CHAPTER XXXII

1873

WESTWARD

The _Russia_ (Captain Cook), the crack ship of the Cunard line which carried me to America in the month of March, 1873, would not find much grace in the eyes of the rich men who brave the dangers of the sea in what are called “the floating palaces” of this twentieth century. There were no conservatories, no swimming-bath, no marble architecture. On the other hand, there was a greater sense of security. I have sailed in one of these giant modern liners many stories (not decks!) high, and I confess to having been appalled at the thought of what must be the confusion in a panic on board a labyrinthine ship where a silken clue is needed, even in a calm, to find the way to the dining-saloon. Oliver Montagu, who afterwards commanded the Blues, was my travelling companion. We spent ten delightful days in New York, forced to leave it all too quickly, but carrying away with us memories of lavish hospitality and kindness, busy, eager men, dainty dames and damsels, the preciousness of whose beauty would have adorned far less gorgeous apparel than what they were clad in; abundance of worldly goods, fine jewels, and a profusion of flowers thrown out as a defiance to climate.

The one thing that seemed lacking at that time was any expression of the highest forms of art. The Pierpont Morgans, Wideners, Fricks and others have long since filled up that gap. But of the glories of New York it is not for me to speak here. Our business there was to have what New York itself calls a “lovely time”; that was _our_ business, and the kindness of other people made it _their_ pleasure. The objects of our journey lay farther afield, and so we followed Horace Greely’s famous bit of advice, “Go West, young man, go West!”

On board the _Russia_ we had made friends with one of our shipmates, Tom Nickalls, a very leading member of the Stock Exchange, a first-rate sportsman and cheery companion, and he joined us in our expedition into the Wilds. As a child he had known Chicago, which we were anxious to see; he had still some friends or connections there, and it did not take much persuasion on his part to induce us to call a halt.

The resurrection of Chicago was certainly the most colossal achievement of human endeavour that ever I witnessed. It was on the 8th of October, 1871, if the legend be true, that Biddy Maloney’s cow, whisking her tail, upset a lamp in a wooden shed in de Koven Street and started the great fire. A fierce wind was blowing from the west, a long, hot summer had dried into tinder the wooden buildings and lumber yards, and in a few minutes the flames were raging beyond the power of man to control them. Between that Sunday night and Tuesday morning an area of nearly three and a third square miles was reduced to a heap of ashes. The winter was near when building would be impossible. The most that could be done was the work of clearance. Then, from the four winds of heaven, were blown builders, carpenters, masons, bricklayers, glaziers. The statistics of the building that began the first day that the frost was out of the ground, the 15th of April, 1872, and ended on the 1st of December of the same year, are simply amazing.

Excluding Sundays and counting two hundred working days, it was computed that for each hour of each day of eight hours there was completed one brick, stone or iron building of twenty-five feet frontage and from four to six stories high. Was such a thing possible? Well, we arrived in the spring of 1873, before the new building season was in full blast, and we saw those buildings—that miracle—the Phœnix risen from its ashes.

When we had all taken our places in the omnibus and were just moving off, bound for St. Louis, a rough man got in, carrying a small carpet bag—all his luggage. “Whar does this hyar conveyance connect?” he asked. “It’s bound for the St. Louis train.” “Waal! that’s not my road, but I guess it don’t much signify.” “Why, where are you going to?” “Waal! I guess I’m bound to go to the end of the rope, anyways,” said the man, changing his quid with the utmost unconcern. There you have the true pioneer spirit of America which opens up and fertilizes the limitless wilderness. Men such as this who started years ago, without plan or prospect, “bound to go to the end of the rope,” are now rolling in wealth, lords of countless herds, exporters of grain, owners of rich mines, lumber kings, what not? Strong thews and sinews, but above all a stout heart, must these men have. Only think of what is implied by “the end of the rope.” No house to live in, no friend, perhaps not even a dog, to speak to; food coarse and often scanty; exposure by day and by night to sun and rain, wind, snow and frost; cattle straying or attacked by wild beasts; thieving, murdering and scalping Indians; a life of peril and exhausting labour; a cutting of all home-ties; a dearth of all home news; fever and sickness untended and uncared for. That is “the end of the rope.” Who shall say that the man who succeeds—the survival of the fittest—has not earned his success? But how many are bound to go under?

There was a very pleasant American gentleman in the same carriage with us, with whom we made good friends. I had by that time learned enough of the American language to say, offering him a cigar, “Do you use tobacco, sir?” “Yes, sir,” he replied, politely accepting the offer, “I do. For I smoke and I snuff and I chew; and if it had pleased Heaven to decree that there should be a fourth way of using tobacco, I guess I should have used it that way also.” It is always comforting to see such respect paid to the decrees of Heaven.

St. Louis is, as cities go in America, quite venerable. Founded by the Louisiana Fur Company in 1764, it was just ninety-nine years old at the time of our visit. We had to spend a day there in order to deliver certain letters, which were to procure us facilities for hunting further West, and a most amusing day it proved to be. Our cicerone was a local gentleman who had been warned of our coming, and was kindness itself. Only one thing he expected in return, and that was boundless, literally boundless, admiration of St. Louis and all that was in it. In our secret hearts we were not much impressed; wealth, dinginess and dust struck as the chief features of the city; but our friend found subject for self-gratification even in the dust. “There, sir!” he seemed to say, “I’ll trouble you to show me such dust as this in any of your played-out old European cities.” He offered us refreshment in the shape of a bottle of “Imperial,” a light, sparkling wine rather like perry. “This, sir, is some of our native prŏdūce. How do you find it compare with the vintages of Champagne? I am told that it is greatly admired at Paris, sir.” We vowed that no such wine had been tasted since the days of Noah.

Our friend was gratified. In America the word good is insufficient; you must say that everything is the best; less praise is an insult and an ignorant insult at that. One thing he admitted that St. Louis had never been able to achieve. They could defeat Reims and Épernay, but a champagne bottle they could not make; some element was wanting which would enable their glass to stand the pressure. So a roaring trade was done in secondhand bottles from Europe.

We drove through the city and into the suburbs, composed for the most part of neat little villas, some detached, some semi-detached, standing in tiny gardens. Standing before a clean little white house with green shutters, and adorned at the entrance with some plaster of Paris statuary, our cicerone said: “These are the residences of our rich townsmen. How do they compare with the mansions of your aristocracy in London?” I was foolish enough to say that they seemed to me a little small. He smiled a smile of pity at the insular jealousy of the Old World.

It appears that there was living at St. Louis an English gentleman named Shaw, who, having made a beautiful garden, offered it to the town on condition that it should be kept up at the public expense. The City Fathers objected to this condition. “Yes, sir, they are skinflints,” said our friend; “what we want here is about one hundred and fifty first-class funerals, then we should get along fine.”

In the evening he dined with us and came to see us off at the station, where he presented each of us with a large octavo volume of three hundred and thirteen pages entitled, “St. Louis, the Future Great City of the World, by L. N. Reavis. Fourth edition.” The book is full of quotations of speeches by men of more or less, chiefly less, eminence in which the audiences of St. Louis had been flattered to the top of their bent. “Voices,” Mr. Reavis calls them, “prophetic voices.” I cannot resist copying a choice bit culled from Mr. Reavis’ own writing: “And if it be true, as I hope to establish, that St. Louis is destined to be the great city of the world, the all-directing head and central moving heart of the accumulated civilization of the great family of man, the facts of her history will in time be sought for, by citizens and writers, with an eagerness and a zeal never before called out by the interests of any other city—not even of Jerusalem nor of Rome. Henceforth St. Louis must be viewed in the light of her future, her mightiness in the Empire of the world, her sway in the rule of States and nations. Her destiny is fixed. Like a new-born Empire she is moving forward to conscious greatness, and will soon be the world’s magnet of attraction. Here will be reared great halls for art and learning; here will congregate the great men and women of future ages; here will be represented some Solon and Hamilton, giving laws for the higher and better government of the people; here will be represented some future great teachers of religion, teaching the ideal and the spiritual development of the race, and the higher allegiance of man to the Angel-world; here will live some future Plutarch, who will weigh the great men of his age; here some future Mozart will thrill the strings of a more perfect lyre; here some future Rembrandt, through his own ideal imagination, will picture for himself more perfect panoramic scenes of nature’s lovely landscapes,” etc., etc.

We thanked our kind friend. The engine shrieked and we rolled away from the future great city of the world into outer darkness, illuminated at intervals by the blaze of burning forests.

We spent a day at Kansas City, not from choice, but because there was no connecting train to take us on to Fort Wallace, which was our destination. Kansas City, on the Missouri river, just below the mouth of the Kansas river, was at that time a thriving town risen five and twenty years earlier out of a howling wilderness and already boasting a population of forty thousand and representing a capital of some twenty million dollars.

Mr. Reavis, the author I have just quoted, says: “Its splendid buildings, its many railways, its increasing wealth and sleepless enterprise, challenge the admiration of the East as well as of the West.” A shot fired from a long bow indeed! After reading such a description it was startling to see pigs picking up a luxurious living off the plentiful garbage strewn in that magnificent street the Broadway. The pigs were very real,—the splendid buildings, creations of Mr. Reavis’ fancy which must have been stimulated by hashish, for the deepest draughts of the rather thin “Imperial” would hardly account for such flights as this. “In the development of the great West, with its fertility of soil and boundless natural resources, Kansas City is bound to play a prominent part. She will grow with the growing country, increasing every day in wealth and power; she will wear the golden crown and royal purple, and be hailed Queen City of the Missouri Valley.” The prophecy was delivered forty years ago. I hope it may have come true, and that the descendants of the pigs of those days may now be suitably housed, grunting in comfortable sties.

There was not much to do by way of killing time, so we wandered off at haphazard towards the wood-crowned bluffs round the town; our steps, as luck would have it, led us to Westport, a tiny village which was the original trading camp from which Kansas City sprang. The sun was hot, the road deep-rutted and dusty like the roads in the North of China round about Peking. To our joy when we reached the village we saw “Lager Bier” posted up over a little bar-room, so we went in thirsty and rather bored.

The place was kept by the oldest inhabitant, a very aged German of whom nothing was to be seen save only a portentously thick red nose; the rest of him was hidden by a grey military great coat and cap, which seemed to grow out of a great shock mass of grizzled hair and snuffy beard, that probably no comb or brush had disturbed for years.

Below the nose was a voice coming from no visible opening, and the voice uttered a jumble of German and English, most perplexing. The room, dirty, shabby, squalid, was hung round with portraits of the old Emperor Wilhelm, Fritz the Crown Prince, Bismarck—rude representations of German triumphs, ending in the surrender of his sword by the Emperor Napoleon. At the back was a door, opening for company’s sake into a shop next door, kept by another old German, a gunsmith by trade, as dirty and snuffy as his mate. When the two old gaffers found that we could speak to them in their mother tongue, how pleased they were! Immediately their tongues began to go like mill-clacks, telling us of the old days when they came out as pioneers, and drove a roaring trade with the Indians. The old gunsmith assured us that he might have retired upon a comfortable fortune long ago, but he had stuck to Westport like a limpet to its rock. He had become used to the rough outpost life, in which he had grown old, so he set up his son in trade, and rubbed on as before in the days when the young out-growth of Kansas City “noch nicht anzudenken war.”

Presently the two old fellows grew more confidential and let out what was probably their true reason for remaining here, belief in the existence of a hidden treasure somewhere hard by, a treasure all in gold buried by the early traders, Mexicans and borderers, under terror of attack from the Indians. Happy the man who should light upon that treasure! For him there would be no more living by the sweat of his brow under the curse of the first sin, but a restoration to a garden of Eden with trees bearing sausages for fruit, streams flowing with Lager Bier, the air laden with the perfume of never-extinguished canaster.

There is to me something infinitely touching in the memory of these two old cronies, wrapped in one another, hugging their friendship, their dirt and their superstitious belief in the hidden gold. They had well passed the allotted span of life when I saw them—they must have been long since gathered to their fathers. Which went first? How fared it with the other?

Kansas City was proud of its press. There were four daily papers published in English and one in German. I cannot honestly say that, whether regarded from the point of view of literature or as providers of news, they could claim any merit worthy of “The Queen City of the Missouri Valley.” Their columns were in the main stuffed with abuse of each other and a certain amount of padding of the giant gooseberry order. Their powers of vituperation were remarkable. The _Kansas City Times_, speaking of a rival, says: “For a low down, contemptible and insignificant journalism we award the palm to the _Kansas City Journal_. Its editor’s lack of decency is only equalled by his mental poverty.” The _Topeca Commonwealth_, speaking of a Mr. Griffin, says, “He is a dirty liar, a malicious libeller and a large-sized and highly-scented skunk—Mr. Griffin has not been heard from yet on this somewhat pointed argument.”

Buffalo hunting—I suppose I ought to say Bison hunting, but I keep to the name made famous by Buffalo Bill and others—was one of the chief objects of our expedition. The Kansas and Pacific Railway hung out most tempting pictures of sport in the Wild West—all their stations had buffalo heads as advertisements with prodigious pictures of railway trains charging herds of myriads—“verra awkward for the coo.” In the afternoon, Mr. Weston, an Englishman in the employ of the railway, came to see us.

It was early in the year for the trek northwards of the herds which had migrated to the South before the winter. However, Mr. Weston sent a telegram of inquiry down the line, and the happy answer came back from Fort Wallace, “Buffalo been seen within forty miles of this place.” So to Fort Wallace we determined to go.

We started at nightfall and ought to have reached Fort Wallace in about twenty-four hours, but the line was obstructed by the breaking down of a goods train, so we had to undergo some thirty-two hours of very real discomfort, in the company of rowdy gamblers, the curse of those days in the West, women of no doubtful character and squalling children. The spitting of the gamblers was a fine art. During the day-time there was no consolation of fine scenery, for we were travelling through that most dismal wilderness the blooming prairie—of the night the less said the better.

Travelling through the desert was something which no one will ever see again. The march of civilization has created a revolution in the whole aspect of the West. Cities have sprung up, farm steadings have been built, and the vast expanse which I have seen black with the wandering buffalo is now covered with waving crops. The buffalo has been improved off the face of the earth, only bred here and there in artificial reserves as a curiosity.

Forty years ago, in that dismal waste, at distances of about forty miles, were log huts occupied by one man, where the engine pulled up to drink; between them not a dwelling—not a tree—a few sage bushes—a sort of dwarf cactus—hardly a blade of grass—the abomination of desolation. How in this wilderness, this boundless desert with a round horizon, animal life contrived to sustain itself was a mystery. Vast herds, probably millions of buffaloes, travelled north from Mexico in summer and back again south in the autumn. There were antelopes and coyotes (a sort of wolf), skunks, squirrels, here and there horses that had run wild; of birds—larks, vultures, blackbirds with glorious yellow breasts, prairie chickens, wild ducks. Then there were the pretty little prairie dogs, the tiny owls and the rattlesnakes—the three said to live together in amity in the same holes. The beasts and birds had company, the lonely railway man in the log hut had but himself and his thoughts.

Governor Lowe, who was British Minister at Peking, told me a capital story of how the famous Senator Wade, who was Senator for Ohio, travelling West found at one of these solitary huts an Ohio man, who at once recognized him, shook him by the hand and said, “Why, Mr. Senator, I am right pleased to see you!” The Senator thanked him for his welcome and answered, “But what in the name of wonder are you doing here?” “Well, Mr. Senator, I’m going to tell you. This is going to be one of the greatest cities in the world.” The Senator failed to see the possibilities of that one log hut in the wilderness. “Yes, sir! There is a river runs about seven miles from here, and we air calculating to divert the course of that river and bring it along here. Then we shall get a few first-class families from East and West to come and locate here and this will become a great town, giving the go-by to New York, San Francisco, and may be even to London and Paris. All that is wanted here, sir, is a little water and good society.” “Yes,” answered the witty Senator, “and the same remark applies equally to Hell.” The “We” of the solitary eremite speaks volumes. In it lies the keynote of American confidence and success.

It was freezing hard at 5.30 in the morning of the 25th when we left that miserable train with its unholy crew of undesirables, having had to pass a second night on board instead of comfortably in Mr. Ruggles’ excellent inn at Fort Wallace. He was sitting up for us, for we had warned him of our coming; he struggled out of that yawny state of coma which is engendered by a night of arm-chair and tobacco and showed us to our rooms. A few pails of ice-cold water washed away the memories of those two wretched nights, and a delicious breakfast of milk, new laid eggs and buffalo steaks made new men of us. Mr. and Mrs. Ruggles were really delightful people. She, poor lady! was a very different person from the landlady whom one would imagine presiding over a prairie hotel.

What a strange life for a highly educated lady, whose mind had been formed by travel and stored with memories of London, Paris, Venice, Florence, Rome! That she should turn cateress for a rough crowd of engineers, navvies, teamsters and hunters! We were truly in a land of surprises where your tavern-keeper may be a polished gentleman and the chief of the State an ignorant boor. After breakfast we held a council of war, Mr. Ruggles being the chief spokesman. After some debate we agreed by his advice to enter into negotiations with one Mr. Dodge, the boss of an “outfit” about thirty miles off, to which he was going to send out a team with flour for his men—in that “outfit” there was the unique advantage of a small tent—in any other we should have to lie under the stars; a glance at a frozen fountain which the sun’s rays had not yet been able to melt decided us. The tent was the great lure, and we determined to join Mr. Dodge’s outfit if he would have us. Mr. Ruggles soon settled that for us, and at ten o’clock, having crammed a few necessaries into a bag and put our rifles together, we started under the convoy of Andy Phillips, teamster, hunter, and partner in some sort with Mr. Dodge.

By this time a whole troop of idlers, hunters and navvies had crept out of sundry very dirty blankets and buffalo robes in which they had been huddled in back rooms and outhouses, and we had to run the gauntlet of a volley of chaff as we sallied forth. “What will you take for your skins?” “What’s your contract for heads?” They did not believe in us nor in our smart-looking Rigby rifles. It is astonishing how suspicious men of a certain class are of cleanliness; dirt alone is to them workmanlike. The last thing I heard was: “Wal! Wal! Wal! Damn me if them fellers don’t think they’re gwine to hunt bufflers! Wal! Wal! Wal!” The contemptuous way in which this was said was greeted with loud applause and laughter.

Our way lay for a while eastward along the line of the railway, and then we struck off north on to the open prairie.

Andy Phillips, our teamster, was a character. A small, wiry man, dressed in a flannel shirt worn so long that it had become a second skin; an old coat many sizes too big for him, tied together at the breast by a bit of string, the sleeves being rolled up so as to give his hands a chance of coming out; a rusty old billycock hat, much indented and of uncertain brim. The fierce sun and wind and frost, weather and dirt, had tanned man and clothes to one uniform neutral tint; no human being could say what might once have been the colour of either. In conversation he did not shine, but when directly challenged to give an opinion he had an oracular way of delivering short, jerky sentences, prefaced by a turn of his quid and a spit, which was very imposing. There was no temptation to talk, though, for the cart was springless and the prairie not as smooth as a billiard table, so we were most mercilessly jolted and pitched about whenever the mules broke into the semblance of a trot.

Very amusing were the prairie dogs, quaint little beasts living in townships of small mounds, arranged like ant-hills, with so much method and regularity that one might fancy that each little colony had its mayor, municipal officers, laws, ordinances and rules of etiquette. As we drew near, the inhabitants—tiny yellow beasts something between squirrels and weasels—would turn out in strength, taking their stands each on the top of his house, with tails most impertinently cocked, barking, yapping, scolding with absurd little voices to warn us off; but as soon as the cart came close to the village, there was universal panic and _sauve qui peut_; the braggarts with one consent would take headers into their holes; not a prairie dog to be seen until we reached the next township, where the same comedy of threats, rage and terror would be played anew.

For many miles we jolted along without seeing anything in the way of game to shoot at, but at last we came within a few hundred yards of a couple of antelope. Their backs were turned to us and they were feeding up wind, so Oliver got down and tried to stalk them, but there was not covert enough to hide a shrew-mouse, let alone a big Blue well over six feet; one of them curled round and caught a sight of him as he was crawling up, and they galloped away into space.

The only chance of getting near to the pretty, shy creatures would be when the nature of the ground, where the prairie is cut up into divides by dry water-courses (canyons), would enable the hunter to creep up to them unseen, or bring him upon them suddenly without his having had any previous inkling of their whereabouts. Although the eye stretched to the bounds of a round horizon, the irregularities of the prairie sometimes hid objects close by, or on the next divide.

In this way, later in the day, Oliver got another chance at an antelope; it was a long and difficult shot, and though he made practice good enough to draw a note of admiration even from the undemonstrative Andy, he was unsuccessful. As for me, the only chance I had all day was at an old grey wolf-coyote, who was lumbering along at that awkward, shuffling pace which seems so slow and is so fast. He was more than two hundred yards off and both my bullets struck the ground so close to him that he gave a great terror-stricken jump each time;—unfortunately very near does not count at any game. We stopped for our mid-day meal at a creek where we found a pool of stagnant water from which we scared half a dozen mallard; we had some bread and cold meat, and Mr. Dodge had thrown into the cart a can or two of preserved strawberries and oysters—the former tasted of tin and sugar, the latter of tin and salt, but friend Andy enjoyed them mightily.

As soon as the mules had fed and rested, Andy gave the signal for a move. “Now then, you fellers! If you’re ready I’m a-gwine to move on, and I guess we’ll beat the sun an hour.” The further we advanced in the prairie, the more frequent became the carcases of dead buffaloes, some already blanched skeletons, others more recently killed, torn and mangled by wolves and vultures. Even had economic and agricultural reasons not determined their extermination, there would probably have been few buffaloes left by now.

The slaughter was on a huge scale. Old bulls and young, even cows heavy in calf were slain mercilessly, often in places where the skins could not be removed, so that the massacre was profitless and without excuse. The hunters seemed to be bent on killing the goose that laid the golden egg. A good bull’s skin was worth two dollars, a cow’s skin one dollar; to-day I am told that a bison’s head in good condition is worth a huge sum to decorate the walls of some sporting club in the West.

Our day was not quite blank, for Oliver shot a jackass rabbit, a sort of big hare with huge, flapping ears; the expanding bullet made mince-meat of it, but we picked up the pieces and were thankful for them at supper-time. Towards the end of the day Oliver’s keen eyes spied some huge black lumps in the distance—buffalo! We were mad to go after them, but Andy looked at the herd and then looked at the sun, which by this time was low in the heavens, turned his quid in his mouth, and saying, “I guess a man feels pretty bad if he’s lost on this yar prairer after dark,” whipped up his mules and drove on. Next day, when I was being led on for mile after mile by a herd, I knew how wise he had been. But at the time I hated him and his prudence; I thought he lacked keenness. Andy not keen! I soon had occasion to know better.

The day was fast waning when we reached the camp. How the same word may mean different things! In the East the camp used to mean three or four luxurious tents comfortably carpeted and furnished with iron beds and arm-chairs, pitched under the shade of trees by a running stream, a bustling dragoman ready to conjure tea, coffee, cigars, anything and everything out of his saddlebags. Here a fire of dried buffalo dung near a creek of muddy water full of little red worms; the air poisoned by the smell of drying hides, out of which one, rather better seasoned than the others, would serve as a bed. The boasted tent turned out to be nothing more than a bit of torn canvas stretched on three poles, open to the four winds of heaven. This was our “camp” in the West.

By and by “the boys” came in from hunting; a tatterdemalion crew, ragged, unkempt and very, very dirty; it would be difficult to imagine a rougher, wilder-looking lot. Throwing down their rifles on the iron-hard ground as if they rather wished to break them, they set to work to prepare supper, taking little or no notice of us. There was Captain Vogel, the boss of the outfit, Prairie Bill, his partner, Mexico Bill and two minor satellites who spoke not, and apparently had no names worth mentioning.

The dung fire was quickly made up again; one man set to work to make damper in a skillet; another cut some lumps of buffalo flesh off a huge carcase and threw them into a frying-pan; a third boiled some roughly-ground coffee in the foul water of the creek—this, with the fragments of Oliver’s jackass-rabbit, constituted our feast. No whisky or other spirits, for the hunters only drank when they went into a settlement to spend and gamble away their hard-earned money. Then, to use their own expression, they would “make the place howl.”

As the pannikin of coffee went round, our hosts became more communicative and began telling us hunting stories garnished with all that wealth of imprecation for which the language of the Wild West is justly famous. One story of Prairie Bill’s I jotted down in my pocket-book that night. Prairie Bill was a tall, active fellow, as lean as a lath, all wire and muscle, with keen, beadlike, black eyes and an impudent little snub nose—a regular dare-devil. Looking at him I felt half tempted to believe that his story might be true. By way of preface he swore steadily for several seconds, and having thus relieved his mind, he spat furiously, and was then in trim to proceed.

“If you fellers want to hear how I once killed a bloomin’ buffler, blarm me to most etarnal smash if I don’t tell yer.” (oath). “I’d been a-follerin’ a herd all the ruddy day without gettin’ near enough for a shot, when all on a sudden a big bull drops astarn and looks me in the face. Wal! I fired and hit him, and darn me if I didn’t plug him seven times out of my Spencer rifle without killin’ him.” (Many oaths.) “When the big brute see as I hadn’t got a shot left, darned if he didn’t put his ruddy head down and come bang at me.” (More oaths.) “Guess I felt considerable mean, you bet! But there warn’t no time for thinkin’, and as he comes a tearin’ up, ready to give me Hell, I steps on one side, and ketchin’ hold of his mane, swings myself on to the back of him.” (Oaths of attestation.) “Wal! there I was, darn me, a-ridin’ on the ruddy buffler across the ruddy prairer. What did I do then? Why I pulled out my old knife and kep’ a-stickin’ of him in his ruddy neck till he dropped down as dead as General Washin’ton. And next day darned if me and the Captain here didn’t skin him.”

Prairie Bill ended as he had begun, with a long volley of oaths. His mates joined in, swearing in sympathetic chorus—all except Captain Vogel, whom I never heard utter an oath.

The night became cruelly cold; if we sat to the leeward of the fire the smoke and dung ashes were blown into our noses and eyes; if we faced it our backs were frozen; our legs were cramped sitting tailor fashion, and altogether we were so uncomfortable that we soon were glad to turn in. We lay down dressed as we were on hides stretched over the hard, frozen ground, with our rifle-cases for pillows. The camp dogs barked, and the men grunted, muttered and snored. Sleep was fitful; we were all rather crusty and dismally uncomfortable, for we were huddled together under that imposture of a tent, packed as tight as a box of figs.

There was no temptation to play the sluggard and I rose as soon as the first streaks of daylight tinged the blackness of the east. On my way to the camp fire I met Andy Phillips, trembling with excitement. He had been along the creek to look after his mules, which had been so badly tied up the night before by Mexico Bill that they had strayed. He had not found them, but he had seen a herd of buffalo. When he saw me he hurried up and hissed out laconically, “Bufflers t’crik!” “Do you think we can get at them?” “Guess we kin.” I ran back for my rifle and off we started. As we went along Andy told me that in the herd which he had seen there were several very fine old bulls; they had come down to the creek to drink at a point about a mile and a half off, and he did not think they would move far away. So we got down into the winding creek, which in most places was quite dry, the banks being high enough to hide us; so Andy felt confident that I should get a shot. I was by no means sure of myself, though, for I was nervous and in a fever of excitement, madly eager to get a head, and my hands were numbed and stiff from the blistering cold iron of the rifle.

When we reached the spot indicated by Andy I could almost hear the beating of my own heart. Very cautiously we crawled up the bank and peered over. Not a sign of a buffalo to be seen! I was greatly vexed, not thinking for the moment of the inequality of the levels of the divides, and forgetting that the whole herd, not having been disturbed, could hardly be more than half a mile off at most. “The critturs is bound to be close by, anyways,” whispered Andy as he marched off again up the creek. He knew the sort of ground and stopped at a place where the bank commanded a view of the next divide, and sure enough there the herd was, thirty or forty great awkward, shaggy, black monsters, quietly feeding about five hundred yards off. Luckily the creek here took a sharp turn which enabled us to get within closer range, the wind not betraying us, and when next we put our noses over the bank the nearest beasts were not much more than a hundred and fifty yards from us.

As we were watching them the biggest bull, a fine old fellow with a huge black mane and a long goat’s beard, detached himself from a bunch of cows and stood stretching himself and cocking his tail. There he stood, broadside on to me, a glorious chance. “Take the old chap as is a-cockin’ his tail,” Andy whispered in my ear, but there was no need of the hint; before the words were well out of his mouth the rifle had spoken and the dull thud that followed told that the bullet had struck home. “He has it, by the Lord!” shouted Andy. No apathy about him now! The old bull bowed to the shot, took a pace or two to the front, then turned to the right, tottered for a couple of seconds, sank down, and rolled over stone dead, shot through the heart. The rest of the herd, when they saw their chief stricken, gathered round him for a few moments, as is their wont at the sight of blood, and when the prairie rang with the noise of his fall, an almost metallic sound, trotted slowly off, Andy sending a parting shot after them in vain.

As for me, I was too much excited over my first buffalo to think of firing a second shot. I ran up to get a close look at him. We measured the distance; one hundred and seventy yards. Andy, highly delighted at my success, made short work of cutting off the head, which now hangs in my hall at Batsford. We were now pretty hungry and went back to breakfast in great glee. How good the muddy coffee and the tough buffalo steak tasted!

When we reached the camp we found that the others had naturally breakfasted and started. Oliver with Prairie Bill as his aide-de-camp, Tom Nickalls under the guidance of young Mexico. It was just as well for the latter that he was out of the way when Andy turned up, or there would have been an explosion in the matter of those strayed mules. Captain Vogel had stayed behind for me.

My second campaign under Captain Vogel was very different from the first. We had to face our quarry on the open prairie, stalking was out of the question, trickery and deceit the only means of getting near the poor, stupid brutes. We had to play at being buffaloes. It was not a difficult game. The two men sticking so close together as to show no daylight between them, and hunching their backs, had to lead a horse equally close behind them. The innocent simplicity of the bison was quite taken in by the stratagem, and even in the springtime, when the beasts were the most suspicious, the hunter had no difficulty in getting to within two hundred yards of his prey, provided the wind were right. Should the herd be puzzled, they would not move off except for a little way—slowly and stopping from time to time. When they stopped the men must stop too. By degrees the beasts would become more familiar, and so it was generally easy to get a shot at from one hundred to one hundred and fifty yards. In the late summer and autumn they would allow themselves to be approached quite near, so that the hunters could shoot them as easily as cows in a byre.

Captain Vogel was a small, lean man, not strongly built but toughened by hard work and a strenuous life. Long elf-locks of fair, sun-bleached hair fell over his shoulders; his beard was thick and tangled. He had bright blue eyes which always seemed to be looking into the distance—a hunter’s eyes. His features were regular and showed breeding. He was clad in a nondescript suit of grey rags and a battered old wideawake; his arms were a heavy three-barrelled rifle, the only one of its kind that I ever saw—and a hunting-knife. A strange man, as gentle as a woman, a paragon alone among the hunters of the West, for he neither swore, nor smoked, nor chewed, nor drank spirits, nor gambled; not even when resting during a holiday in some town. As his name implied, he was of German origin, but he had no knowledge of his birth tongue, though he remembered hearing his father and mother speak it when he was a child. Born in the Eastern States he came West many years ago, a sickly youth, condemned by the doctors, and took to hunting in search of health. He found it in the keen air of the prairie. Now sickness and pain were strangers to him, and fatigue had lost its power over him. His little three-year-old mare, his solitary pet, followed him about like a dog. His one ambition was to set up as a farmer somewhere in the Wild Country when he should have saved money enough.

In 1873 times were not so good for the hunters as they had been. A year ago a bull’s skin was worth three dollars and a cow’s two; now prices had gone down. A bull’s skin only fetched two dollars and a cow’s one. He calculated his expenses at a dollar and a half a day, and he and his partner, Prairie Bill, could each reckon on six dollars a day profit. He would soon have made his little pile, for he banked all his money instead of gambling. Were his parents alive? Had he any friends left? He did not know; it was long years since he had had a letter. He could give no address; here to-day and there to-morrow, a wanderer on the face of the earth. Last year he fell in with a man from his old neighbourhood, but the man was too drunk to understand or to tell him anything, and the next morning he had gone away nobody knew whither, vanished into space. With such talk we went our way into the prairie to play at being buffaloes.

We had not gone very far when we spied a large herd in the distance; they were moving towards us, evidently having been disturbed, for every now and then they would turn to look behind them. It is the unwritten law of the prairie that no man shall interfere with a herd that is being followed by another hunter, so we stood still and watched. In a few minutes we saw Oliver and Prairie Bill come over the horizon and on to the same divide with the buffaloes; then there was a general stampede and Oliver, leaping on to his horse, gave chase.

Captain Vogel was much excited and annoyed, for in his judgment his partner had bungled the hunt badly. All of a sudden the hindmost beasts of the flying herd stopped, and Oliver, jumping off as quick as thought, dropped a cow just as she was galloping off again. It was a pretty sight, made all the more so by the mirage which threw a mist over the distance. It was like a vision seen in a dream; a ghostly hunter pursuing phantom buffaloes over a desert shrouded in the dim mystery of an opalescent haze.

After the death of Oliver’s cow the herd broke into two divisions, the one trekking off to the south, with Oliver and Prairie Bill after them, the other moving northwards; it would have been no breach of etiquette had we followed these, but they were a long way off—a mile or more—and Captain Vogel preferred going forward in the hope of finding a herd that had not been “skeered.” For some three or four miles we travelled wearily on under a blazing sun, our feet sinking in the dry, hot dust, without seeing anything. At last a change in the level brought us in sight of five huge old bulls lying down about four or five hundred yards away, and close to them, on the left, three antelopes peacefully feeding. Here was a rare piece of luck! I would rather have one antelope than all five bulls, so we crept slowly on towards the left, but we did not dare try to get very near lest they should take fright and gallop off. We halted at between two and three hundred yards from them and lay down, waiting for one to turn his side to me.

After what seemed an age of suspense, the psychological moment came. I drew a long breath, took a very deliberate aim, and pulled the trigger. To my bitter disappointment the bullet just grazed the antelope high in the shoulder. Two inches lower and I should have had my trophy. In an instant the three pretty creatures were skimming like swallows over the horizon. I was glad to think that my intended victim was only scratched.

Startled by the crack of the rifle the five buffaloes struggled up in their ungainly fashion and looked uneasily about them, but seeing nothing that they considered dangerous—for the clever little mare knew her business too well to budge an inch, and we were acting our strange

## part most convincingly—they only shuffled lazily a few paces off, we in

pursuit, slackening our pace when they turned, hurrying when they went forward. In this way we soon came within easy shot, and I dropped the biggest of the five, the great clumsy creature rolling over and over and raising a cloud of dust. We both thought that he would get up again, but having watched him for a minute or two and seeing his legs stiffen, we accounted him dead and went on after his mates, who had pursued their slow course, in no wise affected by his fate. Just as I was preparing for a second shot we heard a terrific noise and there was the big bull whom we had left for dead coming on at full gallop in the best of health, with his head down, snorting and blowing up the dust, which looked like smoke coming in two volumes out of his nostrils.

We knelt down and prepared to receive cavalry, thinking that he was going to charge us; but his only thought was to rejoin his faithless friends, and the five monsters, now thoroughly frightened, fled into the mirage and we saw them no more. The mirage was very baffling; it was one of the difficulties of the hunter. In the first place, for some unexplained reason, it made all the beasts very wild, and in the second it made a field glass useless. This, however, did not affect the native hunters; like the Indian shikari they preferred to trust to their own eyes and were afraid to use a glass lest they should weaken their eagle sight.

On the furthest divide that we reached we found an enormous herd; the prairie was black with them. Captain Vogel reckoned that there must have been over two thousand heads. Playing the same game I shot three fine bulls without difficulty or adventure. Two others, for which we could not stop, would be gathered next day. Vogel shot very badly, not killing a single beast, but he said himself that he did not pride himself so much on shooting as on getting up to game; of that craft he certainly was a master. I could not help thinking that his wonderful old three-barrelled shooting-iron had something to do with the missing. One old bull led us a fine dance, making us follow mile after mile without ever giving us a broadside chance. Further and further on we followed him until at last we had to give him up as a bad job, for we were between ten and twelve miles from camp and we had twisted and turned in so many windings that Vogel declared that he did not know where we were. A terror! We were parched with thirst and my feet were sore from walking in the hot dust. There were, of course, no landmarks, so we had to guess at our homeward route with the help of the sun and my pocket compass.

A long, anxious tramp brought us to a divide where Vogel recognized some carcases which he had skinned the week before; close by he knew of a puddle of water at which he and the mare drank luxuriously; I could not! It was full of live insects and green vegetable matter, so I preferred to carry the leather which had once been my tongue into camp rather than run the risk of that poisonous draught. Four or five miles more brought us into camp where Tom Nickalls was blazing away with his rifle at a prairie chicken which was fool enough to stop until a lucky shot cut its head off. Oh! the joy of a drink of almost clean water out of Tom’s flask!

Captain Vogel and I were the last to come into camp. On comparing notes we found that our bag consisted in all of nine buffalo—not counting the two of mine that Vogel would be sure to find and skin the next day. Oliver had killed four, Tom Nickalls one, I four. Not a bad piece of work, as even the hunters were obliged to confess, and they are not given to paying compliments. Our guns were greatly praised. Prairie Bill, with picturesque and highly ornate additions, declared that they had only one fault, and that was that they did not belong to him.

Andy, mourning over his mules, not yet found, stopped in the midst of a torrent of abuse addressed to young Mexico, to swear that “them guns shoots wicked.” “You may bet your pile on that,” said Captain Vogel. The men said, however, that our rifles were too light for their use in the autumn time, when the big slaughter takes place. At that time they needed weapons with plenty of weight of metal so that they should not heat readily. That great sportsman and rifleman, Lord Elcho (the late Lord Wemyss), once laughed at my Rigby as being too heavy. I wonder what he would have said to Captain Vogel’s three-barrelled cannon.

After all, this buffalo hunting was tame sport; one day of it, just for the novelty of the thing, was all very well, but neither of us would have cared for a renewal of the experience. The vast dreariness of the prairie offered no charm of scenery, none of the poetry of deer-stalking celebrated by Scrope. The American bison, fierce as he looked, was not a savage, revengeful enemy like the Indian buffalo; even when wounded he rarely turned upon his man. Hunting the creatures on horseback, and pistolling the master bull, which was the sport of the United States officers garrisoning the outlying forts, must have been fine fun. But for that we had not the necessary mounts. Had I had another day I should have confined myself to going after antelope; that, at least, was an exciting sport, needing great wariness and patience.

For the first time in my life I on this day saw a herd of wild horses—perhaps I ought to say “horses run wild,” for we are told that there is no such thing as an indigenous American horse, so these must have been runaways, even though their savage state might have been decades or even centuries old. They followed us cautiously at a respectful distance, attracted, probably, by the charms of the good little mare. Mean-looking animals they were, in the poorest of condition; their manes and tails floating wildly in the wind; one, at least, must have been a recent recruit escaped from some ranche, as the saddle galls on his back proved. Horses that have once been broken in and have gone back to savagery and liberty are, so the hunters told me, the shiest of all.

Another sight new to me was that of the “sun-dogs”; luminous clouds with prismatic colours hanging round the sun like beautiful satellites, a sure sign of coming storms and foul weather.

Round the camp fire that night the battles of the day were fought over again, but the main talk was about Indians. For the last week or two all America had been ringing with the murder of General Canby and the Peace Commissioners by the Modoc Indians of the lava beds on the borders of California and Oregon; but the news, already stale even in Europe, had not yet reached the prairie, and we were the first to tell the story to the hunters. They were fiercely indignant, but far more so against the Government than against the Modocs. Even the wildest men, the men like Prairie Bill who held that “an Indian was never in his proper place till he was six feet underground,” were bound to admit that the Government treated them shamefully. The policy adopted at that time was, as the march of civilization advanced, to keep driving them back further and further on to reservations, as the parcels of land allotted to them were called. In return for the rich territory of which they were robbed the Government supplied them with blankets, arms, ammunition and other necessaries, which were distributed by the “Indian Agents.”

There were few warmer berths in the gift of the ministry than that of an Indian Agent. There were practically no limits to his powers of robbery, and right good or bad use he made of his opportunities, charging for first-class double blankets and supplying the poor Indian starvelings with half blankets of the thinnest and meanest description; and so it was with all other stores. In a few years the agent was a rich man. The Indians knew they were being swindled, but there was no redress, and one fine day there would come a day of reckoning such as we were discussing. Then the soldiers must be called out to wreak vengeance which is not consummated until many valuable lives have been lost; for what chance have drill and discipline and regular troops against the cunning of savages fighting on the vantage ground of such a stronghold as the lava beds. “Why don’t they call out the hunters?” said Prairie Bill; “guess we’re used to trackin’ varmin!”

Wherever there were gathered together ten men who live by honest labour, whether they were merchants in New York, miners in California, farmers or hunters on the prairie, one heard the same abuse of the Government, the same tale of bribery, extortion and corruption. These men, with whom we were talking, were rough and wild and uncouth, but they were not bad fellows, as Mr. Ruggles testified, and they earned their bread hardly and honestly by the sweat of their brows. Nay more! They had a fair right to complain, for they were the most likely men to suffer by the policy of a Government which provoked the savages by robbery, and then furnished them with arms to avenge their outrages. It was the scalp of the hunter and not that of the Minister at Washington that was in peril. The Indian agent was surely one of the most striking products of universal suffrage.

The beautiful “sun-dogs” were true prophets; the wind got up in the night and beat fiercely upon us as we lay under our tattered awning; towards the dawn the rain came down and soaked us through and through. Tired as we were after our long tramp through the dust of the desert sleep was impossible. The break of day was a relief. No news of Andy’s mules. He had been after them all the day before, but found no trace of them; perhaps he had not sworn quite sufficiently at young Mexico. We were obliged to start and there was nothing for it but to borrow Vogel and Prairie Bill’s horses, Andy hoping that as his beasts were in the habit of travelling backwards with skins and forwards with stores, they might have made tracks home to their stables. By this time we had become quite friendly with our hunters and they bade us a touching farewell. I often thought of them afterwards. Did Vogel ever succeed in stocking a farm? What became of that reckless but very attractive scamp, Prairie Bill? And young Mexico, what was his fate?

When we reached Fort Wallace with two heads and having accounted for eight other beasts, for Tom Nickalls shot one on the way home, the hunters and loafers who had chaffed us so unmercifully on our departure changed their tune. No praise was too high for us, we became heroes, and our once despised rifles were passed round, handled and admired by every idler about the place.

Mr. and Mrs. Ruggles were delighted at our success. They too had had a little excitement during our absence, for a thief had broken into the house and stolen all Mrs. Ruggles’ jewellery and trinkets, keepsakes which are more valuable than ever in this dreary banishment. The man had got in through the window of Oliver’s room and happily not noticing some of our boxes, in which there were a few articles of more or less value, made straight for the poor lady’s apartment. In these parts a man had to take the law into his own hands. Ruggles soon found out who was missing from the settlement, and starting by the next train caught the rogue at a station down the line. Revolver in hand Ruggles offered him his choice between disgorging and having his brains blown out. He chose the former, so all was recovered save a dollar or two, which had been spent in drink. The thief was a man well connected, who had gone down in the world, wrecked by drink and debauchery, and was now a navvy on the railroad. Towards eight o’clock in the evening the train carried us westward.

We afterwards learned from United States officers that our expedition had been a little imprudent. The Sioux Indians, though not absolutely on the war-path, were in an uncomfortable state of ferment. The news of the Modoc massacre had spread among the tribes in the same mysterious manner that tidings spread through the bazaars of India, and there was a general feeling of uneasiness. At no time would it be pleasant, as we knew from our hunter friends, to meet Indians on the plain; at any rate they would try to steal, a game at which they were very successful, especially when the booty consisted of horses or cattle belonging to white men. All’s well that ends well. We saw no Sioux, our scalps were tight upon our heads, and there is a certain tinge of pleasure in the idea of having incurred an even remotely possible danger!

April 28th.—Could there be a more delightful change after the dreary monotony of the desert than to lift one’s eyes on waking to the radiant snows of the Rocky Mountains?

We were hardly prepared to find Denver City so pleasant a place, and, above all, so quiet and orderly; for in the Eastern States we had been led to believe that we should find one of those wild, lawless settlements of the West—models from which Bret Harte painted “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and other masterpieces, in which the six-shooter makes such a show. Indeed, in a New York paper I read an advertisement which ran as follows: “An hotel with bullet-proof walls has recently been erected at Denver City, so that a gentleman can sit and listen to the shooting going on in the next room without being incommoded by any feeling of danger.”

The East was in those days very hard upon the West, and, as I thought, very unjustly; for there were vigilance committees everywhere, and Judge Lynch—an obvious necessity in wild young communities—made short work of sweeping out ruffians who misbehaved themselves. Indeed, the West might boast that whereas the Tombs, the famous prison at New York, was full of murderers, who might or might not be punished as politics might dictate, in Denver or Virginia City justice marched with no lame or uncertain foot.

We found a capital hotel, kept by one Charpiot, a Frenchman; gifted with the genius of his race for cooking and serving things nicely, he was known to fame as the Delmonico of the West; we had not been fed so well since we left New York. What a pretty little town it was! Now I suppose it has grown out of all recollection, but at the time of which I am writing (1873) it had but twelve thousand inhabitants. However much it may have spread it must still have its glorious view of the Rockies, with the famous Pike’s Peak as the chief feature. The air was so pure and clear that though the great chain was fifteen miles off the mountains seemed quite close, as though a man might walk there under the hour.

Although the town only began to be built in 1853 it was already a bustling, thriving little place. I wrote in my journal: “Being the centre of a rich agricultural and mineral district it does a brisk trade, and as the prosperity of Colorado is developing itself with giant strides Denver City is likely to continue its rapid growth.” I fancy that I might have worded my prophecy more strongly.

We found the town in a fever of excitement. President Grant with his wife and daughter had arrived and there was to be a grand reception in the evening at the house of Governor McCook, where the President was staying. But the great attraction was the advent of a number of Indians who had come in from their “reservation” to see the great Father. Their chief, old George Washington, as he called himself, was a small, thick-set old man, with a most villainous expression, heightened by dabs of blue, red, and yellow paint, which gave quite a fiendish look to his cruel mouth and cunning little bear’s eyes. Long, straight elf-locks of coarse black hair parted in the middle, and the parting painted vermilion, fell over his shoulders. He wore a chimney-pot hat, decorated with red and yellow streamers, a short blue coat with military buttons; necklaces and other ornaments of coloured beads; two revolvers; leather trousers with tassels all down the sides; such was the noble savage of Fenimore Cooper, the modern representative of Uncas and Chingachgook, as I saw him.

His crew were as ugly and evil-looking as their chief. Some carried bows and arrows in leathern quivers slung at their backs; not one was without a revolver. Looking at their stunted, shapeless bodies, it was hard to say whether they were men or women—“bucks or squaws” as an American would put it. When we came upon them in one of the chief streets they were bartering furs. The man in the shop said they were quite harmless. “Harmless, yes,” said a bystander; “so’s snakes when their teeth is drawn. But I kinder guess it’s the sort of harmless you don’t want to be too near when you ain’t got a six-shooter about you.”

* * * * *

April 29th.—When we left Denver City President Grant, with Mrs. Grant and the Princess Royal, as the American wags called her, was in the train, and for glory’s sake a crowd had assembled at Cheyenne to salute the great man, soldiers and an ear-racking band being on the platform. The President was no doubt a man who had rendered signal service to his country, but he was not of the quality which would find favour with the culture of Boston or the refinement of New York. The more delicately strung of his countrymen looked upon him as common and boorish. The second Duke of Wellington used to tell a good story of him. The Duke always felt it due to the name of his illustrious father, when any famous warrior came to England, to offer him an entertainment at Apsley House. When General Grant came to England he was accordingly invited there to dinner. When he arrived and saw the portrait of the great Duke, he could find nothing more appropriate to say than: “Ah! I have commanded more Divisions than that man ever commanded Regiments, and yet what a lot of talk there has been about him.” “Yes,” answered the Duke in his droll, dry way, “I believe he was considered a meritorious person in his day.”

The second Duke was really a very witty man, and the fun of his conversation was enhanced by his rather grotesque appearance, and his humorous manner. Alfred Montgomery used to imitate him, as he well knew, but they loved one another dearly, and the Duke cared not one whit. One day at luncheon at Lady Dorothy Neville’s Mr. Edmund Yates was present. Alfred being mentioned, naturally the guests began telling stories of his wit. Yates turned round to the Duke and said: “You know, Mr. Montgomery is very fond of mimicking your Grace.” The Duke answered: “Yes! I know it, but let me give you a bit of advice, Mr. Yates. Don’t _you_ try to mimic a gentleman!” The Duke was a most admirable note writer. He told me how once Lady Dorothy Neville wrote to him saying that she was about restoring the dear little church at Danksfee, and was asking her friends to help; so, feeling sure that he would wish to do something for the church in which he had so often worshipped, she had put down his name for one hundred pounds. The answer was characteristic. He, too, was restoring the church at Strathfieldsaye, and knowing that Lady Dorothy would wish to contribute in memory of old days he had put down her name for one hundred pounds. “In the circumstances no money need pass between us.”

But I am wandering and must hasten back to Cheyenne. We had some trouble with our luggage, but when that was disposed of and we had had luncheon we started for Ogden and Salt Lake City. It took us thirty-five hours to reach Ogden.

The first part of the journey was dull enough, spinning through the everlasting monotony of prairie, with glimpses of antelopes and wrathful prairie dogs. We turned into bed rather early and next day found ourselves in the midst of the lovely wild scenery of the Rocky Mountains, great crags towering over the line with terrifying threats, as if the shaking of the train must bring them down upon us. In places great falls of snow had been tunnelled through, and the gorges were spanned by crazy wooden bridges that rocked under the long chain of cars. The line was high up among the snows, laid at giddy heights some eight thousand feet above sea-level.

It was an Indian country, so there was a good deal of what Prairie Bill would have called “poison” about. The curious-looking creatures, wrapped in their shoddy blankets, hung about the railway stations, impassive, unnoticing, impenetrable, as little moved as if they had been corpses by all that was going on around them. Had they any feelings? Perhaps, but they never showed them. At Ogden we changed into the Salt Lake train.

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