In Cowboy Land, 435 



lated, riding in company with a surveyor of the Burling- 

 ton 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 fall- 

 ing. 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 ist Cavalry camped, under the com- 

 mand 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 per* 

 formed 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 ap- 

 peared 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. 



