82 



FOREST AND STREAM. 



[Aug. 23, 1888. 



Aadresss all communications to the Forest and Stream Pub. Co. 



EARLY DAYS ON THE MISSOURI. 



V.— AN ILL-FATED SETTLEMENT. 



IN 1866 a company was formed at Helena for the pur- 

 pose of opening a route to the nearest point on the 

 Missouri River, which would be below the rapids and 

 other obstructions on the upper river. The projectors, 

 by examining a map, had selected for their point the 

 mouth of Musselshell. A more unfortunate selection 

 could scarcely have been made. The route was infested 

 by hostile Indians, impassable for heavy teams, and 

 seventy miles of it was a desert without grass or water. 

 Several slight attempts Were made to go through, but 

 nothing was actually accomplished until the early part of 

 1868. Most of the stockholders were undoubtedly actu- 

 ated by honest motives, but the directors must have been 

 fully aware of the rascally intentions of their paper city. 

 It was founded in fraud and ended in massacre. The 

 town itself consisted of a few straggling huts built on a 

 miserable sage brush bottom, overlooked on one side by 

 ghastly bad land bluffs, whose gigantic, hideous ravines 

 were sparsely covered by gnarled and stunted pines, with 

 twisted limbs that looked as if every inch had been born 

 in agony and grown in torture; on another side, a dirty, 

 slimy alkali creek, fitly named Crooked Creek, pours its 

 noisome slum into the Musselshell. The Musselshell at 

 this point was in the spring a torrent of bad land mud; in 

 the summer, an alkali quicksand. Along its banks strug- 

 gled for existence a few melancholy cotton woods, looking 

 like so many deadly Upas trees shedding their baleful 

 influence, and whose withering air appeared to breed 

 desolation. The few stunted blades of grass that sickened 

 through the bad land soil were yellow and withered. The 

 bloom of June brought no beauty to this hideous place, 

 nor did the white pall of winter give it majestyT Fit 

 scene and center for the most frightful horrors and mas- 

 sacres. 



Why the Indians should be so hostile in this particular 

 neighborhood has always been a mystery to me. Had 

 they been capable of philosophic reflection they would 

 have known that their most deadly malice could not 

 have been better gratified than by the unmolested settle- 

 ment there of their most deadly enemies. About twenty 

 or thirty men, mostly hunters or woodchoppers, made this 

 place then- headquarters, and as they made their money 

 at the risk of their lives, no one wished to leave any of it 

 unspent in case he should be killed. Men living thus, 

 without law or social restraints and with plenty of money, 

 would naturally be engaged in some wild scenes, and I 

 have witnessed there orgies that would bring a compla- 

 cent smile to the face of a leering fiend; but I have also 

 witnessed acts that would add a brighter halo to the head 

 of an aureoled saint. In the neighborhood and country 

 tributary to it there have been more than thirty different 

 massacres, the recital of which would be a monotonous 

 rehearsal of disgusting atrocity— a task I shall not at- 

 tempt, but will content myself with relating a few char- 

 acteristic incidents. 



In the spring of 1868 Mr. Higgins, of White Sulphur 

 Springs, came down there for some reason best known 

 to himself, with a fine train of mules. His mules and 

 several horses that were owned by different parties were 

 herded in a point formed by the Musselshell and Missouri 

 rivers. The settlement was in a narrow neck between 

 these two rivers, and it was supposed the stock was 

 pretty safe, as in order to get away with them they 

 would have to run by the settlement, as it was impossible 

 to stampede them across the stream. Mr. Higgins and 

 some men were guarding the stock, however, when a 

 mounted Sioux party rushed in on them, killed two men, 

 shot Mr. Higgins in* the arm and took every hoof of the 

 stock. The whole thing was done like a flash of light. 

 At the yell of the stampede men rushed out of their 

 cabins and tents and opened fire at the whooping Indians 

 as they pursued the frantic stock, but no Indian was 

 killed. One young buck on a magnificent horse, after 

 they had gotten the stock away, turned back and again 

 ran through the firing crowd, making signs of derision 

 as he swept by on his flying horse. 



One foggy, misty day in the summer of 1868 the Sioux 

 attacked the Crow camp, a short distance from Mussel- 

 shell, and got away with about 800 head of horses. I 

 was in the Crow camp at the time, but it would occupy 

 too much space to describe the stampede of the horses, 

 the yells of the Sioux, the bitter imprecations of the 

 Crows, the mounting in hot haste of the Crow warriors 

 for pursuit, the harangues of the old men, the loud beat- 

 ing of the tom-toms, the rise and fall of the war chant 

 of the women, the varying success of the battle, as for- 

 tune inclined one way and then the other; the exultant 

 songs of victory when some enemy fell, the cutting off 

 the hair and maiming of themselves of the relatives of 

 the slain, the wails and lamentations over the dead. 



The Indians kept up a series of skirmishes against the 

 settlement during the early spring of 1869. A white 

 woman, Jenny Smith, was wounded and scalped alive, 

 and a Crow squaw was shot through the lower part of 

 the body in the first attack. For a couple of weeks any 

 one who ventured out any distance was sure to be fired at 

 and run in. For a short time again the Indians appar- 

 ently had left, when some men who ventured out to get 

 some wood were ran in by a small party. This small 

 party, of a dozen or fifteen Indians, would make con- 

 stant petty attacks and run off again if they received 

 the slightest opposition. The majority of the settlement 

 took great precaution for their personal safety, and 

 would on no occasion venture outside the shelter of their 

 houses. A very few men were all that would offer de- 

 cided opposition to these constant attacks, but continual 

 success on the part of the whites, and the apparent 

 cowardice of the Indians, finally induced almost every 

 one to run after the Indians whenever they made any 

 sort of demonstration. The only horse in the settlement 

 was picketed and iron hobbled close to one of the build- 

 ings. One morning a few Indians crawled through the 

 sage brush, cut the horse loose, and endeavored to get 

 him away with the hobble on. Nearly every one ran 

 after them, and the heavy firing caused them to abandon 

 the horse and seek safety in flight. 



A couple of mornings after this occurrence they opened 

 fire at a couple of Crow squaws, who were gathering sage 

 brush for firewood. The Indians numbered sixteen, and 

 almost every white man rushed after them in a body. 

 The Indians ran toward the Musselshell and then ran up 

 the bottom. They were not running very fast and the 

 whites were gaining on them when suddenly there came 

 a shot, which killed Jack Leader, from a coulee on the 

 bank of the Musselshell, and the whites saw an ambush. 

 Had the Indians seized the moment of panic no white 

 man could have escaped the massacre. The whites 

 turned to run. one man then saw the danger of flight and 

 stopped it with a leveled rifle. The Indians had prob- 

 ably been trying to bring about this ambuscade for sev- 

 eral days. Their principal force was cached in a square 

 coulee on the bank of the Musselshell. Their plan was 

 to make feint attacks with a small party, so as to induce 

 all the whites to run after them; their decoy party was to 

 run by the hidden Indians; when the pursuing whites 

 came close to the ambush the Indians were to jump out, 

 and in the surprise and panic kill every white man. It 

 was well and ably planned, and probably owed its failure 

 to some nervous Indian, who had fired too soon; but even 

 as it was, it would have been successful had they made 

 their onslaught in the moment of terror and panic that 

 followed their first shot. 



Most of the whites gradually withdrew to the settle- 

 ment or to a safe distance from danger. Five or six men 

 kept their position within thirty or forty steps of the now 

 besieged Indians. We thought there was quite a number 

 of them, but did not know how many. After a short 

 time another white man, named Greenwood, was shot 

 through the lungs and had to be carried back. We 

 resorted to various artifices to get a shot at the Indians. 

 Two men would lie close together behind a clump of sage 

 brush; one would show his hat on a stick to draw a shot 

 from the enemy; the other would fire at the flash of the 

 Indian's gun. A couple of hours were passed in this way, 

 and it began to look as though we should not accomplish 

 anything, when, fortunately, it began to rain. We were 

 armed with breechloading rifles, the ammunition of 

 which rain would not injure; the Indians were armed 

 with flint-lock guns and bows and arrows, and as they 

 were stripped naked for war, they could not protect their 

 arms from the rain. We were getting impatient, and 

 relying on their arms being useless on account of the 

 rain, started to change their position, but were appalled 

 at the sight of their numbers in the coulee. 



The only possible way to reach them was for some of 

 us to cross the Musselshell, get in their rear, open fire 

 from there and drive them out of their coulee, when 

 those on the other side of the Indians would have a chance 

 at them, and thus place them between two fires, I sug- 

 gested this plan to Frank Smith and Joe Bushaway. 

 They agreed with it, and we three prepared to cross the 

 river. We crossed the river about forty steps above the 

 Indians' position. The Indians, when they saw us make 

 this movement, came to the mouth of the coulee and tried 

 every means to get their guns off. One would aim a gun 

 and snap the flint, another pour powder on the pan. 

 They did manage to fire off a few of their old fukes, 

 which went off with a noise like that from so many 

 cannons. Other Indians tried to shoot us with arrows, 

 but their wet bow strings possessed such feeble force that 

 the arrows could scarcely reach us. The stream was 

 miry behind the Indians — where we crossed it was toler- 

 ably solid, but, the water in the deepest portion took me 

 to the armpits: the other men, being taller, did not have 

 so much trouble. The two others wore buckskin shirts; 

 I was dressed in buckskin complete, and in crossing the 

 stream my buckskin pants lengthened and interfered 

 with me so much that I was obliged to kick them off, 

 although I had about f 500 in the pocket, and throw them 

 to the opposite shore, where I afterward recovered them; 

 but during the remainder of the battle I had nothing on 

 but a shirt. Nearly all the men belonging to the settle- 

 ment were back about half a mile from the Indians. We 

 three had crossed the stream and were opposite the In- 

 dians, about sixty steps off, and had commenced to fire 

 on them, when this mob, seeing U9 in our flesh-colored 

 buckskin clothes, mistook us for Indians, and opened a 

 heavy fire on us, obliging us to retreat across the river 

 again. When the Indians saw our plan, the uselessness 

 of their arms and the trap they had placed themselves in. 

 they realized their fate. A gloomy Nemesis scowled 

 retribution for the massacre of many a white man. We 

 could see the smoke from the circling pipe and hear the 

 low wail of the death song. 



By this time Jim Wells, Dennis Halpin and others, 

 who were on the opposite side of the Missouri River when 

 the fight commenced, had crossed the Missouri when 

 they heard the firing and had hurried up to the front. 

 This time Jim Wells, Frank Smith and Frenchy crossed 

 the Musselshell at a better point and opened fire on the 

 Indians from the rear. The Indians jumped out of the 

 coulee with wild terror, panic and fear, and were met 

 with a withering volley from those on the bank, which 

 caused them to run almost anywhere in their blind ter- 

 ror. There was not a cheer nor a yell; not a sound but 

 that of the panting^ of the breathless, horror-stricken In- 

 dians, and the rattle of the firearms which sounded ter- 

 ribly distinct against that lowering rainy sky as the 

 deadly cross-fire swept their tumultuous, panic-stricken 

 flight. I recollect one great big Indian — horror and death 

 staring in his wild eyeballs — blind in his terror, who al- 

 most ran into the party on the bank, but a bullet stretched 

 him on the plain, and as he furiously grasped the sage 

 brush his sobbing, gurgling breath ended in death. 



Another, a handsome boy, with chattering teeth and 

 stiffening hair — pity should have spared him — but black 

 death and unpitying fate sealed his eyes. 



In their wild despair they plunged into the river. 

 Some were shot as they mired, others dragged their 

 wounded bodies to the brush. No Indian would have 

 escaped had it not been for this mob a half a mile off. 

 They fired indiscriminately at friend or foe, and pre- 

 vented us from closing in on the Indians. It is the curse 

 of undisciplined bodies, that their panic fear invites 

 massacre, and their want of union snatches the fruits of 

 success out of the very grasp of victory. Men who took 

 an active part in the battle scalped the Indians, but no 

 brave man otherwise mutilated the dead. 



Several Crow squaws who were living in the settle- 

 ment, when they heard the heavy firing with which the 

 battle closed, came out about half way and were en- 

 gaged in a war dance, and the high notes of their peans 

 sounded weirdly through the mist and rain. After the 



battle I passed by them on my way back to the settle- 

 ment to get some clothes for myself, and their flattering 

 attentions were rather embarrassing in my undressed 

 condition. 



An old fraud by name of Capt. Andrews, cut the heads 

 off the dead Indians, removed the flesh and brains by 

 boiling, labeled the skulls with awe-inspiring names, 

 and started on a lecturing tour throughout the States, in 

 which, I have no doubt, he made Baron Munchausen 

 ashamed of himself. 



Thirteen Indians were left dead on the ground, and the 

 camp when they came in to gather up the remaining 

 bones and lament the dead, acknowledged that more 

 than thirty died on the route to the camp, and only one 

 out of the ninety odd who were in the fight escaped with- 

 out a wound. 



Next day we found the cache where they had stripped 

 for the fight, in which there were more than a hundred 

 robes, a great many moccasins and two war bonnets. The 

 robes and moccasins were sold and the money given to 

 the wounded man, Greenwood. Wells and myself re* 

 ceived the two war bonnets. Wells's war bonnet was a 

 circlet crown of war eagle feathers. The head piece of 

 mine had horns and plumes (an insignia of the very high- 

 est rank) and the waving tail, made from the tail feathers 

 of war eagles, was more than five feet long. 



The settlement declined into a mere trading post, and 

 its final fate was characteristic of the place. When 

 Carroll was established Musselshell was abandoned, and 

 two men were hired to chop into cordwood what re- 

 mained of the buildings. When they had their work 

 finished some Indians captured them, tied them to the 

 cordwood and burned everything. When the howling 

 winds from off the desert bad lands swept away the ashes 

 of that murderous fire, the last vestige of civilized man 

 disappeared from this ghastly place. Once more this ill- 

 fated spot was left to the growl and snarl of wild beasts 

 and the home of the hoarse croaking raven, whose 

 circling flight over the fatal spot looked like the wraith 

 of some murdered white man or slaughtered savage— fit 

 scene for wailing ghost and goblin shade. 



Henry Macdonald. 



THE SCIURIDyE. 



I. — THE WOODCHUCK. 



WITH us the squirrels are represented by an interest- 

 ing group of animals, which in classification 

 naturally fall into six well marked genera, including the 

 woodchucks, the prairie marmots, the chipmunks or 

 ground squirrels, the spermophiles, the true or arboreal 

 squirrels, and the flying squirrels (see my last article, 

 "The U. S. Rodentia," for the several species in each of 

 these genera). Taken as a whole, the group perhaps 

 shows its greatest difference, both in habit and structure, 

 between two such forms as a woodchuek and a flying 

 squirrel; while on the other hand, a chipmunk and a 

 spermophile, in these two particulars, a>e very much 

 more nearly related to each other. 



a woodchuck (A. monax). 



Woodchucks, as we are well aware, belong to the genus 

 Arctomyx, and with two of the species out of the three 

 in our fauna, I have but little or no personal acquaint- 

 ance. Of the hoary marmot {A. pruinosws) I have never 

 seen a specimen, and at the present writing have no good 

 account of the animal at my hand. My knowledge of 

 the Rocky Mountain marmot (A. flaviventer) stands pretty 

 much in the same case; although several years ago I shot 

 a specimen of this species in the Medicine Bow Range of 

 the Rocky Mountains in Wyoming, but he fell in a posi- 

 tion where it was impossible for me to recover my prize. 

 There were a number of them out together, standing 

 near their burrows, and every once in a while one of the 

 party would give vent to a rather prolonged and peculiar 

 whistle, whereupon some of them would sit up on their 

 haunches and others take to their burrows in all possible 

 speed. They reminded me very much of the accounts I 

 have read of the Alpine marmot of the Continent. 



Last summer I saw here at Fort Wingate, New Mexico, 

 an animal that I took to be a Rocky Mountain marmot, 

 but the momentary glimpse I had of it did not absolutely 

 satisfy as to the fact, and I lost him to view among the 

 rocks'bef ore I had the opportunity for a fair shot. It was 

 evidently a marmot, however, of a size not quite equal to 

 our Eastern woodchuck, and appeared to be of a bright 

 rufous brown above, and paler on the under parts. My 

 annoyance at losing him was not easily appeased, as 

 mammals of any kind are more than rare in the neighbor- 

 hood, and over three years' residence has shown me but 

 few of the typically Western types. 



Many years ago, during my boyhood days, which were 

 mostly* spent in happy old New England, I did my share 

 of both shooting and trapping woodchucks, and even 

 helped eat a roasted one on an occasion. But I also did 

 more than this, for several times I had them as pets, and 

 closely studied their habits in nature and in confinement. 



Through some parts of the State of Connecticut it 

 would be hard to pick out a clover field of any size that 



