154 I'f^ iJ^^ United States vi 



for the barrack square of bare earth was sufficiently 

 large to have afforded shelter and safety to all 

 the human beings in the Fort ; but the horses would 

 probably have perished, and the stores, and the 

 barracks, and officers' quarters, and, in fact, the 

 whole settlement would have been burnt to ashes.' ^ 



'Denver, Colorado, 

 ^ 2 2,rd December. 



' I joined the party at Sydney, where they had 

 buffalo hunting with great success. It would take 

 too long to describe the unutterable villainy and 

 ruffianism of that most infernal hole, and we were 

 delighted to get out of it with whole skins. The 

 colonel of the post was very kind indeed, and sent 

 an escort a few miles down the line with us. Then 

 we rode across country to a most extraordinary 

 series of cliffs and fissures called Scott's Bluffs, 

 composed almost entirely of light -coloured clay, 

 rising some three or four hundred feet from the 

 plain, and carved and weathered into all manner 

 of strange buttresses and pinnacles. Here we 

 expected to find " big horn " or Rocky Mountain 

 sheep, and so we did, but just as we were commenc- 

 ing to hunt them a band of Sioux Indians, two 

 hundred and forty strong, under the command of 

 " Little Wound," the fiend who massacred the 

 Pawnee women and children last year, swept down 



1 ' Wapiti Running on the Plains,' by the Right Hon. the Earl of 

 Dunraven, Nineteenth Century, October 1880. 



