reeled and fell, but before he had fairly touched
the ground I was upon him, knife in hand, and had driven the keen-edged
weapon to its hilt in his heart. Jerking his war-bonnet off, I
scientifically scalped him in about five seconds....
“The Indians came charging down upon me from a hill in hopes of
cutting me off. General Merritt ... ordered ... Company K to hurry
to my rescue. The order came none too soon.... As the soldiers came
up I swung the Indian chieftain’s topknot and bonnet in the air, and
shouted: ‘The first scalp for Custer!’”
Far up to the northward, Sitting Bull, with the war chief Spotted Tail
and about three thousand warriors fled from the scene of the Custer
massacre. And as they traveled on the lonely plains they came to a
little fort with the gates closed. “Open your gates and hand out your
grub,” said the Indians.
“Come and get the grub,” answered the fort.
So the gates were thrown open and the three thousand warriors stormed
in to loot the fort. They found only two white men standing outside a
door, but all round the square the log buildings were loopholed and
from every hole stuck out the muzzle of a rifle. The Indians were
caught in such a deadly trap that they ran for their lives back to camp.
Very soon news reached the Blackfeet that their enemies the Sioux were
camped by the new fort at Wood Mountain, so the whole nation marched to
wipe them out, and Sitting Bull appealed for help to the white men. “Be
good,” said the fort, “and nobody shall hurt you.”
So the hostile armies camped on either side, and the thirty white men
kept the peace between them. One day the Sioux complained that the
Blackfeet had stolen fifty horses. So six of the white men were sent
to the Blackfoot herd to bring the horses back. They did not know which
horses to select so they drove off one hundred fifty for good measure
straight at a gallop through the Blackfoot camp, closely pursued by
that indignant nation. Barely in time they ran the stock within the
fort, and slammed the gates home in the face of the raging Blackfeet.
They were delighted with themselves until the officer commanding fined
them a month’s pay each for insulting the Blackfoot nation.
The winter came, the spring and then the summer, when those thirty
white men arrived at the Canada-United States boundary where they
handed over three thousand Sioux prisoners to the American troops. From
that time the redcoats of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police of Canada
have been respected on the frontier.
And now came a very wonderful adventure. Sitting Bull, the leader
of the Sioux nation who had defeated General Custer’s division and
surrendered his army to thirty Canadian soldiers, went to Europe to
take part in a circus personally conducted by the chief of scouts of
the United States Army, Buffalo Bill. Poor Sitting Bull was afterward
murdered by United States troops in the piteous massacre of Wounded
Knee. Buffalo Bill for twenty-six years paraded Europe and America
with his gorgeous Wild West show, slowly earning the wealth which he
lavished in the founding of Cody City, Wyoming.
Toward the end of these tours I used to frequent the show camp much
like a stray dog expecting to be kicked, would spend hours swapping
lies with the cowboys in the old Deadwood Coach, or sit at meat with
the colonel and his six hundred followers. On the last tour the old man
was thrown by a bad horse at Bristol and afterward rode with two broken
bones in splints. Only the cowboys knew, who told me, as day by day I
watched him back his horse from the ring with all the old incomparable
grace.
He went back to build a million dollar irrigation ditch for his little
city on the frontier, and shortly afterward the newspapers reported
that my friends--the Buffalo Creek Gang of robbers--attacked his bank,
and shot the cashier. May civilization never shut out the free air of
the frontier while the old hero lives, in peace and honor, loved to the
end and worshiped by all real frontiersmen.
XVII
A. D. 1860
THE AUSTRALIAN DESERT
I
When the Eternal Father was making the earth, at one time He filled the
sea with swimming dragons, the air with flying dragons, and the land
with hopping dragons big as elephants; but they were not a success, and
so He swept them all away. After that he filled the southern continents
with a small improved hopping dragon, that laid no eggs, but carried
the baby in a pouch. There were queer half-invented fish, shadeless
trees, and furry running birds like the emu and the moa. Then He
swamped that southern world under the sea, and moved the workshop to
our northern continents. But He left New Zealand and Australia just as
they were, a scrap of the half-finished world with furry running birds,
the hopping kangaroo, the shadeless trees, and half-invented fish.
So when the English went to Australia it was not an ordinary voyage,
but a journey backward through the ages, through goodness only knows
how many millions of years to the fifth day of creation. It was like
visiting the moon or Mars. To live and travel in such a strange land a
man must be native born, bush raised, and cunning at that, on pain of
death by famine.
The first British settlers, too, were convicts. The laws were so bad in
England that a fellow might be deported merely for giving cheek to a
judge; and the convicts on the whole were very decent people, brutally
treated in the penal settlements. They used to escape to the bush,
and runaway convicts explored Australia mainly in search of food. One
of them, in Tasmania, used, whenever he escaped, to take a party with
him and eat them one by one, until he ran short of food and had to
surrender.
Later on gold was discovered, and free settlers drifted in, filling the
country, but the miners and the farmers were too busy earning a living
to do much exploration. So the exploring fell to English gentlemen,
brave men, but hopeless tenderfeet, who knew nothing of bushcraft and
generally died of hunger or thirst in districts where the native-born
colonial grows rich to-day.
Edgar John Eyre, for instance, a Yorkshireman, landed in Sydney at the
age of sixteen, and at twenty-five was a rich sheep-farmer, appointed
by government protector of the black fellows. In 1840 the colonists
of South Australia wanted a trail for drifting sheep into Western
Australia, and young Eyre, from what he had learned among the savages,
said the scheme was all bosh, in which he was perfectly right. He
thought that the best line for exploring was northward, and set out
to prove his words, but got tangled up in the salt bogs surrounding
Torrens, and very nearly lost his whole party in an attempt to wade
across. After that failure he felt that he had wasted the money
subscribed in a wildcat project, so to make good set out again to find
a route for sheep along the waterless south coast of the continent. He
knew the route was impossible, but it is a poor sort of courage that
has to feed on hope, and the men worth having are those who leave their
hopes behind to march light while they do their duty.
Eyre’s party consisted of himself and his ranch foreman Baxter, a
favorite black boy Wylie, who was his servant, and two other natives
who had been on the northward trip. They had nine horses, a pony, six
sheep, and nine weeks’ rations on the pack animals.
The first really dry stage was one hundred twenty-eight miles without
a drop of water, and it was not the black fellows, but Eyre, the
tenderfoot, who went ahead and found the well that saved them. The
animals died off one by one, so that the stores had to be left behind,
and there was no food but rotten horse-flesh which caused dysentery, no
water save dew collected with a sponge from the bushes after the cold
nights. The two black fellows deserted, but after three days came back
penitent and starving, thankful to be reinstated.
These black fellows did not believe the trip was possible, they wanted
to go home, they thought the expedition well worth plundering, and so
one morning while Eyre was rounding up the horses they shot Baxter,
plundered the camp and bolted. Only Eyre and his boy Wylie were left,
but if they lived the deserters might be punished. So the two black
fellows, armed with Baxter’s gun, tried to hunt down Eyre and his boy
with a view to murder. They came so near at night that Eyre once heard
them shout to Wylie to desert. Eyre and the boy stole off, marching so
rapidly that the murderers were left behind and perished.
A week later, still following the coast of the Great Bight, Wylie
discovered a French ship lying at anchor, and the English skipper fed
the explorers for a fortnight until they were well enough to go on.
Twenty-three more days of terrible suffering brought Eyre and his boy,
looking like a brace of scarecrows, to a hilltop overlooking the town
of Albany. They had reached Western Australia, the first travelers to
cross from the eastern to the western colonies.
In after years Eyre was governor of Jamaica.
II
Australia, being the harshest country on earth, breeds the hardiest
pioneers, horsemen, bushmen, trackers, hunters, scouts, who find
the worst African or American travel a sort of picnic. The bushie
is disappointing to town Australians because he has no swank, and
nothing of the brilliant picturesqueness of the American frontiersman.
He is only a tall, gaunt man, lithe as a whip, with a tongue like a
whip-lash; and it is on bad trips or in battle that one finds what he
is like inside, a most knightly gentleman with a vein of poetry.
Anyway the Melbourne people were cracked in 1860 when they wanted an
expedition to cross Australia northward, and instead of appointing
bushmen for the job selected tenderfeet. Burke was an Irishman, late
of the Hungarian cavalry, and the Royal Irish Constabulary, serving as
an officer in the Victorian police. Wills was a Devon man, with some
frontier training on the sheep runs, but had taken to astronomy and
surveying. There were several other white men, and three Afghans with a
train of camels.
They left Melbourne with pomp and circumstance, crossed Victoria
through civilized country, and made a base camp on the Darling River
at Menindie. There Burke sacked two mutinous followers and his doctor
scuttled in a funk, so he took on Wright, an old settler who knew
the way to Cooper’s Creek four hundred miles farther on. Two hundred
miles out Wright was sent back to bring up stores from Menindie, while
the expedition went on to make an advanced base at Cooper’s Creek.
Everything was to depend on the storage of food at that base.
While they were waiting for Wright to come up with their stores, Wills
and another man prospected ninety miles north from Cooper’s Creek to
the Stony Desert, a land of white quartz pebbles and polished red
sandstone chips. The explorer Sturt had been there, and come back
blind. No man had been beyond.
Wills, having mislaid his three camels, came back ninety miles afoot
without water, to find the whole expedition stuck at Cooper’s Creek,
waiting for stores. Mr. Wright at Menindie burned time, wasting six
weeks before he attempted to start with the stores, and Burke at last
could bear the delay no longer. There were thunder-storms giving
promise of abundant water for once in the northern desert, so Burke
marched with Wills, King and Gray, taking a horse and six camels.
William Brahe was left in charge at the camp at Cooper’s Creek, to
remain with ample provisions until Wright turned up, but not to leave
except in dire extremity.
Burke’s party crossed the glittering Stony Desert, and watching the
birds who always know the way to water, they came to a fine lake, where
they spent Christmas day. Beyond that they came to the Diamantina and
again there was water. The country improved, there were northward
flowing streams to cheer them on their way, and at last they came to
salt water at the head of the Gulf of Carpentaria. They had crossed the
continent from south to north.
With blithe hearts they set out on their return, and if they had to
kill the camels for food, then to eat snakes, which disagreed with
them, still there would be plenty when they reached Cooper’s Creek.
Gray complained of being ill, but pilfering stores is not a proper
symptom of any disease, so Burke gave him a thrashing by way of
medicine. When he died, they delayed one day for his burial; one day
too much, for when they reached Cooper’s Creek they were just nine
hours late. Thirty-one miles they made in the last march and reeled
exhausted into an empty camp ground. Cut in the bark of a tree were the
words “Dig, 21 April 1861.” They dug a few inches into the earth where
they found a box of provisions, and a bottle containing a letter.
“The depot party of the V. E. E. leave this camp to-day to return to
the Darling. I intend to go S. E. from camp sixty miles to get into our
old track near Bulloo. Two of my companions and myself are quite well;
the third, Patten, has been unable to walk for the last eighteen days,
as his leg has been severely hurt when thrown from one of the horses.
No person has been up here from Darling. We have six camels and twelve
horses in good working condition. William Brahe.”
It would be hopeless with two exhausted camels to try and catch up
with that march. Down Cooper’s Creek one hundred fifty miles the South
Australian Mounted Police had an outpost, and the box of provisions
would last out that short journey.