THE NINETEENTH KANSAS CAVALRY
"The regiments of Kansas have glorified our State on a hundred
battle fields, but none served her more faithfully, or endured more
in her cause than the Nineteenth Kansas Cavalry."
--HORACE L. MOORE.
When Camp Crawford was opened, northeast of town, between the Kaw River
and the Shunganunga Creek, I went into training for regular cavalry
service, thinking less of pretty girls and more of good horses with the
passing days. I had plenty of material for both themes. Not only were
there handsome young ladies in the capital city, but this call for
military supplies had brought in superb cavalry mounts. Every day the
camp increased its borders. The first to find places were the men of the
Eighteenth Kansas Regiment, veterans of the exalted order of the wardens
of civilization. Endurance was their mark of distinction, and Loyalty
their watchword. It was the grief of this regiment, and especially of
the men directly under his leadership, that Captain Henry Lindsey was
not made a Major for the Nineteenth. No more capable or more popular
officer than Lindsey ever followed an Indian trail across the Plains.
It was from the veterans of this Eighteenth Cavalry, men whom Lindsey
had led, that we younger soldiers learned our best lessons in the months
that followed. Those were my years of hero-worship. I had gone into
this service with an ideal, and the influence of such men as Morton and
Forsyth, the skill of Grover, and the daring of Donovan and Stillwell
were an inspiration to me. And now my captain was the same Pliley, who
with Donovan had made that hundred-mile dash to Fort Wallace to start a
force to the rescue of our beleaguered few in that island citadel of
sand.
The men who made up Pliley's troop were, for the most part, older than
myself, and they are coming now to the venerable years; but deep in the
heart of each surviving soldier of that company is admiration and
affection for the fearless, adroit, resourceful Captain, the modest,
generous-hearted soldier.
On the last evening of our stay in Topeka there was a gay gathering of
young people, where, as usual, the soldier boys were the lions. Brass
buttons bearing the American Eagle and the magic inscription "U. S."
have ever their social sway.
Rachel had been assigned to my care by the powers that were. After
Tillhurst's departure I had found my companions mainly elsewhere, and I
would have chosen elsewhere on this night had I done the choosing. On
the way to her aunt's home Rachel was more charming than I had ever
found her before. It was still early, and we strolled leisurely on our
way and talked of many things. At the gate she suddenly exclaimed:
"Philip, you leave to-morrow. Maybe I shall never see you again; but I'm
not going to think that." Her voice was sweet, and her manner sincere.
"May I ask you one favor?"
"Yes, a dozen," I said, rashly.
"Let's take one more walk out to our locust tree."
"Oh, blame the locust tree! What did it ever grow for?" That was my
thought but I assented with a show of pleasure, as conventionality
demands. It was a balmy night in early November, not uncommon in this
glorious climate. The moon was one quarter large, and the dim light was
pleasant. Many young people were abroad that evening. When we reached
the swell where the tree threw its lacy shadows on its fallen yellow
leaves, my companion grew silent.
"Cheer up, Rachel," I said. "We'll soon be gone and you'll be free from
the soldier nuisance. And Dick Tillhurst is sure to run up here again
soon. Besides, you have all Massachusetts waiting to be conquered."
She put her little gloved hand on my arm.
"Philip Baronet, I'm going to ask you something. You may hate me if you
want to."
"But I don't want to," I assured her.
"I had a letter from Mr. Tillhurst to-day. He does want to come up," she
went on; "he says also that the girl you introduced to me in your
father's office, what's her name?--I've forgotten it."
"So have I. Go on!"
"He says she is to be married at Christmas to somebody in Springvale.
You used to like her. Tell me, do you care for her still? You could like
somebody else just as well, couldn't you, Phil?"
I put my hand gently over her hand resting on my arm, and said nothing.
"Could you, Phil? She doesn't want you any more. How long will you care
for her?"
"Till death us do part," I answered, in a low voice.
She dropped my arm, and even in the shadows I could see her eyes flash.
"I hate you," she cried, passionately.
"I don't blame you," I answered like a cold-blooded brute. "But, Rachel,
this is the last time we shall be together. Let's be frank, now. You
don't care for me. It is for the lack of one more scalp to dangle at
your door that you grieve. You want me to do all the caring. You could
forget me before we get home."
Then the tears came, a woman's sure weapon, and I hated myself more than
she hated me.
"I can only wound your feelings, I always make you wretched. Now,
Rachel, let's say good-bye to-night as the best of enemies and the worst
of friends. I haven't made your stay in Kansas happy. You will forget me
and remember only the pleasant people here."
When she bade me good-bye at her aunt's door, there was a harshness in
her voice I had not noted before.
"If she really did care for me she wouldn't change so quickly. By
Heaven, I believe there is something back of all this love-making.
Charming a dog as he is, Phil Baronet in himself hasn't that much
attraction for her," I concluded, and I breathed freer for the thought.
When I came long afterwards to know the truth about her, I understood
this sudden change, as I understood the charming pretensions to
admiration and affection that preceded it.
The next day our command started on its campaign against the unknown
dangers and hardships and suffering of the winter Plains. It was an
imposing cavalcade that rode down the broad avenue of the capital city
that November day when we began our march. Up from Camp Crawford we
passed in regular order, mounted on our splendid horses, riding in
platoon formation. At Fourth Street we swung south on Kansas Avenue. At
the head of the column twenty-one buglers rode abreast, Bud Anderson and
O'mie among them. Our Lieutenant-Colonel, Horace L. Moore, and his staff
followed in order behind the buglers. Then came the cavalry, troop
after troop, a thousand strong, in dignified military array, while from
door and window, side-walk and side-street, the citizens watched our
movements and cheered us as we passed. Six months later the remnants of
that well-appointed regiment straggled into Topeka like stray dogs, and
no demonstration was given over their return. But they had done their
work, and in God's good time will come the day "to glean up their
scattered ashes into History's golden urn."
A few miles out from Topeka we were overtaken by Governor Crawford. He
had resigned the office of Chief Executive of Kansas to take command of
our regiment. The lustre of the military pageantry began to fade by the
time we had crossed the Wakarusa divide, and the capital city, nestling
in its hill-girt valley by the side of the Kaw, was lost to our view.
Ours was to be a campaign of endurance, of dogged patience, of slow,
grinding inactivity, the kind of campaign that calls for every resource
of courage and persistence from the soldier, giving him in return little
of the inspiration that stimulates to conquest on battle fields. The
years have come and gone, and what the Nineteenth Kansas men were called
to do and to endure is only now coming into historical recognition.
Our introduction to what should befall us later came in the rainy
weather, bitter winds, insufficient clothing, and limited rations of our
journey before we reached Fort Beecher, on the Arkansas River. To-day,
the beautiful city of Wichita marks the spot where the miserable little
group of tents and low huts, called Fort Beecher, stood then. Fifty
miles east of this fort we had passed the last house we were to see for
half a year.
The Arkansas runs bottomside up across the Plains. Its waters are mainly
under its bed, and it seems to wander aimlessly among the flat, lonely
sand-bars, trying helplessly to get right again. Beyond this river we
looked off into the Unknown. Somewhere back of the horizon in that
shadowy illimitable Southwest General Sheridan had established a
garrison on the Canadian River, and here General Custer and his Seventh
United States Cavalry were waiting for us. They had forage for our
horses and food and clothing for ourselves. We had left Topeka with
limited supplies expecting sufficient reinforcement of food and grain at
Fort Beecher to carry us safely forward until we should reach Camp
Supply, Sheridan's stopping-place, wherever in the Southwest that might
be. Then the two regiments, Custer's Seventh and the Kansas Nineteenth,
were together to fall upon the lawless wild tribes and force them into
submission.
Such was the prearranged plan of campaign, but disaster lay between us
and this military force on the Canadian River. Neither the Nineteenth
Cavalry commanders, the scouts, nor the soldiers knew a foot of that
pathless mystery-shrouded, desolate land stretching away to the
southward beyond the Arkansas River. We had only a meagre measure of
rations, less of grain in proportion, and there was no military depot to
which we could resort. The maps were all wrong, and in the trackless
wastes and silent sand-dunes of the Cimarron country gaunt Starvation
was waiting to clutch our vitals with its gnarled claws; while with all
our nakedness and famine and peril, the winter blizzard, swirling its
myriad whips of stinging cold came raging across the land and caught us
in its icy grip.
I had learned on the Arickaree how men can face danger and defy death; I
had only begun to learn how they can endure hardship.
It was mid-November when our regiment, led by Colonel Crawford, crossed
the Arkansas River and struck out resolutely toward the southwest. Our
orders were to join Custer's command at Sheridan's camp in the Indian
Territory, possibly one hundred and fifty miles away. We must obey
orders. It is the military man's creed. That we lacked rations, forage,
clothing, and camp equipment must not deter us, albeit we had not
guides, correct maps, or any knowledge of the land we were invading.
My first lesson in this campaign was the lesson of comradeship. My
father had put me on a horse and I had felt at home when I was so short
and fat my legs spread out on its back as if I were sitting on a floor.
I was accounted a fair rider in Springvale. I had loved at first sight
that beautiful sorrel creature whose bones were bleaching on the little
island in Colorado, whose flesh a gnawing hunger had forced me to eat.
But my real lessons in horsemanship began in Camp Crawford, with four
jolly fellows whom I came to know and love in a way I shall never know
or love other men--my comrades. Somebody struck home to the soldier
heart ever more when he wrote:
There's many a bond in this world of ours,
Ties of friendship, and wreaths of flowers,
And true-lover's knots, I ween;
The boy and girl are sealed with a kiss;
But there's never a bond, old friend, like this,--
We have drunk from the same canteen.
Such a bond is mine for these four comrades. Reed and Pete, Hadley and
John Mac were their camp names, and I always think of them together.
These four made a real cavalry man of me. It may be the mark of old age
upon me now, for even to-day the handsome automobile and the great
railway engine can command my admiration and awe; but the splendid
thoroughbred, intelligent, and quivering with power, I can command and
love.
The bond between the cavalry man and his mount is a strong one, and the
spirit of the war-horse is as varied and sensitive as that of his rider.
When our regiment had crossed the Arkansas River and was pushing its way
grimly into the heart of the silent stretches of desolation, our horses
grew nervous, and a restless homesickness possessed them. Troop A were
great riders, and we were quick to note this uneasiness.
"What's the matter with these critters, Phil?" Reed, who rode next to
me, asked as we settled into line one November morning.
"I don't know, Reed," I replied. "This one is a dead match for the horse
I rode with Forsyth. The man that killed him laughed and said, 'There
goes the last damned horse, anyhow.'"
"Just so it ain't the first's all I'm caring for. You'll be in luck if
you have the last," the rider next to Reed declared.
"What makes you think so, John?" I inquired.
"Oh, that's John Mac for you," Reed said laughing. "He's homesick."
"No, it's the horses that's homesick," John Mac answered. "They've got
horse sense and that's what some of us ain't got. They know they'll
never get across the Arkansas River again."
"Cheerful prospect," I declared. "That means we'll never get across
either, doesn't it?"
"Oh, yes," John answered grimly, "we'll get back all right. Don't know
as this lot'd be any special ornament to kingdom come, anyhow; but we'll
go through hell on the way comin' or goin'; now, mark me, Reed, and
stop your idiotic grinning."
Whatever may have given this nervousness to the horses, so like a
presentiment of coming ill, they were all possessed with the same
spirit, and we remembered it afterwards when their bones were bleaching
on the high flat lands long leagues beyond the limits of civilization.
The Plains had no welcoming smile for us. The November skies were
clouded over, and a steady rain soaked the land with all its
appurtenances, including a straggling command of a thousand men
floundering along day after day among the crooked canyons and gloomy
sandhills of the Cimarron country. In vain we tried to find a trail
that should lead us to Sheridan's headquarters at Camp Supply, on the
Canadian River. Then the blizzard had its turn with us. Suddenly, as is
the blizzard's habit, it came upon us, sheathing our rain-sodden
clothing in ice. Like a cloudburst of summer was this winter cloudburst
of snow, burying every trail and covering every landmark with a mocking
smoothness. Then the mercury fell, and a bitter wind swept the open
Plains.
We had left Fort Beecher with five days' rations and three days' forage.
Seven days later we went into bivouac on a crooked little stream that
empties its salty waters into the Cimarron. It was a moonless, freezing
night. Fires were impossible, for there was no wood, and the buffalo
chips soaked with rain were frozen now and buried under the snow. A
furious wind threshed the earth; the mercury hovered about the zero
mark. Alkali and salt waters fill the streams of that land, and our food
supply was a memory two days old.
How precious a horse can become, the Plains have taught us. The man on
foot out there is doomed. All through this black night of perishing
cold we clung to our frightened, freezing, starving horses. We had put
our own blankets about them, and all night long we led them up and down.
The roar of the storm, the confusion from the darkness, the frenzy from
hunger drove them frantic. A stampede among them there would have meant
instant death to many of us, and untold suffering to the dismounted
remainder. How slowly the cold, bitter hours went by! I had thought the
burning heat of the Colorado September unendurable. I wondered in that
time of freezing torment if I should ever again call the heat a burden.
There were five of us tramping together in one little circle that
night--Reed and John Mac, and Pete and Hadley, with myself. In all the
garrison I came to know these four men best. They were near my own age;
their happy-go-lucky spirit and their cheery laughter were food and
drink. They proved to me over and over how kind-hearted a soldier can
be, and how hard it is to conquer a man who wills himself unconquerable.
Without these four I think I should never have gotten through that
night.
Morning broke on our wretched camp at last, and we took up the day's
march, battling with cold and hunger over every foot of ground. On the
tenth day after we crossed the Arkansas River the crisis came. Our army
clothes were waiting for us at Camp Supply. Rain and ice and the rough
usage of camp life had made us ragged already, and our shoes were worn
out. And still the cold and storm stayed with us. We wrapped pieces of
buffalo hide about our bare feet and bound the horses' nose-bags on them
in lieu of cavalry boots. Our blankets we had donated to our mounts, and
we had only dog tents, well adapted to ventilation, but a very mockery
at sheltering.
Our provisions were sometimes reduced to a few little cubes of sugar
doled out to each from the officers' stores. The buffalo, by which we
had augmented our food supply, were gone now to any shelter whither
instinct led them. It was rare that even a lone forsaken old bull of the
herd could be found in some more sheltered spot.
At last with hungry men and frenzied horses, with all sense of direction
lost, with a deep covering of snow enshrouding the earth, and a
merciless cold cutting straight to the life centres, we went into camp
on the tenth night in a little ravine running into Sand Creek, another
Cimarron tributary, in the Indian Territory. We were unable to move any
farther. For ten days we had been on the firing line, with hunger and
cold for our unconquerable foes. We could have fought Indians even to
the death. But the demand on us was for endurance. It is a woman's
province to suffer and wait and bear. We were men, fighting men, but
ours was the struggle of resisting, not attacking, and the tenth night
found us vanquished. Somebody must come to our rescue now. We could not
save ourselves. In the dangerous dark and cold, to an unknown place,
over an unknown way, somebody must go for us, somebody must be the
sacrifice, or we must all perish. The man who went out from the camp on
Sand Creek that night was one of the two men I had seen rise up from the
sand-pits of the Arickaree Island and start out in the blackness and the
peril to carry our cry to Fort Wallace--Pliley, whose name our State
must sometime set large in her well-founded, well-written story.
With fifty picked men and horses he went for our sakes, and more, aye,
more than he ever would claim for himself. He was carrying rescue to
homes yet to be, he was winning the frontier from peril, he was paying
the price for the prairie kingdom whose throne and altar are the
hearthstone.
"Camp Starvation," we christened our miserable, snow-besieged
stopping-place. We had fire but we were starving for food. Our horses
were like wild beasts in their ravenous hunger, tearing the clothing
from the men who came too carelessly near to their rope tethers.
That splendid group of mounts that had pranced proudly down Kansas
Avenue less than a month before, moving on now nearly seven days without
food, dying of cruel starvation, made a feature of this tragical winter
campaign that still puts an ache into my soul. Long ago I lost most of
the sentiment out of my life, but I have never seen a hungry horse since
that Winter of '68 that I let go unfed if it lay within my power to
bring it food.
The camp was well named. It was Hadley and Reed and Pete and John Mac,
that good-natured quartet, who stood sponsors for that title. We were a
pitiful lot of fellows in this garrison. We mixed the handful of flour
given to us with snow water, and, wrapping the unsalted dough around a
sagebrush spike, we cooked it in the flames, and ate it from the stick,
as a dog would gnaw a bone. The officers put a guard around the few
little hackberry trees to keep the men from eating the berries and the
bark. Not a scrap of the few buffalo we found was wasted. Even the
entrails cleansed in the snow and eaten raw gives hint of how hungry we
were.
At last in our dire extremity it was decided to choose five hundred of
the strongest men and horses to start under the command of
Lieutenant-Colonel Horace L. Moore, without food or tents, through the
snow toward the Beulah Land of Camp Supply. Pliley had been gone for
three days. We had no means of knowing whether his little company had
found Sheridan's Camp or were lost in the pathless snows of a
featureless land, and we could not hold out much longer.
I was among the company of the fittest chosen to make this journey. I
was not yet twenty-two, built broad and firm, and with all the heritage
of the strength and endurance of the Baronet blood, I had a power of
resistance and recoil from conditions that was marvellous to the
veterans in our regiment.
It was mid-forenoon of the fifth of November when the Nineteenth Kansas
moved out of Camp Crawford by the Shunganunga and marched proudly down
the main thoroughfare of Topeka at the auspicious beginning of its
campaign. Twenty days later, Lieutenant-Colonel Moore again headed a
marching column, this time, moving out of Camp Starvation on Sand
Creek--five hundred ragged, hungry men with famishing horses, bearing no
supplies, going, they could only guess whither, and unable even to
surmise how many days and nights the going would consume. It was well
for me that I had an ideal. I should have gone mad otherwise, for I was
never meant for the roving chance life of a Plains scout.
When our division made its tentless bivouac with the sky for a covering
on the first night out beyond the Cimarron River from Camp Starvation,
the mercury was twenty degrees below zero. Even a heart that could pump
blood like mine could hardly keep the fires of the body from going out.
There was a full moon somewhere up in the cold, desolate heavens
lighting up a frozen desolate land. I shiver even now at the picture my
memory calls up. In the midst of that night's bitter chill came a dream
of home, of the warm waters of the Neosho on August afternoons, of the
sunny draw, and--Marjie. Her arms were about my neck, her curly head was
nestling against my shoulder, the little ringlets about her temples
touched my cheek. I lifted her face to kiss her, but a soft shadowy
darkness crept between us, and I seemed to be sinking into it deeper and
deeper. It grew so black I longed to give up and let it engulf me. It
was so easy a thing to do.
Then in a blind stupidity I began to hear a voice in my ears, and to
find myself lunging back and forth and stumbling lamely on my left foot.
The right foot had no feeling, no power of motion, and I forgot that I
had it.
"What are you doing, Pete?" I asked, when I recognized who it was that
was holding me.
Pete was like an elder brother, always doing me a kind service.
"Trying to keep you from freezing to death," he replied.
"Oh, let me go. It's so easy," I answered back drowsily.
"By golly, I've a notion to do it." Pete's laugh was a tonic in itself.
"Here you and your horse are both down, and you can't stand on one of
your feet. I'll bet it's froze, and you about to go over the River; and
when a fellow tries to pull you back you say, 'Oh, let me go!' You
darned renegade! you ought to go."
He was doing his best for me all the time, and he had begun none too
soon, for Death had swooped down near me, and I was ready to give up the
struggle. The warmth of the horse's body had saved one foot, but as to
the other--the little limp I shall always have had its beginning in that
night's work.
The next day was Thanksgiving, although we did not know it. There are no
holy days or gala days to men who are famishing. That day the command
had no food except the few hackberries we found and the bark of the
trees we gnawed upon. It was the hardest day of all the march.
Pete, who had pulled me back from the valley of the shadow the night
before, in his search for food that day, found a luckless little
wild-cat. And that cat without sauce or dressing became his Thanksgiving
turkey.
The second night was bitterly cold, and then came a third day of
struggling through deep snows on hilly prairies, and across
canyon-guarded bridgeless streams. The milestones of our way were the
poor bodies of our troop horses that had given up the struggle, while
their riders pushed resolutely forward.
On the fourth day out from Camp Starvation we came at sundown to the
edge of a low bluff, beyond which lay a fertile valley. If Paradise at
life's eventide shall look as good to me, it will be worth all the cares
of the journey to make an abundant entrance therein.
Out of the bitter cold and dreary snow fields, trackless and treeless,
whereon we had wandered starving and uncertain, we looked down on a
broad wooded valley sheltering everything within it. Two converging
streams glistening in the evening light lay like great bands of silver
down this valley's length. Below us gleamed the white tents of
Sheridan's garrison, while high above them the Stars and Stripes in
silent dignity floated lightly in the gentle breeze of sunset.
That night I slept under a snug tent on a soft bed of hay. And again I
dreamed as I had dreamed long ago of the two strange women whom I was
struggling to free from a great peril.
General Sheridan had expected the Kansas regiment to make the journey
from Fort Beecher on the Arkansas to his station on the Canadian River
in four or five days. Our detachment of five hundred men had covered it
in fourteen days, but we had done it on five days' rations, and three
days' forage. Small wonder that our fine horses had fallen by the way.
It is only the human organism backed by a soul, that can suffer and
endure.
Pliley and his fifty men who had left us the night we went into camp on
Sand Creek had reached Sheridan three days in advance of us, and already
relief was on its way to those whom we had left beyond the
snow-beleaguered canyons of the Cimarron. The whole of our regiment was
soon brought in and this part of the journey and its hardships became
but a memory. Official war reports account only for things done. No
record is kept of the cost of effort. The glory is all for the battle
lists of the killed or wounded, and yet I account it the one heroic
thing of my life that I was a Nineteenth Kansas Cavalry man through that
November of 1868 on the Plains.