CHAPTER \ II. 



THE WILD WEST. 



ROAMING at large among the states and territories during the TO's the shifting 

 seasons were followed year after year without any special purpose on my part, 

 winning or losing, accepting nature's gifts and taking chances wherever I pitched a 

 camp or drove a stake, north or south, or elsewhere. Yet among the wild Indians 

 in our reservations there was risk when buffaloes were running, and really trouble 

 moreover was at hand. Army posts were distributed all over the prairies, and I 

 frequently dropped in to report when a storm threatened. I stopped in at Fort 

 Custer ten weeks one year with Senior Captain Sanderson, llth Infantry, by 

 invitation, with my wife along. But that was in 1881, after the war was fought, 

 and all over redskins were subdued and made captives. Meanwhile I cut across 

 country. 



Whatever happened at large is but an echo and an imitation of history, which 

 extended from 1804 to about 1860 under the reign of the explorers, Lewis and 

 Clarke. 



You see the breech clout Indian vanished as soon as the freighters and 

 traders enabled them to be called blanket Indians. After the buffalo slaughter 

 was ordered in 1875 they adopted felt hats. I saw lots of old felt hats in the 

 Sioux camp at Little Big Horn, where the departing warriors, after the Custer 

 massacre, left their lodge poles standing and empty kettles on the ground. I was 

 at Chetopah, on the Kansas line of Indian territory, when some of the buffalo 

 hunters fitted out with splendid mounts and a grand flourish to deplete the redskins' 

 larder by government edict, and I was on the Yellowstone in 1881, following the 

 winter when the last wholesale slaughter of the buffalo and antelope took place in 

 the deep snow along the bottom. Tihe string of carcasses as I saw them (all the 

 antelopes and most of the old buffaloes remaining "impeded") was at least one 

 hundred miles long, sometimes in clusters just as they were shot in their tracks, 

 with intervals of mesa between, and again in single file or by twos and threes, for 

 rods together. It was a gruesome sight, for the wolves had exposed the bones of 

 all whose skins had been taken by eating off the meat. There were no hungry 

 wolves that year. Not a howl was heard. 



The year previous, in 1874, Congressman Fort, of Illinois, had introduced a 

 bill to protect the buffaloes, but those whose business was to fight the Indians had 

 already decided that the least dangerous, least expensive and most expeditious 

 method was to destroy their rations and wipe out their subsistence. Knowing the 

 game that was on the Indians fought desperately at the Little Big Horn, and all 

 along the navigable rivers in Montana the steamboat men had to ironclad their 

 pilot houses to protect their river men from marauders on the cliff. The sagacious 

 Crows were then quite willing to cede the right of way to the Northern Pacific 

 railroad in 1881, whereby they might receive food to supply the lack of buffalo meat. 



Referring to- the action and display of buffalo and antelope afield on the 

 Arkansas in the 70's, Dr. A. J. Woodcock writes poetically : 



(42) 



