MY TWO NEW FRIENDS. 237 



States army. Not only was I well pleased with my two 

 friends in themselves, but I was also charmed that I 

 should have an experienced bison hunter to start with side 

 by side, and witnesses, too, of what took place, for some 

 of the " rowdy journals of the American press " had already 

 begun to try to sneer at "the English lord or baronet " 

 the ignoramuses always gave me the one title or the 

 other, and often both " who had boastfully expressed his 

 resolution to step across the Atlantic and walk into buffalo 

 in shorter time than it had ever been accomplished by 

 man ; " and I well knew that, with a departure from truth 

 much abroad in these realms, the mere vicinity of the 

 Rocky Mountains is fatal to an approach to veracity in 

 Englishman or American, all sorts of falsehood would be 

 invented by scurrilous detractors, and that I should, by 

 an immense portion of the press, and in the tyrannizing 

 spirit of the realms, be denied fair play. 



In this, my first visit to the Fort, I saw in the posses 

 sion of a soldier several of those animals called "prairie 

 dogs," one of which I subsequently procured, and which 

 has since been placed in the Regent's-park Gardens. 



On Saturday morning, the 8th of October, my dog- wag 

 gon came up to barracks to fetch my goods to the 

 camp, which, according to my orders, had been brought 

 across the river and pitched nearer to the Fort, whence 

 the officers as well as myself could amuse ourselves with 

 paying Druid a visit, and then we proceeded with the Fort 

 Riley waggons to join forces and direct our march for the 

 nearest spot in which we hoped to reach the bison. A 

 goodly company then we formed, for the officers had, if I 

 remember rightly, ten or eleven well-armed soldiers 

 with them, carbines and revolvers all complete, and two 

 waggons containing provisions, their tents, and an officer's 



