Out on the frontier, and generally among those who spend their lives in,
or on the borders of, the wilderness, life is reduced to its elemental
conditions. The passions and emotions of these grim hunters of the
mountains, and wild rough-riders of the plains, are simpler and stranger
than those of people dwelling in more complicated states of society.
As soon as the communities become settled and begin to grow with any
rapidity, the American instinct for law asserts itself; but in the
earlier stages each individual is obliged to be a law to himself and to
guard his rights with a strong hand. Of course the transition periods
are full of incongruities. Men have not yet adjusted their relations to
morality and law with any niceness. They hold strongly by certain rude
virtues, and on the other hand they quite fail to recognize even
as shortcomings not a few traits that obtain scant mercy in older
communities. Many of the desperadoes, the man-killers, and road-agents
have good sides to their characters. Often they are people, who, in
certain stages of civilization, do, or have done, good work, but who,
when these stages have passed, find themselves surrounded by conditions
which accentuate their worst qualities, and make their best qualities
useless. The average desperado, for instance, has, after all, much the
same standard of morals that the Norman nobles had in the days of the
battle of Hastings, and, ethically and morally, he is decidedly in
advance of the vikings, who were the ancestors of these same nobles--and
to whom, by the way, he himself could doubtless trace a portion of
his blood. If the transition from the wild lawlessness of life in the
wilderness or on the border to a higher civilization were stretched
out over a term of centuries, he and his descendants would doubtless
accommodate themselves by degrees to the changing circumstances. But
unfortunately in the far West the transition takes place with marvellous
abruptness, and at an altogether unheard-of speed, and many a man's
nature is unable to change with sufficient rapidity to allow him to
harmonize with his environment. In consequence, unless he leaves for
still wilder lands, he ends by getting hung instead of founding a family
which would revere his name as that of a very capable, although not in
all respects a conventionally moral, ancestor.
Most of the men with whom I was intimately thrown during my life on the
frontier and in the wilderness were good fellows, hard-working, brave,
resolute, and truthful. At times, of course, they were forced of
necessity to do deeds which would seem startling to dwellers in cities
and in old settled places; and though they waged a very stern and
relentless warfare upon evil-doers whose misdeeds had immediate and
tangible bad results, they showed a wide toleration of all save the most
extreme classes of wrong, and were not given to inquiring too curiously
into a strong man's past, or to criticizing him over-harshly for a
failure to discriminate in finer ethical questions. Moreover, not a few
of the men with whom I came in contact--with some of whom my relations
were very close and friendly--had at different times led rather tough
careers. This fact was accepted by them and by their companions as a
fact, and nothing more. There were certain offences, such as rape, the
robbery of a friend, or murder under circumstances of cowardice and
treachery, which were never forgiven; but the fact that when the
country was wild a young fellow had gone on the road--that is, become a
highwayman, or had been chief of a gang of desperadoes, horse-thieves,
and cattle-killers, was scarcely held to weigh against him, being
treated as a regrettable, but certainly not shameful, trait of youth.
He was regarded by his neighbors with the same kindly tolerance which
respectable mediaeval Scotch borderers doubtless extended to their
wilder young men who would persist in raiding English cattle even in
time of peace.
Of course if these men were asked outright as to their stories they
would have refused to tell them or else would have lied about them; but
when they had grown to regard a man as a friend and companion they
would often recount various incidents of their past lives with perfect
frankness, and as they combined in a very curious degree both a decided
sense of humor, and a failure to appreciate that there was anything
especially remarkable in what they related, their tales were always
entertaining.
Early one spring, now nearly ten years ago, I was out hunting some lost
horses. They had strayed from the range three months before, and we
had in a roundabout way heard that they were ranging near some broken
country, where a man named Brophy had a ranch, nearly fifty miles from
my own. When I started thither the weather was warm, but the second day
out it grew colder and a heavy snowstorm came on. Fortunately I was able
to reach the ranch all right, finding there one of the sons of a Little
Beaver ranchman, and a young cowpuncher belonging to a Texas outfit,
whom I knew very well. After putting my horse into the corral and
throwing him down some hay I strode into the low hut, made partly of
turf and partly of cottonwood logs, and speedily warmed myself before
the fire. We had a good warm supper, of bread, potatoes, fried venison,
and tea. My two companions grew very sociable and began to talk freely
over their pipes. There were two bunks one above the other. I climbed
into the upper, leaving my friends, who occupied the lower, sitting
together on a bench recounting different incidents in the careers of
themselves and their cronies during the winter that had just passed.
Soon one of them asked the other what had become of a certain horse, a
noted cutting pony, which I had myself noticed the preceding fall. The
question aroused the other to the memory of a wrong which still rankled,
and he began (I alter one or two of the proper names):
"Why, that was the pony that got stole. I had been workin' him on rough
ground when I was out with the Three Bar outfit and he went tender
forward, so I turned him loose by the Lazy B ranch, and when I came back
to git him there wasn't anybody at the ranch and I couldn't find him.
The sheep-man who lives about two miles west, under Red Clay butte,
told me he seen a fellow in a wolfskin coat, ridin' a pinto bronco, with
white eyes, leadin' that pony of mine just two days before; and I hunted
round till I hit his trail and then I followed to where I'd reckoned he
was headin' for--the Short Pine Hills. When I got there a rancher told
me he had seen the man pass on towards Cedartown, and sure enough when
I struck Cedartown I found he lived there in a 'dobe house, just outside
the town. There was a boom on the town and it looked pretty slick.
There was two hotels and I went into the first, and I says, 'Where's the
justice of the peace?' says I to the bartender.
"'There ain't no justice of the peace,' says he, 'the justice of the
peace got shot.'
"'Well, where's the constable?' says I.
"'Why, it was him that shot the justice of the peace!' says he; 'he's
skipped the country with a bunch of horses.'
"'Well, ain't there no officer of the law left in this town?' says I.
"'Why, of course,' says he, 'there's a probate judge; he is over
tendin' bar at the Last Chance Hotel.'
"So I went over to the Last Chance Hotel and I walked in there.
'Mornin',' says I.
"'Morning',' says he.
"'You be the probate judge?' says I.
"'That's what I am,' says he. 'What do you want?' says he.
"'I want justice,' says I.
"'What kind of justice do you want?' says he. 'What's it for?'
"'It's for stealin' a horse,' says I.
"'Then by God you'll git it,' says he. 'Who stole the horse?' says he.
"'It is a man that lives in a 'dobe house, just outside the town
there,' says I.
"'Well, where do you come from yourself?' said he.
"'From Medory,' said I.
"With that he lost interest and settled kind o' back, and says he,
'There won't no Cedartown jury hang a Cedartown man for stealin' a
Medory man's horse,' said he.
"'Well, what am I to do about my horse?' says I.
"'Do?' says he; 'well, you know where the man lives, don't you?' says
he; 'then sit up outside his house, to-night and shoot him when he comes
in,' says he, 'and skip out with the horse.'
"'All right,' says I, 'that is what I'll do,' and I walked off.
"So I went off to his house and I laid down behind some sage-brushes to
wait for him. He was not at home, but I could see his wife movin' about
inside now and then, and I waited and waited, and it growed darker, and
I begun to say to myself, 'Now here you are lyin' out to shoot this man
when he comes home; and it's getting' dark, and you don't know him, and
if you do shoot the next man that comes into that house, like as not it
won't be the fellow you're after at all, but some perfectly innocent man
a-comin' there after the other man's wife!'
"So I up and saddled the bronc' and lit out for home," concluded the
narrator with the air of one justly proud of his own self-abnegating
virtue.
The "town" where the judge above-mentioned dwelt was one of those
squalid pretentiously named little clusters of make-shift dwellings
which on the edge of the wild country spring up with the rapid growth of
mushrooms, and are often no longer lived. In their earlier stages
these towns are frequently built entirely of canvas, and are subject to
grotesque calamities. When the territory purchased from the Sioux, in
the Dakotas, a couple of years ago was thrown open to settlement, there
was a furious inrush of men on horseback and in wagons, and various
ambitious cities sprang up overnight. The new settlers were all under
the influence of that curious craze which causes every true westerner to
put unlimited faith in the unknown and untried; many had left all they
had in a far better farming country, because they were true to their
immemorial belief that, wherever they were, their luck would be better
if they went somewhere else. They were always on the move, and headed
for the vague beyond. As miners see visions of all the famous mines of
history in each new camp, so these would-be city founders saw future St.
Pauls and Omahas in every forlorn group of tents pitched by some muddy
stream in a desert of gumbo and sage-brush; and they named both the
towns and the canvas buildings in accordance with their bright hopes for
the morrow, rather than with reference to the mean facts of the day. One
of these towns, which when twenty-four hours old boasted of six
saloons, a "court-house," and an "opera house," was overwhelmed by early
disaster. The third day of its life a whirlwind came along and took off
the opera house and half the saloons; and the following evening lawless
men nearly finished the work of the elements. The riders of a huge
trail-outfit from Texas, to their glad surprise discovered the town and
abandoned themselves to a night of roaring and lethal carousal. Next
morning the city authorities were lamenting, with oaths of bitter rage,
that "them hell-and-twenty Flying A cowpunchers had cut the court-house
up into parts." It was true. The cowboys were in need of chaps, and
with an admirable mixture of adventurousness, frugality, and ready
adaptability to circumstances, had made substitutes therefore in the
shape of canvas overalls, cut from the roof and walls of the shaky
temple of justice.
One of my valued friends in the mountains, and one of the best hunters
with whom I ever travelled, was a man who had a peculiarly light-hearted
way of looking at conventional social obligations. Though in some ways
a true backwoods Donatello, he was a man of much shrewdness and of great
courage and resolution. Moreover, he possessed what only a few men do
possess, the capacity to tell the truth. He saw facts as they were, and
could tell them as they were, and he never told an untruth unless for
very weighty reasons. He was pre-eminently a philosopher, of a happy,
sceptical turn of mind. He had no prejudices. He never looked down, as
so many hard characters do, upon a person possessing a different code of
ethics. His attitude was one of broad, genial tolerance. He saw nothing
out of the way in the fact that he had himself been a road-agent, a
professional gambler, and a desperado at different stages of his career.
On the other hand, he did not in the least hold it against any one that
he had always acted within the law. At the time that I knew him he had
become a man of some substance, and naturally a staunch upholder of the
existing order of things. But while he never boasted of his past deeds,
he never apologized for them, and evidently would have been quite as
incapable of understanding that they needed an apology as he would have
been incapable of being guilty of mere vulgar boastfulness. He did not
often allude to his past career at all. When he did, he recited its
incidents perfectly naturally and simply, as events, without any
reference to or regard for their ethical significance. It was this
quality which made him at times a specially pleasant companion, and
always an agreeable narrator. The point of his story, or what seemed to
him the point, was rarely that which struck me. It was the incidental
sidelights the story threw upon his own nature and the somewhat lurid
surroundings amid which he had moved.
On one occasion when we were out together we killed a bear, and after
skinning it, took a bath in a lake. I noticed he had a scar on the side
of his foot and asked him how he got it, to which he responded with
indifference:
"Oh, that? Why, a man shootin' at me to make me dance, that was all."
I expressed some curiosity in that matter, and he went on:
"Well, the way of it was this: It was when I was keeping a saloon in New
Mexico, and there was a man there by the name of Fowler, and there was a
reward on him of three thousand dollars----"
"Put on him by the State?"
"No, put on by his wife," said my friend; "and there was this--"
"Hold on," I interrupted; "put on by his wife did you say?"
"Yes, by his wife. Him an her had been keepin' a faro bank, you see, and
they quarreled about it, so she just put a reward on him, and so--"
"Excuse me," I said, "but do you mean to say that this reward was put
on publicly?" to which my friend answered, with an air of gentlemanly
boredom at being interrupted to gratify my thirst for irrelevant detail:
"Oh, no, not publicly. She just mentioned it to six or eight intimate
personal friends."
"Go on," I responded, somewhat overcome by this instance of the
primitive simplicity with which New Mexico matrimonial disputes were
managed, and he continued:
"Well, two men come ridin' in to see me to borrow my guns. My guns was
Colt's self-cockers. It was a new thing then, an they was the only ones
in town. These come to me, and 'Simpson,' says they, 'we want to borrow
your guns; we are goin' to kill Fowler.'
"'Hold on for a moment,' said I, 'I am willin' to lend you them guns,
but I ain't goin' to know what you 'r' goin' to do with them, no sir;
but of course you can have the guns.'" Here my friend's face lightened
pleasantly, and he continued:
"Well, you may easily believe I felt surprised next day when Fowler come
ridin' in, and, says he, 'Simpson, here's your guns!' He had shot them
two men! 'Well, Fowler,' says I, 'if I had known them men was after you,
I'd never have let them have them guns nohow,' says I. That wasn't true,
for I did know it, but there was no cause to tell him that." I murmured
my approval of such prudence, and Simpson continued, his eyes gradually
brightening with the light of agreeable reminiscence:
"Well, they up and they took Fowler before the justice of the peace. The
justice of the peace was a Turk."
"Now, Simpson, what do you mean by that?" I interrupted:
"Well, he come from Turkey," said Simpson, and I again sank back,
wondering briefly what particular variety of Mediterranean outcast had
drifted down to New Mexico to be made a justice of the peace. Simpson
laughed and continued:
"That Fowler was a funny fellow. The Turk, he committed Fowler, and
Fowler, he riz up and knocked him down and tromped all over him and made
him let him go!"
"That was an appeal to a higher law," I observed. Simpson assented
cheerily, and continued:
"Well, that Turk, he got nervous for fear Fowler he was goin' to kill
him, and so he comes to me and offers me twenty-five dollars a day to
protect him from Fowler; and I went to Fowler, and 'Fowler,' says I,
'that Turk's offered me twenty-five dollars a day to protect him from
you. Now, I ain't goin' to get shot for no twenty-five dollars a day,
and if you are goin' to kill the Turk, just say so and go and do it; but
if you ain't goin' to kill the Turk, there's no reason why I shouldn't
earn that twenty-five dollars a day!' and Fowler, says he, 'I ain't
goin' to touch the Turk; you just go right ahead and protect him.'"
So Simpson "protected" the Turk from the imaginary danger of Fowler, for
about a week, at twenty-five dollars a day. Then one evening he happened
to go out and met Fowler, "and," said he, "the moment I saw him I knowed
he felt mean, for he begun to shoot at my feet," which certainly did
seem to offer presumptive evidence of meanness. Simpson continued:
"I didn't have no gun, so I just had to stand there and take it util
something distracted his attention, and I went off home to get my gun
and kill him, but I wanted to do it perfectly lawful; so I went up to
the mayor (he was playin' poker with one of the judges), and says I to
him, 'Mr. Mayor,' says I, 'I am goin' to shoot Fowler. And the mayor
he riz out of his chair and he took me by the hand, and says he, 'Mr.
Simpson, if you do I will stand by you;' and the judge, he says, 'I'll
go on your bond.'"
Fortified by this cordial approval of the executive and judicial
branches of the government, Mr. Simpson started on his quest. Meanwhile,
however, Fowler had cut up another prominent citizen, and they already
had him in jail. The friends of law and order feeling some little
distrust as to the permanency of their own zeal for righteousness,
thought it best to settle the matter before there was time for cooling,
and accordingly, headed by Simpson, the mayor, the judge, the Turk,
and other prominent citizens of the town, they broke into the jail and
hanged Fowler. The point in the hanging which especially tickled my
friend's fancy, as he lingered over the reminiscence, was one that was
rather too ghastly to appeal to our own sense of humor. In the Turk's
mind there still rankled the memory of Fowler's very unprofessional
conduct while figuring before him as a criminal. Said Simpson, with a
merry twinkle of the eye: "Do you know that Turk, he was a right funny
fellow too after all. Just as the boys were going to string up Fowler,
says he, 'Boys, stop; one moment, gentlemen,--Mr. Fowler, good-by,' and
he blew a kiss to him!"
In the cow-country, and elsewhere on the wild borderland between
savagery and civilization, men go quite as often by nicknames as by
those to which they are lawfully entitled. Half the cowboys and hunters
of my acquaintance are known by names entirely unconnected with those
they inherited or received when they were christened. Occasionally some
would-be desperado or make-believe mighty hunter tries to adopt what
he deems a title suitable to his prowess; but such an effort is never
attempted in really wild places, where it would be greeted with huge
derision; for all of these names that are genuine are bestowed by
outsiders, with small regard to the wishes of the person named.
Ordinarily the name refers to some easily recognizable accident of
origin, occupation, or aspect; as witness the innumerable Dutcheys,
Frencheys, Kentucks, Texas Jacks, Bronco Bills, Bear Joes, Buckskins,
Red Jims, and the like. Sometimes it is apparently meaningless; one of
my own cowpuncher friends is always called "Sliver" or "Splinter"--why,
I have no idea. At other times some particular incident may give rise to
the title; a clean-looking cowboy formerly in my employ was always known
as "Muddy Bill," because he had once been bucked off his horse into a
mud hole.
The grewsome genesis of one such name is given in the following letter
which I have just received from an old hunting-friend in the Rockies,
who took a kindly interest in a frontier cabin which the Boone and
Crockett Club was putting up at the Chicago World's Fair.
"Feb 16th 1893; Der Sir: I see in the newspapers that your club the
Daniel Boon and Davey Crockit you intend to erect a fruntier Cabin
at the world's Far at Chicago to represent the erley Pianears of our
country I would like to see you maik a success I have all my life been a
fruntiersman and feel interested in your undrtaking and I hoap you wile
get a good assortment of relicks I want to maik one suggestion to you
that is in regard to getting a good man and a genuine Mauntanner to take
charg of your haus at Chicago I want to recommend a man for you to get
it is Liver-eating Johnson that is the naim he is generally called he
is an old mauntneer and large and fine looking and one of the Best Story
Tellers in the country and Very Polight genteel to every one he meets I
wil tel you how he got that naim Liver-eating in a hard Fight with the
Black Feet Indians thay Faught all day Johnson and a few Whites Faught
a large Body of Indians all day after the fight Johnson cam in contact
with a wounded Indian and Johnson was aut of ammunition and thay faught
it out with thar Knives and Johnson got away with the Indian and in the
fight cut the livver out of the Indian and said to the Boys did thay
want any Liver to eat that is the way he got the naim of Liver-eating
Johnson
"Yours truly" etc., etc.
Frontiersmen are often as original as their names; and the originality
may take the form of wild savagery, of mere uncouthness, or of an odd
combination of genuine humor with simple acceptance of facts as they
are. On one occasion I expressed some surprise in learning that a
certain Mrs. P. had suddenly married, though her husband was alive and
in jail in a neighboring town; and received for answer: "Well, you see,
old man Pete he skipped the country, and left his widow behind him, and
so Bob Evans he up and married her!"--which was evidently felt to be a
proceeding requiring no explanation whatever.
In the cow-country there is nothing more refreshing than the
light-hearted belief entertained by the average man to the effect that
any animal which by main force has been saddled and ridden, or harnessed
and driven a couple of times, is a "broke horse." My present foreman
is firmly wedded to this idea, as well as to its complement, the belief
that any animal with hoofs, before any vehicle with wheels, can be
driven across any country. One summer on reaching the ranch I was
entertained with the usual accounts of the adventures and misadventures
which had befallen my own men and my neighbors since I had been out
last. In the course of the conversation my foreman remarked: "We had a
great time out here about six weeks ago. There was a professor from Ann
Arbor come out with his wife to see the Bad Lands, and they asked if we
could rig them up a team, and we said we guessed we could, and Foley's
boy and I did; but it ran away with him and broke his leg! He was here
for a month. I guess he didn't mind it though." Of this I was less
certain, forlorn little Medora being a "busted" cow-town, concerning
which I once heard another of my men remark, in reply to an inquisitive
commercial traveller: "How many people lives here? Eleven--counting the
chickens--when they're all in town!"
My foreman continued: "By George, there was something that professor
said afterwards that made me feel hot. I sent word up to him by Foley's
boy that seein' as how it had come out we wouldn't charge him nothin'
for the rig; and that professor he answered that he was glad we were
showing him some sign of consideration, for he'd begun to believe he'd
fallen into a den of sharks, and that we gave him a runaway team a
purpose. That made me hot, calling that a runaway team. Why, there was
one of them horses never _could_ have run away before; it hadn't never
been druv but twice! And the other horse maybe had run away a few times,
but there was lots of times he _hadn't_ run away. I esteemed that team
full as liable not to run away as it was to run away," concluded my
foreman, evidently deeming this as good a warranty of gentleness as the
most exacting could require.
The definition of good behavior on the frontier is even more elastic
for a saddle-horse than for a team. Last spring one of the Three-Seven
riders, a magnificent horseman was killed on the round-up near Belfield,
his horse bucking and falling on him. "It was accounted a plumb gentle
horse too," said my informant, "only it sometimes sulked and acted a
little mean when it was cinched up behind." The unfortunate rider did
not know of this failing of the "plumb gentle horse," and as soon as he
was in the saddle it threw itself over sideways with a great bound, and
he fell on his head, and never spoke again.
Such accidents are too common in the wild country to attract very much
attention; the men accept them with grim quiet, as inevitable in such
lives as theirs--lives that are harsh and narrow in their toil and their
pleasure alike, and that are ever-bounded by an iron horizon of hazard
and hardship. During the last year and a half three other men from the
ranches in my immediate neighborhood have met their deaths in the course
of their work. One, a trail boss of the O X, was drowned while swimming
his herd across a swollen river. Another, one of the fancy ropers of the
W Bar, was killed while roping cattle in a corral; his saddle turned,
the rope twisted round him, he was pulled off, and trampled to death by
his own horse.
The fourth man, a cowpuncher named Hamilton, lost his life during the
last week of October, 1891, in the first heavy snowstorm of the season.
Yet he was a skilled plainsman, on ground he knew well, and just before
straying himself, he successfully instructed two men who did not know
the country how to get to camp. They were all three with the round-up,
and were making a circle through the Bad Lands; the wagons had camped on
the eastern edge of these Bad Lands, where they merged into the prairie,
at the head of an old disused road, which led about due east from the
Little Missouri. It was a gray, lowering day, and as darkness came on
Hamilton's horse played out, and he told his two companions not to wait,
as it had begun to snow, but to keep on towards the north, skirting some
particularly rough buttes, and as soon as they struck the road to turn
to the right and follow it out to the prairie, where they would find
camp; he particularly warned them to keep a sharp look-out, so as not
to pass over the dim trail unawares in the dusk and the storm. They
followed his advice, and reached camp safely; and after they had left
him nobody ever again saw him alive. Evidently he himself, plodding
northwards, passed over the road without seeing it in the gathering
gloom; probably he struck it at some point where the ground was bad, and
the dim trail in consequence disappeared entirely, as is the way with
these prairie roads--making them landmarks to be used with caution.
He must then have walked on and on, over rugged hills and across deep
ravines, until his horse came to a standstill; he took off its saddle
and picketed it to a dwarfed ash. Its frozen carcass was found with
the saddle near by, two months later. He now evidently recognized some
landmark, and realized that he had passed the road, and was far to the
north of the round-up wagons; but he was a resolute, self-confident man,
and he determined to strike out for a line camp, which he knew lay about
due east of him, two or three miles out on the prairie, on one of the
head branches of Knife River. Night must have fallen by this time, and
he missed the camp, probably passing it within less than a mile; but he
did pass it, and with it all hopes of life, and walked wearily on to
his doom, through the thick darkness and the driving snow. At last his
strength failed, and he lay down in the tall grass of a little hollow.
Five months later, in the early spring, the riders from the line camp
found his body, resting, face downwards, with the forehead on the folded
arms.
Accidents of less degree are common. Men break their collar-bones, arms,
or legs by falling when riding at speed over dangerous ground, when
cutting cattle or trying to control a stampeded herd, or by being thrown
or rolled on by bucking or rearing horses; or their horses, and on rare
occasion even they themselves, are gored by fighting steers. Death by
storm or in flood, death in striving to master a wild and vicious horse,
or in handling maddened cattle, and too often death in brutal conflict
with one of his own fellows--any one of these is the not unnatural end
of the life of the dweller on the plains or in the mountains.
But a few years ago other risks had to be run from savage beasts, and
from the Indians. Since I have been ranching on the Little Missouri, two
men have been killed by bears in the neighborhood of my range; and in
the early years of my residence there, several men living or travelling
in the country were slain by small war-parties of young braves. All
the old-time trappers and hunters could tell stirring tales of their
encounters with Indians.
My friend, Tazewell Woody, was among the chief actors in one of the most
noteworthy adventures of this kind. He was a very quiet man, and it
was exceedingly difficult to get him to talk over any of his past
experiences; but one day, when he was in high good-humor with me for
having made three consecutive straight shots at elk, he became quite
communicative, and I was able to get him to tell me one story which
I had long wished to hear from his lips, having already heard of it
through one of the other survivors of the incident. When he found that I
already knew a good deal old Woody told me the rest.
It was in the spring of 1875, and Woody and two friends were trapping on
the Yellowstone. The Sioux were very bad at the time and had killed
many prospectors, hunters, cowboys, and settlers; the whites retaliated
whenever they got a chance, but, as always in Indian warfare, the
sly, lurking, bloodthirsty savages inflicted much more loss than they
suffered.
The three men, having a dozen horses with them, were camped by the
river-side in a triangular patch of brush, shaped a good deal like a
common flat-iron. On reaching camp they started to put out their traps;
and when he came back in the evening Woody informed his companions that
he had seen a great deal of Indian sign, and that he believed there were
Sioux in the neighborhood. His companions both laughed at him, assuring
him that they were not Sioux at all but friendly Crows, and that
they would be in camp next morning; "and sure enough," said Woody,
meditatively, "they _were_ in camp next morning." By dawn one of the men
went down the river to look at some of the traps, while Woody started
out to where the horses were, the third man remaining in camp to get
breakfast. Suddenly two shots were heard down the river, and in another
moment a mounted Indian swept towards the horses. Woody fired, but
missed him, and he drove off five while Woody, running forward,
succeeded in herding the other seven into camp. Hardly had this been
accomplished before the man who had gone down the river appeared, out of
breath with his desperate run, having been surprised by several Indians,
and just succeeding in making his escape by dodging from bush to bush,
threatening his pursuers with his rifle.
These proved to be but the forerunners of a great war party, for when
the sun rose the hills around seemed black with Sioux. Had they chosen
to dash right in on the camp, running the risk of losing several of
their men in the charge, they could of course have eaten up the three
hunters in a minute; but such a charge is rarely practised by Indians,
who, although they are admirable in defensive warfare, and even in
certain kinds of offensive movements, and although from their skill in
hiding they usually inflict much more loss than they suffer when matched
against white troops, are yet very reluctant to make any movement where
the advantage gained must be offset by considerable loss of life.
The three men thought they were surely doomed, but being veteran
frontiersmen and long inured to every kind of hardship and danger,
they set to work with cool resolution to make as effective a defence
as possible, to beat off their antagonists if they might, and if this
proved impracticable, to sell their lives as dearly as they could.
Having tethered the horses in a slight hollow, the only one which
offered any protection, each man crept out to a point of the triangular
brush patch and lay down to await events.
In a very short while the Indians began closing in on them, taking every
advantage of cover, and then, both from their side of the river and from
the opposite bank, opened a perfect fusillade, wasting their cartridges
with a recklessness which Indians are apt to show when excited. The
hunters could hear the hoarse commands of the chiefs, the war-whoops and
the taunts in broken English which some of the warriors hurled at them.
Very soon all of their horses were killed, and the brush was fairly
riddled by the incessant volleys; but the three men themselves, lying
flat on the ground and well concealed, were not harmed. The more daring
young warriors then began to creep toward the hunters, going stealthily
from one piece of cover to the next; and now the whites in turn opened
fire. They did not shoot recklessly, as did their foes, but coolly and
quietly, endeavoring to make each shot tell. Said Woody: "I only fired
seven times all day; I reckoned on getting meat every time I pulled
trigger." They had an immense advantage over their enemies, in that
whereas they lay still and entirely concealed, the Indians of course had
to move from cover to cover in order to approach, and so had at times
to expose themselves. When the whites fired at all they fired at a man,
whether moving, or motionless, whom they could clearly see, while the
Indians could only shoot at the smoke, which imperfectly marked the
position of their unseen foes. In consequence the assailants speedily
found that it was a task of hopeless danger to try in such a manner to
close in on three plains veterans, men of iron nerve and skilled in the
use of the rifle. Yet some of the more daring crept up very close to the
patch of brush, and one actually got inside it, and was killed among the
bedding that lay by the smouldering camp-fire. The wounded and such of
the dead as did not lie in too exposed positions were promptly taken
away by their comrades; but seven bodies fell into the hands of the
three hunters. I asked Woody how many he himself had killed. He said
he could only be sure of two that he got; one he shot in the head as
he peeped over a bush, and the other he shot through the smoke as
he attempted to rush in. "My, how that Indian did yell," said Woody,
retrospectively, "_he_ was no great of a Stoic." After two or three
hours of this deadly skirmishing, which resulted in nothing more serious
to the whites than in two of them being slightly wounded, the Sioux
became disheartened by the loss they were suffering and withdrew,
confining themselves thereafter to a long range and harmless fusillade.
When it was dark the three men crept out to the river bed, and taking
advantage of the pitchy night broke through the circle of their foes;
they managed to reach the settlements without further molestation,
having lost everything except their rifles.
For many years one of the most important of the wilderness dwellers was
the West Point officer, and no man has played a greater part than he
in the wild warfare which opened the regions beyond the Mississippi to
white settlement. Since 1879, there has been but little regular Indian
fighting in the North, though there have been one or two very tedious
and wearisome campaigns waged against the Apaches in the South. Even in
the North, however, there have been occasional uprisings which had to be
quelled by the regular troops.
After my elk hunt in September, 1891, I came out through the Yellowstone
Park, as I have elsewhere related, riding in company with a surveyor
of the Burlington and Quincy railroad, who was just coming in from
his summer's work. It was the first of October. There had been a heavy
snow-storm and the snow was still falling. Riding a stout pony each, and
leading another packed with our bedding, etc., we broke our way from
the upper to the middle geyser basin. Here we found a troop of the 1st
Cavalry camped, under the command of old friends of mine, Captain Frank
Edwards and Lieutenant (now Captain) John Pitcher. They gave us hay
for our horses and insisted upon our stopping to lunch, with the
ready hospitality always shown by army officers. After lunch we began
exchanging stories. My travelling companion, the surveyor, had that
spring performed a feat of note, going through one of the canyons of the
Big Horn for the first time. He went with an old mining inspector, the
two of them dragging a cottonwood sledge over the ice. The walls of the
canyon are so sheer and the water so rough that it can be descended only
when the stream is frozen. However, after six days' labor and hardship
the descent was accomplished; and the surveyor, in concluding, described
his experience in going through the Crow Reservation.
This turned the conversation upon Indians, and it appeared that both
of our hosts had been actors in Indian scrapes which had attracted my
attention at the time they occurred, as they took place among tribes
that I knew and in a country which I had sometime visited, either
when hunting or when purchasing horses for the ranch. The first, which
occurred to Captain Edwards, happened late in 1886, at the time when the
crow Medicine Chief, Sword-Bearer, announced himself as the Messiah of
the Indian race, during one of the usual epidemics of ghost dancing.
Sword-Bearer derived his name from always wearing a medicine sword--that
is, a sabre painted red. He claimed to possess magic power, and, thanks
to the performance of many dexterous feats of juggling, and the lucky
outcome of certain prophecies, he deeply stirred the Indians, arousing
the young warriors in particular to the highest pitch of excitement.
They became sullen, began to paint and armed themselves; and the agent
and the settlers nearby grew so apprehensive that the troops were
ordered to go to the reservation. A body of cavalry, including Captain
Edwards' troop, was accordingly marched thither, and found the Crow
warriors, mounted on their war ponies and dressed in their striking
battle-garb, waiting on a hill.
The position of troops at the beginning of such an affair is always
peculiarly difficult. The settlers round-about are sure to clamor
bitterly against them, no matter what they do, on the ground that they
are not thorough enough and are showing favor to the savages, while
on the other hand, even if they fight purely in self-defence, a large
number of worthy but weak-minded sentimentalists in the East are sure
to shriek about their having brutally attacked the Indians. The war
authorities always insist that they must not fire the first shot under
any circumstances, and such were the orders at this time. The Crows
on the hill-top showed a sullen and threatening front, and the troops
advanced slowly towards them and then halted for a parley. Meanwhile a
mass of black thunderclouds gathering on the horizon threatened one of
those cloudbursts of extreme severity and suddenness so characteristic
of the plains country. While still trying to make arrangements for a
parley, a horseman started out of the Crow ranks and galloped headlong
down towards the troops. It was the medicine chief, Sword-Bearer. He
was painted and in his battle-dress, wearing his war-bonnet of floating,
trailing eagle feathers, while the plumes of the same bird were braided
in the mane and tail of his fiery little horse. On he came at a gallop
almost up to the troops and then began to circle around them, calling
and singing and throwing his crimson sword into the air, catching it by
the hilt as it fell. Twice he rode completely around the soldiers, who
stood in uncertainty, not knowing what to make of his performance, and
expressly forbidden to shoot at him. Then paying no further heed to them
he rode back towards the Crows. It appears that he had told them that he
would ride twice around the hostile force, and by his incantations would
call down rain from heaven, which would make the hearts of the white
men like water, so that they should go back to their homes. Sure enough,
while the arrangements for the parley were still going forward, down
came the cloudburst drenching the command and making the ground on the
hills in front nearly impassable; and before it dried a courier arrived
with orders to the troops to go back to camp.
This fulfilment of Sword-Bearer's prophecy of course raised his
reputation to the zenith and the young men of the tribe prepared for
war, while the older chiefs, who more fully realized the power of the
whites, still hung back. When the troops next appeared they came upon
the entire Crow force, the women and children with their tepees being
off to one side beyond a little stream while almost all the warriors
of the tribe were gathered in front. Sword-Bearer started to repeat
his former ride, to the intense irritation of the soldiers. Luckily,
however, this time some of his young men could not be restrained. They
too began to ride near the troops, and one of them was unable to refrain
from firing on Captain Edwards' troop, which was in the van. This gave
the soldiers their chance. They instantly responded with a volley, and
Captain Edwards' troop charged. The fight lasted but a minute or two,
for Sword-Bearer was struck by a bullet and fell, and as he had
boasted himself invulnerable, and promised that his warriors should be
invulnerable also if they would follow him, the hearts of the latter
became as water and they broke in every direction. One of the amusing,
though irritating, incidents of the affair was to see the plumed and
painted warriors race headlong for the camp, plunge into the stream,
wash off their war paint, and remove their feathers; in another moment
they would be stolidly sitting on the ground, with their blankets over
their shoulders, rising to greet the pursuing cavalry with unmoved
composure and calm assurance that they had always been friendly and
had much disapproved the conduct of the young bucks who had just
been scattered on the field outside. It was much to the credit of the
discipline of the army that no bloodshed followed the fight proper. The
loss to the whites was small.
The other incident, related by Lieutenant Pitcher, took place in 1890,
near Tongue River, in northern Wyoming. The command with which he was
serving was camped near the Cheyenne Reservation. One day two young
Cheyenne bucks, met one of the government herders, and promptly killed
him--in a sudden fit, half of ungovernable blood lust, half of mere
ferocious lightheartedness. They then dragged his body into the brush
and left it. The disappearance of the herder of course attracted
attention, and a search was organized by the cavalry. At first the
Indians stoutly denied all knowledge of the missing man; but when it
became evident that the search party would shortly find him, two or
three of the chiefs joined them, and piloted them to where the body lay;
and acknowledged that he had been murdered by two of their band, though
at first they refused to give their names. The commander of the post
demanded that the murderers be given up. The chiefs said that they were
very sorry, that this could not be done, but that they were willing to
pay over any reasonable number of ponies to make amends for the death.
This offer was of course promptly refused, and the commander notified
them that if they did not surrender the murderers by a certain time he
would hold the whole tribe responsible and would promptly move out and
attack them. Upon this the chiefs, after holding full counsel with
the tribe, told the commander that they had no power to surrender the
murderers, but that the latter had said that sooner than see their tribe
involved in a hopeless struggle they would of their own accord come
in and meet the troops anywhere the latter chose to appoint, and die
fighting. To this the commander responded: "All right; let them come
into the agency in half an hour." The chiefs acquiesced, and withdrew.
Immediately the Indians sent mounted messengers at speed from camp to
camp, summoning all their people to witness the act of fierce self-doom;
and soon the entire tribe of Cheyennes, many of them having their faces
blackened in token of mourning, moved down and took up a position on
the hill-side close to the agency. At the appointed hour both young men
appeared in their handsome war dress, galloped to the top of the hill
near the encampment, and deliberately opened fire on the troops. The
latter merely fired a few shots to keep the young desperadoes off, while
Lieutenant Pitcher and a score of cavalrymen left camp to make a circle
and drive them in; they did not wish to hurt them, but to capture
and give them over to the Indians, so that the latter might be forced
themselves to inflict the punishment. However, they were unable to
accomplish their purpose; one of the young braves went straight at them,
firing his rifle and wounding the horse of one of the cavalrymen, so
that, simply in self-defence, the latter had to fire a volley, which
laid low the assailant; the other, his horse having been shot, was
killed in the brush, fighting to the last. All the while, from the
moment the two doomed braves appeared until they fell, the Cheyennes on
the hill-side had been steadily singing the death chant. When the young
men had both died, and had thus averted the fate which their misdeeds
would else have brought upon the tribe, the warriors took their bodies
and bore them away for burial honors, the soldiers looking on in
silence. Where the slain men were buried the whites never knew, but all
that night they listened to the dismal wailing of the dirges with which
the tribesmen celebrated their gloomy funeral rites.
Frontiersmen are not, as a rule, apt to be very superstitious. They lead
lives too hard and practical, and have too little imagination in things
spiritual and supernatural. I have heard but few ghost stories while
living on the frontier, and these few were of a perfectly commonplace
and conventional type.
But I once listened to a goblin story which rather impressed me. It was
told by a grisled, weather-beaten old mountain hunter, named Bauman,
who was born and had passed all his life on the frontier. He must have
believed what he said, for he could hardly repress a shudder at certain
points of the tale; but he was of German ancestry, and in childhood had
doubtless been saturated with all kinds of ghost and goblin lore, so
that many fearsome superstitions were latent in his mind; besides, he
knew well the stories told by the Indian medicine men in their winter
camps, of the snow-walkers, and the spectres, and the formless evil
beings that haunt the forest depths, and dog and waylay the lonely
wanderer who after nightfall passes through the regions where they lurk;
and it may be that when overcome by the horror of the fate that befell
his friend, and when oppressed by the awful dread of the unknown, he
grew to attribute, both at the time and still more in remembrance, weird
and elfin traits to what was merely some abnormally wicked and cunning
wild beast; but whether this was so or not, no man can say.
When the event occurred Bauman was still a young man, and was trapping
with a partner among the mountains dividing the forks of the Salmon from
the head of Wisdom River. Not having had much luck, he and his partner
determined to go up into a particularly wild and lonely pass through
which ran a small stream said to contain many beaver. The pass had
an evil reputation because the year before a solitary hunter who
had wandered into it was there slain, seemingly by a wild beast, the
half-eaten remains being afterwards found by some mining prospectors who
had passed his camp only the night before.
The memory of this event, however, weighed very lightly with the two
trappers, who were as adventurous and hardy as others of their kind.
They took their two lean mountain ponies to the foot of the pass, where
they left them in an open beaver meadow, the rocky timber-clad ground
being from thence onwards impracticable for horses. They then struck out
on foot through the vast, gloomy forest, and in about four hours reached
a little open glade where they concluded to camp, as signs of game were
plenty.
There was still an hour or two of daylight left, and after building a
brush lean-to and throwing down and opening their packs, they started up
stream. The country was very dense and hard to travel through, as there
was much down timber, although here and there the sombre woodland was
broken by small glades of mountain grass.
At dusk they again reached camp. The glade in which it was pitched was
not many yards wide, the tall, close-set pines and firs rising round
it like a wall. On one side was a little stream, beyond which rose the
steep mountain-slopes, covered with the unbroken growth of the evergreen
forest.
They were surprised to find that during their short absence something,
apparently a bear, had visited camp, and had rummaged about among their
things, scattering the contents of their packs, and in sheer wantonness
destroying their lean-to. The footprints of the beast were quite plain,
but at first they paid no particular heed to them, busying themselves
with rebuilding the lean-to, laying out their beds and stores, and
lighting the fire.
While Bauman was making ready supper, it being already dark, his
companion began to examine the tracks more closely, and soon took a
brand from the fire to follow them up, where the intruder had walked
along a game trail after leaving the camp. When the brand flickered out,
he returned and took another, repeating his inspection of the footprints
very closely. Coming back to the fire, he stood by it a minute or two,
peering out into the darkness, and suddenly remarked: "Bauman, that bear
has been walking on two legs." Bauman laughed at this, but his partner
insisted that he was right, and upon again examining the tracks with
a torch, they certainly did seem to be made by but two paws, or feet.
However, it was too dark to make sure. After discussing whether the
footprints could possibly be those of a human being, and coming to
the conclusion that they could not be, the two men rolled up in their
blankets, and went to sleep under the lean-to.
At midnight Bauman was awakened by some noise, and sat up in his
blankets. As he did so his nostrils were struck by a strong, wild-beast
odor, and he caught the loom of a great body in the darkness at the
mouth of the lean-to. Grasping his rifle, he fired at the vague,
threatening shadow, but must have missed, for immediately afterwards
he heard the smashing of the underwood as the thing, whatever it was,
rushed off into the impenetrable blackness of the forest and the night.
After this the two men slept but little, sitting up by the rekindled
fire, but they heard nothing more. In the morning they started out to
look at the few traps they had set the previous evening and to put
out new ones. By an unspoken agreement they kept together all day, and
returned to camp towards evening.
On nearing it they saw, hardly to their astonishment, that the lean-to
had been again torn down. The visitor of the preceding day had returned,
and in wanton malice had tossed about their camp kit and bedding, and
destroyed the shanty. The ground was marked up by its tracks, and on
leaving the camp it had gone along the soft earth by the brook, where
the footprints were as plain as if on snow, and, after a careful
scrutiny of the trail, it certainly did seem as if, whatever the thing
was, it had walked off on but two legs.
The men, thoroughly uneasy, gathered a great heap of dead logs, and
kept up a roaring fire throughout the night, one or the other sitting on
guard most of the time. About midnight the thing came down through the
forest opposite, across the brook, and stayed there on the hill-side for
nearly an hour. They could hear the branches crackle as it moved about,
and several times it uttered a harsh, grating, long-drawn moan, a
peculiarly sinister sound. Yet it did not venture near the fire.
In the morning the two trappers, after discussing the strange events of
the last thirty-six hours, decided that they would shoulder their packs
and leave the valley that afternoon. They were the more ready to do this
because in spite of seeing a good deal of game sign they had caught
very little fur. However, it was necessary first to go along the line of
their traps and gather them, and this they started out to do.
All the morning they kept together, picking up trap after trap, each
one empty. On first leaving camp they had the disagreeable sensation of
being followed. In the dense spruce thickets they occasionally heard a
branch snap after they had passed; and now and then there were slight
rustling noises among the small pines to one side of them.
At noon they were back within a couple of miles of camp. In the
high, bright sunlight their fears seemed absurd to the two armed men,
accustomed as they were, through long years of lonely wandering in the
wilderness to face every kind of danger from man, brute, or element.
There were still three beaver traps to collect from a little pond in a
wide ravine near by. Bauman volunteered to gather these and bring them
in, while his companion went ahead to camp and make ready the packs.
On reaching the pond Bauman found three beaver in the traps, one of
which had been pulled loose and carried into a beaver house. He took
several hours in securing and preparing the beaver, and when he started
homewards he marked with some uneasiness how low the sun was getting.
As he hurried towards camp, under the tall trees, the silence and
desolation of the forest weighed on him. His feet made no sound on the
pine needles, and the slanting sun rays, striking through among the
straight trunks, made a gray twilight in which objects at a distance
glimmered indistinctly. There was nothing to break the ghostly stillness
which, when there is no breeze, always broods over these sombre primeval
forests.
At last he came to the edge of the little glade where the camp lay, and
shouted as he approached it, but got no answer. The camp fire had gone
out, though the thin blue smoke was still curling upwards. Near it lay
the packs, wrapped and arranged. At first Bauman could see nobody; nor
did he receive an answer to his call. Stepping forward he again shouted,
and as he did so his eye fell on the body of his friend, stretched
beside the trunk of a great fallen spruce. Rushing towards it the
horrified trapper found that the body was still warm, but that the neck
was broken, while there were four great fang marks in the throat.
The footprints of the unknown beast-creature, printed deep in the soft
soil, told the whole story.
The unfortunate man, having finished his packing, had sat down on the
spruce log with his face to the fire, and his back to the dense woods,
to wait for his companion. While thus waiting, his monstrous assailant,
which must have been lurking nearby in the woods, waiting for a chance
to catch one of the adventurers unprepared, came silently up from
behind, walking with long, noiseless steps, and seemingly still on two
legs. Evidently unheard, it reached the man, and broke his neck while
it buried its teeth in his throat. It had not eaten the body, but
apparently had romped and gambolled round it in uncouth, ferocious glee,
occasionally rolling over and over it; and had then fled back into the
soundless depths of the woods.
Bauman, utterly unnerved, and believing that the creature with which he
had to deal was something either half human or half devil, some great
goblin-beast, abandoned everything but his rifle and struck off at speed
down the pass, not halting until he reached the beaver meadows where the
hobbled ponies were still grazing. Mounting, he rode onwards through the
night, until far beyond the reach of pursuit.