(1862)
NO "scare-heads" in big city papers,
No "puffs" in Department reports,
No pictures by "special staff artists"
Of assaults on impregnable forts;
We are far from the war-vexed Potomac,
Our fights are too small to make news;
We are merely Dakota militia,
Patrolling the frontier for Sioux.
Three hundred-odd "empire builders,"
Gathered in from three hundred-odd claims,
Far scattered across the wide prairies
From Pierre to the mouth of the James.
Perhaps they seemed little or nothing,
Our losses, our toil, and our pain,
The rush of the war ponies, tearing
Through cornfields and yellowing grain;
The whoop of the hostile at midnight,
The glare of the flaming log shacks,
A beacon of hate and destruction
As we fled, with the foe at our backs;
Our women and young driven, weeping,
Exhausted, half-naked, afraid,
To the refugee huts of Vermillion
Or the sun-smitten Yankton stockade.
Small things to a Nation embattled,
But great to the pioneer band
Who are blazing the roads of the future
Through the wastes of a wilderness land.
We plod past the desolate coulées
In the sweltering afternoon heat.
While the far ridges shine in a waving blue line
Where the earth and the brazen sky meet.
No sound save the hoofs of the column
As they swish through the dry prairie grass,
No life anywhere save a hawk, high in air,
Gazing down as we wearily pass.
There is never a foe we may grapple
In the heat of a steel-clashing fray.
For the quarry we hunt is a shadow in front
That flits, and comes never to bay;
A feather of smoke to the zenith,
The print of a hoof in the sod,
A shot from the grass where the far flankers pass
Sending one more poor comrade to God.
Would we rest when the day's work is over
And the stars twinkle out in the sky?
There is double patrol round the lean water-hole
And the picketed horses hard by.
Breast-down in the rain-rutted gully.
With muskets clutched close in our hands,
The hours of night drag their heavy-winged flight
Like Eternity's slow falling sands.
While the Great Dipper, pinned to the Pole Star,
Swings low in the dome of the North
And, faint through the dark, sounds the prairie wolf's bark
Or a snake from the weeds rustles forth.
And the darkness that chokes like a vapor
Is thronged with the visions which come
Of children and wife and the dear things of life
That peopled the lost cabin home.
Till the East flushes red with the morning
And the dawn-wind springs fresh o'er the plain,
And the reveille's note from the bugle's clear throat
Calls us up to our labors again.
We were not in the fight at Antietam,
We never have seen Wilson's Creek,
We were guiding our trains over Iowa's plains
While the shells at Manassas fell thick,
But we're waging a war for a new land
As the East wages war for the old,
That the mountains and plains of the red man's domains
May be brought to Columbia's fold,
And though only a squad of militia
That the armies back East never knew,
We are playing a game which is largely the same
With the truculent, turbulent Sioux.
