II
Now we take up the life of another spy, also an army officer, old Alexander Burnes. At eighteen he had been adjutant of his regiment and rose very steadily from rank to rank until he was sent as an envoy to Runjeet Singh, the ruler of Punjab, and to the ameers of Scinde. In those days Northwestern India was an unknown region and Burnes was pioneer of the British power.
In 1832 he set out on his second mission through Afghanistan, Bokhara and Persia. See how he wrote from Cabul: “I do not despair of reaching Istamboul (Constantinople) in safety. They may seize me and sell me for a slave, but no one will attack me for my riches.... I have no tent, no chair or table, no bed, and my clothes altogether amount to the value of one pound sterling. You would disown your son if you saw him. My dress is purely Asiatic, and since I came into Cabul has been changed to that of the lowest orders of the people. My head is shaved of its brown locks, and my beard dyed black grieves ... for the departed beauty of youth. I now eat my meals with my hands, and greasy digits they are, though I must say in justification, that I wash before and after meals.... I frequently sleep under a tree, but if a villager will take compassion on me I enter his house. I never conceal that I am a European, and I have as yet found the character advantageous to my comfort. The people know me by the name of Sekunder, which is the Persian for Alexander.... With all my assumed poverty I have a bag of ducats round my waist, and bills for as much money as I choose to draw.... When I go into company I put my hand on my heart, and say with all humility to the master of the house, ‘Peace be unto thee,’ according to custom, and then I squat myself down on the ground. This familiarity has given me an insight into the character of the people ... kind-hearted and hospitable, they have no prejudices against a Christian and none against our nation. When they ask me if I eat pork, I of course shudder, and say that it is only outcasts that commit such outrages. God forgive me! for I am very fond of bacon.... I am well mounted on a good horse in case I should find it necessary to take to my heels. My whole baggage on earth goes on one mule, which my servant sits supercargo.... I never was in better spirits.”
After his wonderful journey Burnes was sent to England to make his report to the government, and King William IV must needs hear the whole of the story at Brighton pavilion.
The third journey of this great spy was called the commercial mission to Cabul. There he learned that the Persian siege of Herat was being more or less conducted by Russian officers. Russians swarmed at the court of Dost Mahomed, and an ambassador from the czar was there trying to make a treaty.
Great was the indignation and alarm in British India, and for fear of a Russian invasion in panic haste the government made a big famous blunder, for without waiting to know how Dost was fooling the Russians, an army was sent through the terrible Bolan Pass. That sixty-mile abyss with hanging walls belongs to the Pathans, the fiercest and wildest of all the tribes of men. The army climbed through the death trap, marched, starving, on from Quetta to Candahar and then advanced on Cabul. But Dost’s son Akbar held the great fortress of Ghuznee, a quite impregnable place that had to be taken.
One night while a sham attack was made on the other side of the fortress, Captain Thomson placed nine hundred pounds of gunpowder at the foot of a walled-up gate, and then touched off the charge. The twenty-first light infantry climbed over the smoking ruins and at the head of his storming column Colonel Dennie, in three hours’ fighting, took the citadel. Dost Mahomed fled, and the British entered Cabul to put a puppet sovereign on the throne.
Cabul was a live volcano where English women gave dances. There were cricket matches, theatricals, sports. The governor-general in camp gave a state dinner in honor of Major Pottinger, who had come in from the siege of Herat. During the reception of the guests a shabby Afghan watched, leaning against a door-post, and the court officials were about to remove this intruder when the governor-general approached leading his sister. “Let me present you,” said Lord Auckland, “to Eldred Pottinger, the hero of Herat.” This shabby Afghan was the guest of honor, but nobody would listen to his warnings, or to the warnings of Sir Alexander Burnes, assistant resident. Only the two spies knew what was to come. Then the volcano blew up.
Burnes had a brother staying with him in Cabul, also his military secretary; and when the mob, savage, excited, bent on massacre, swarmed round his house he spoke to them from the balcony. While he talked Lieutenant Broadfoot fell at his side, struck by a ball in the chest. The stables were on fire, the mob filled his garden. He offered to pay then in cash for his brother’s life and his own, so a Cashmiri volunteered to save them in disguise. They put on native clothes, they slipped into the garden, and then their guide shouted, “This is Sekunder Burnes!” The two brothers were cut to pieces.
Pottinger was political agent at Kohistan to the northward, and when the whole Afghan nation rose in revolt his fort was so sorely beset that he and his retinue stole away in the dark, joining a Ghoorka regiment. But the regiment was also beset, and its water supply cut off. Pottinger fought the guns; the men repelled attacks by night and day until worn out; dying of thirst in an intolerable agony the regiment broke, scattering into the hills. Only a few men rallied round Pottinger to fight through to Cabul, and he was fearfully wounded, unable to command. Of his staff and the Ghoorka regiment only five men were alive when they entered Cabul.
Our officer commanding at Cabul was not in good health, but his death was unfortunately delayed while the Afghans murdered men, women and children, and the British troops, for lack of a leader, funked. Envoys waited on Akbar Khan, and were murdered. The few officers who kept their heads were without authority, blocked at every turn by cowards, by incompetents. Then the council of war made treaty with Akbar, giving him all the guns except six, all the treasure, three officers as hostages, bills drawn on India for forty thousand rupees, the honor of their country, everything for safe conduct in their disgrace. Dying of cold and hunger, the force marched into the Khoord-Cabul Pass, and at the end of three days the married officers were surrendered with their wives and children. Of the sixteen thousand men three-fourths were dead when the officer commanding and the gallant Brigadier Skelton were given up as hostages to Akbar. The survivors pushed on through the Jugduluk Pass, which the Afghans had barricaded, and there was the final massacre. Of the whole army, one man, Doctor Brydon, on a starved pony, sinking with exhaustion, rode in through the gates of Fort Jellalabad.
The captured general had sent orders for the retreat of the Jellalabad garrison through the awful defiles of the Khyber Pass in face of a hostile army, and in the dead of winter; but General Sale, commanding, was not such a fool. For three months he had worked his men to desperation rebuilding the fortress, and now when he saw the white tents of Akbar’s camp he was prepared for a siege. That day an earthquake razed the whole fortress into a heap of ruins, but the garrison rebuilt the walls. Then they sallied and, led by Henry Havelock, assaulted Akbar’s camp, smashed his army to flying fragments, captured his guns, baggage, standards, ammunition and food. Nine days later the bands of the garrison marched out to meet a relieving army from India. They were playing an old tune, Oh, but ye’ve been lang o’ comin’.
Meanwhile the British prisoners, well treated, were hurried from fort to fort, with some idea of holding them for sale at so much a slave, until they managed to bribe an Afghan chief. The bribed man led a revolt against Akbar, and one chief after another joined him, swearing on the Koran allegiance to Eldred Pottinger. When Akbar fell, Pottinger marched as leader of the revolted chiefs on the way to Cabul. One day, as the ladies and children were resting in an old fort for shelter during the great heat of the afternoon, they heard the tramp of horsemen, and in the dead silence of a joy and gratitude too great for utterance, received the relieving force.
XII
A. D. 1842 A YEAR’S ADVENTURES
A thousand adventures are taking place every day, all at once in the several continents and the many seas. A few are reported, many are noted in the private journals of adventurers, most of them are just taken as a matter of course in the day’s work, but nobody has ever attempted to make a picture of all the world’s adventures for a day or a year.
Let us make magic. Any date will do, or any year. Here for instance is a date—the twelfth of September, 1842—that will serve our purpose as well as any other.
In Afghanistan a British force of twenty-six thousand people had perished, an army of vengeance had marched to the rescue of Major Pottinger, Lady Sale, Lady McNaughton and other captives held by the Afghan chiefs. On September twelfth they were rescued.
In China the people had refused to buy our Indian opium, so we carefully and methodically bombarded all Chinese seaports until she consented to open them to foreign trade. Then Major Pottinger’s uncle, Sir Henry, made a treaty which the Chinese emperor signed on September eighth.
In the Malacca Straits Captain Henry Keppel of H. M. S. Dido was busy smashing up pirates.
In Tahiti poor little Queen Pomaré, being in childbed, was so bullied by the French admiral that she surrendered her kingdom to France on September ninth. Next morning her child was born, but her kingdom was gone forever.
In South Africa Captain Smith made a disgraceful attack upon the Boers at Port Natal, and on June twenty-sixth they got a tremendous thrashing which put an end to the republic of Natalia. In September they began to settle down as British subjects, not at all content.
Norfolk Island is a scrap of paradise, about six miles by four, lying nine hundred miles from Sydney, in Australia. In 1842 it was a convict settlement, and on June twenty-first the brig Governor Philip was to sail for Sydney, having landed her stores at the island. During the night she stood off and on, and two prisoners coming on deck at dawn for a breath of air noticed that discipline seemed slack, although a couple of drowsy sentries guarded their hatchway. Within a few minutes the prisoners were all on deck. One sentry was disarmed, the other thrown overboard. Two soldiers off duty had a scuffle with the mutineers, but one took refuge in the main chains, while the other was drowned trying to swim ashore. The sergeant in charge ran on deck and shot a mutineer before he was knocked over, stunned. As to the seamen, they ran into the forecastle.
The prisoners had now control of the ship, but none of them knew how to handle their prize, so they loosed a couple of sailors and made them help. Woolfe, one of the convicts, then rescued a soldier who was swimming alongside. The officers and soldiers aft were firing through the grated hatches and wounded several convicts, until they were allayed with a kettle of boiling water. So far the mutiny had gone off very nicely, but now the captain, perched on the cabin table, fired through the woodwork at a point where he thought a man was standing. By luck the bullet went through the ringleader’s mouth and blew out the back of his head, whereon a panic seized the mutineers, who fled below hatches. The sailor at the wheel released the captain, and the afterguard recaptured the ship. One mutineer had his head blown off, and the rest surrendered. The whole deck was littered with the wounded and the dying and the dead, and there were not many convicts left. In the trial at Sydney, Wheelan, who proved innocent, was spared, also Woolfe for saving a soldier’s life, but four were hanged, meeting their fate like men.
It was in August that the sultan of Borneo confirmed Mr. James Brooke as rajah of Sarawak, and the new king was extremely busy executing robbers, rescuing shipwrecked mariners from slavery, reopening old mines for diamonds, gold and manganese. “I breathe peace and comfort to all who obey,” so he wrote to his mother, “and wrath and fury to the evil-doer.”
* * * * *
Captain Ross was in the Antarctic, coasting the great ice barrier. Last year he had given to two tall volcanoes the names of his ships, the Erebus and Terror. This year on March twelfth in a terrific gale with blinding snow at midnight the two ships tried to get shelter under the lee of an iceberg, but the Terror rammed the Erebus so that her bow-sprit, fore topmast and a lot of smaller spars were carried away, and she was jammed against the wall of the berg totally disabled. She could not make sail and had no room to wear round, so she sailed out backward, one of the grandest feats of seamanship on record; then, clear of the danger, steered between two bergs, her yard-arms almost scraping both of them, until she gained the smoother water to leeward, where she found her consort.
* * * * *
In Canada the British governor set up a friendship between the French Canadians and our government which has lasted ever since. That was on the eighth of September, but on the fifth another British dignitary sailed for home, having generously given a large slice of Canada to the United States.
* * * * *
In Hayti there was an earthquake, in Brazil a revolution; in Jamaica a storm on the tenth which wrecked H. M. S. Spitfire, and in the western states Mount Saint Helen’s gave a fine volcanic eruption.
Northern Mexico was invaded by two filibustering expeditions from the republic of Texas, and both were captured by the Mexicans. There were eight hundred fifty prisoners, some murdered for fun, the rest marched through Mexico exposed to all sorts of cruelty and insult before they were lodged in pestilence-ridden jails. Captain Edwin Cameron and his people on the way to prison overpowered the escort and fled to the mountains, whence some of them escaped to Texas. But the leader and most of his men being captured, President Santa Ana arranged that they should draw from a bag of beans, those who got black beans to be shot. Cameron drew a white bean, but was shot all the same. One youth, G. B. Crittenden, drew a white bean, but gave it to a comrade saying, “You have a wife and children; I haven’t, and I can afford to risk another chance.” Again he drew white and lived to be a general in the great Civil War.
General Green’s party escaped by tunneling their way out of the castle of Perot, but most of the prisoners perished in prison of hunger and disease. The British and American ministers at the City of Mexico won the release of the few who were left alive.
* * * * *
In 1842 Sir James Simpson, Governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, with his bell-topper hat and his band, came by canoe across the northern wilds to the Pacific Coast. From San Francisco he sailed for Honolulu in the Sandwich Islands, where the company had a large establishment under Sir John Petty. On April sixteenth he arrived in the H. B. ship Cowlitz at the capital of Russian America. “Of all the drunken as well as the dirty places,” says he, “that I had ever visited, New Archangel was the worst. On the holidays in particular, of which, Sundays included, there are one hundred sixty-five in the year, men, women and even children were to be seen staggering about in all directions drunk.” Simpson thought all the world, though, of the Russian bishop.
The Hudson’s Bay Company had a lease from the Russians of all the fur-trading forts of Southeastern Alaska, and one of these was the Redoubt Saint Diogenes. There Simpson found a flag of distress, gates barred, sentries on the bastions and two thousand Indians besieging the fort. Five days ago the officer commanding, Mr. McLoughlin, had made all hands drunk and ran about saying he was going to be killed. So one of the voyagers leveled a rifle and shot him dead. On the whole the place was not well managed.
From New Archangel (Sitka) the Russian Lieutenant Zagoskin sailed in June for the Redoubt Saint Michael on the coast of Behring Sea. Smallpox had wiped out all the local Eskimos, so the Russian could get no guide for the first attempt to explore the river Yukon. A day’s march south he was entertained at an Eskimo camp where there was a feast, and the throwing of little bladders into the bay in honor of Ug-iak, spirit of the sea. On December ninth Zagoskin started inland—“A driving snow-storm set in blinding my eyes ... a blade of grass seventy feet distant had the appearance of a shrub, and sloping valleys looked like lakes with high banks, the illusion vanishing upon nearer approach. At midnight a terrible snow-storm began, and in the short space of ten minutes covered men, dogs and sledges, making a perfect hill above them. We sat at the foot of a hill with the wind from the opposite side and our feet drawn under us to prevent them from freezing, and covered with our parkas. When we were covered up by the snow we made holes with sticks through to the open air. In a short time the warmth of the breath and perspiration melted the snow, so that a man-like cave was formed about each individual.” So they continued for five hours, calling to one another to keep awake, for in that intense cold to sleep was death. There we may as well leave them, before we catch cold from the draft.
* * * * *
Fremont was exploring from the Mississippi Valley a route for emigrants to Oregon, and in that journey climbed the Rocky Mountains to plant Old Glory on one of the highest peaks. He was a very fine explorer, and not long afterward conquered the Mexican state of California, completing the outline of the modern United States. But Fremont’s guide will be remembered long after Fremont is forgotten, for he was the greatest of American frontiersmen, the ideal of modern chivalry, Kit Carson. Of course he must have a chapter to himself.
XIII
A.D. 1843 KIT CARSON
Once Colonel Inman, an old frontiersman, bought a newspaper which had a full page picture of Kit Carson. The hero stood in a forest, a gigantic figure in a buckskin suit, heavily armed, embracing a rescued heroine, while at his feet sprawled six slain Indian braves, his latest victims.
“What do you think of this?” said the colonel handing the picture to a delicate little man, who wiped his spectacles, studied the work of art, and replied in a gentle drawl, “That may be true, but I hain’t got no recollection of it.” And so Kit Carson handed the picture back.
He stood five feet six, and looked frail, but his countrymen, and all the boys of all the world think of this mighty frontiersman as a giant.
At seventeen he was a remarkably green and innocent boy for his years, his home a log cabin on the Missouri frontier. Past the door ran the trail to the west where trappers went by in buckskin, traders among the Indians, and soldiers for the savage wars of the plains.
One day came Colonel S. Vrain, agent of a big fur-trading company, with his long train of wagons hitting the Santa Fe trail. Kit got a job with that train, to herd spare stock, hunt bison, mount guard and fight Indians. They were three weeks out in camp when half a dozen Pawnee Indians charged, yelling and waving robes to stampede the herd, but a brisk fusillade from the white men sent them scampering back over the sky-line. Next day, after a sixteen mile march the outfit corraled their wagons for defense at the foot of Pawnee Rock beside the Arkansas River. “I had not slept any of the night before,” says Kit, “for I stayed awake watching to get a shot at the Pawnees that tried to stampede our animals, expecting they would return; and I hadn’t caught a wink all day, as I was out buffalo hunting, so I was awfully tired and sleepy when we arrived at Pawnee Rock that evening, and when I was posted at my place at night, I must have gone to sleep leaning against the rocks; at any rate, I was wide enough awake when the cry of Indians was given by one of the guard. I had picketed my mule about twenty paces from where I stood, and I presume he had been lying down; all I remember is, that the first thing I saw after the alarm was something rising up out of the grass, which I thought was an Indian. I pulled the trigger; it was a center shot, and I don’t believe the mule ever kicked after he was hit!”
At daylight the Pawnees attacked in earnest and the fight lasted nearly three days, the mule teams being shut in the corral without food or water. At midnight of the second day they hitched up, fighting their way for thirteen miles, then got into bad trouble fording Pawnee Fork while the Indians poured lead and arrows into the teams until the colonel and Kit Carson led a terrific charge which dispersed the enemy. That fight cost the train four killed and seven wounded.
It was during this first trip that Carson saved the life of a wounded teamster by cutting off his arm. With a razor he cut the flesh, with a saw got through the bone, and with a white-hot king-bolt seared the wound, stopping the flow of blood.
In 1835 Carson was hunter for Bent’s Fort, keeping the garrison of forty men supplied with buffalo meat. Once he was out hunting with six others and they made their camp tired out. “I saw,” says Kit, “two big wolves sneaking about, one of them quite close to us. Gordon, one of my men, wanted to fire his rifle at it, but I would not let him for fear he would hit a dog. I admit that I had a sort of idea that these wolves might be Indians; but when I noticed one of them turn short around and heard the clashing of his teeth as he rushed at one of the dogs, I felt easy then, and was certain that they were wolves sure enough. But the red devil fooled me after all, for he had two dried buffalo bones in his hands under the wolf-skin and he rattled them together every time he turned to make a dash at the dogs! Well, by and by we all dozed off, and it wasn’t long before I was suddenly aroused by a noise and a big blaze. I rushed out the first thing for our mules and held them. If the savages had been at all smart, they could have killed us in a trice, but they ran as soon as they fired at us. They killed one of my men, putting five shots in his body and eight in his buffalo robe. The Indians were a band of snakes, and found us by sheer accident. They endeavored to ambush us the next morning, but we got wind of their little game and killed three of them, including the chief.”
It was in his eight years as hunter for Bent’s Fort that Kit learned to know the Indians, visiting their camps to smoke with the chiefs and play with the little boys. When the Sioux nation invaded the Comanche and Arrapaho hunting-grounds he persuaded them to go north, and so averted war.
In 1842 when he was scout to Fremont, he went buffalo hunting to get meat for the command. One day he was cutting up a beast newly killed when he left his work in pursuit of a large bull that came rushing past him. His horse was too much blown to run well, and when at last he got near enough to fire, things began to happen all at once. The bullet hitting too low enraged the bison just as the horse, stepping into a prairie-dog hole, shot Kit some fifteen feet through the air. Instead of Kit hunting bison, Mr. Buffalo hunted Kit, who ran for all he was worth. So they came to the Arkansas River where Kit dived while the bison stayed on the bank to hook him when he landed. But while the bison gave Kit a swimming lesson, one of the hunters made an unfair attack from behind, killing the animal. So Kit crawled out and skinned his enemy.
One of his great hunting feats was the killing of five buffalo with only four bullets. Being short of lead he had to cut out the ball from number four, then catch up, and shoot number five.
On another hunt, chasing a cow bison down a steep hill, he fired just as the animal took a flying leap, so that the carcass fell, not to the ground, but spiked on a small cedar. The Indians persuaded him to leave that cow impaled upon a tree-top because it was big magic; but to people who do not know the shrubs of the southwestern desert, it must sound like a first-class lie.
One night as the expedition lay in camp, far up among the mountains, Fremont sat for hours reading some letters just arrived from home, then fell asleep to dream of his young wife. Presently a soft sound, rather like the blow of an ax made Kit start broad awake, to find Indians in camp. They fled, but two of the white men were lying dead in their blankets, and the noise that awakened Carson was the blow of a tomahawk braining his own chum, the voyageur, La Jeunesse.
In the following year Carson was serving as hunter to a caravan westward bound across the plains, when he met Captain Cooke in camp, with four squadrons of United States Cavalry. The captain told him that following on the trail was a caravan belonging to a wealthy Mexican and so richly loaded that a hundred riders had been hired as guards.
Presently the Mexican train came up and the majordomo offered Carson three hundred dollars if he would ride to the Mexican governor at Santa Fe and ask him for an escort of troops from the point where they entered New Mexico. Kit, who was hard up, gladly accepted the cash, and rode to Bent’s Fort. There he had news that the Utes were on the war-path, but Mr. Bent lent him the swiftest horse in the stables. Kit walked, leading the horse by the rein, to have him perfectly fresh in case there was need for flight. He reached the Ute village, hid, and passed the place at night without being seen. So he reached Taos, his own home in New Mexico, whence the alcalde sent his message to the governor of the state at Santa Fe.
The governor had already sent a hundred riders but these had been caught and wiped out by a force of Texans, only one escaping, who, during the heat of the fight, caught a saddled Texan pony and rode off.
Meanwhile the governor—Armijo—sent his reply for Carson to carry to the caravan. He said he was marching with a large force, and he did so. But when the survivor of the lost hundred rode into Armijo’s camp with his bad news, the whole outfit rolled their tails for home.
Carson, with the governor’s letter, and the news of plentiful trouble, reached the Mexican caravan, which decided not to leave the protecting American cavalry camped on the boundary-line. What with Texan raiders, border ruffians, Utes, Apaches, Comanches, and other little drawbacks, the caravan trade on the Santa Fe trail was never dull for a moment.
During these years one finds Kit Carson’s tracks all over the West about as hard to follow as those of a flea in a blanket.
Here, for example, is a description of the American army of the Bear Flag republic seizing California in 1846. “A vast cloud of dust appeared first, and thence, a long file, emerged this wildest wild party. Fremont rode ahead—a spare, active-looking man, with such an eye! He was dressed in a blouse and leggings and wore a felt hat. After him came five Delaware Indians, who were his body-guard, and have been with him through all his wanderings; they had charge of the baggage horses. The rest, many of them blacker than the Indians, rode two and two, the rifle held in one hand across the pommel of the saddle. Thirty-nine of them there are his regular men, the rest are loafers picked up lately; his original men are principally backwoodsmen from the state of Tennessee, and the banks of the upper waters of the Missouri.... The dress of these men was principally a long loose coat of deerskin, tied with thongs in front; trousers of the same, which when wet through, they take off, scrape well inside with a knife, and put on as soon as dry. The saddles were of various fashions, though these and a large drove of horses, and a brass field gun, were things they had picked up about California. They are allowed no liquor; this, no doubt, has much to do with their good conduct; and the discipline, too, is very strict.”
One of these men was Kit Carson, sent off in October to Washington on the Atlantic, three thousand miles away, with news that California was conquered for the United States, by a party of sixty men. In New Mexico, Kit met General Kearney, and told him that the Californians were a pack of cowards. So the general sent back his troops, marching on with only one hundred dragoons. But the Californians were not cowards, they had risen against the American invasion, they were fighting magnificently, and Fremont had rather a bad time before he completed the conquest.
It was during the Californian campaign that Carson made his famous ride, the greatest feat of horsemanship the world has ever known. As a despatch rider, he made his way through the hostile tribes, and terrific deserts from the Missouri to California and back, a total of four thousand, four hundred miles. But while he rested in California, before he set out on the return, he joined a party of Californian gentlemen on a trip up the coast from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Two of the six men had a remount each, but four of them rode the six hundred miles without change of horses in six days. Add that, and the return to Kit Carson’s journey, and it makes a total of five thousand, six hundred miles. So for distance, he beats world records by one hundred miles, at a speed beyond all comparison, and in face of difficulties past all parallel.
For some of us old western reprobates who were cow hands, despising a sheep man more than anything else alive, it is very disconcerting to know that Carson went into that business. He became a partner of his lifelong friend, Maxwell, whose rancho in New Mexico was very like a castle of the Middle Ages. The dinner service was of massive silver, but the guests bedded down with a cowhide on the floor. New Mexico was a conquered country owned by the United States, at intervals between the Mexican revolts, when Kit settled down as a rancher. The words settled down, mean that he served as a colonel of volunteers against the Mexicans, and spent the rest of the time fighting Apaches, the most ferocious of all savages.
Near Santa Fe, lived Mr. White and his son who fell in defense of their ranch, having killed three Apaches, while the women and children of the household met with a much worse fate than that of death. The settlers refused to march in pursuit until Carson arrived, but by mistake he was not given command, a Frenchman having been chosen as leader.
The retreat of the savages was far away in the mountains, and well fortified. The only chance of saving the women and children was to rush this place before there was time to kill them, and Carson dashed in with a yell, expecting all hands to follow. So he found himself alone, surrounded by the Apaches, and as they rushed, he rode, throwing himself on the off side of his horse, almost concealed behind its neck. Six arrows struck his horse, and one bullet lodged in his coat before he was out of range. He cursed his Mexicans, he put them to shame, he persuaded them to fight, then led a gallant charge, killing five Indians as they fled. The delay had given them time to murder the women and children.
Once, after his camp had been attacked by Indians, Carson discovered that the sentry failed to give an alarm because he was asleep. The Indian punishment followed, and the soldier was made for one day to wear the dress of a squaw.
Kit Carson
We must pass by Kit’s capture of a gang of thirty-five desperadoes for the sake of a better story. The officer, commanding a detachment of troops on the march, flogged an Indian chief, the result being war. Carson was the first white man to pass, and while the chiefs were deciding how to attack his caravan, he walked alone into the council lodge. So many years were passed since the Cheyennes had seen him that he was not recognized, and nobody suspected that he knew their language, until he made a speech in Cheyenne, introducing himself, recalling ancient friendships, offering all courtesies. As to their special plan for killing the leader of the caravan, and taking his scalp, he claimed that he might have something to say on the point. They parted, Kit to encourage his men, the Indians to waylay the caravan; but from the night camp he despatched a Mexican boy to ride three hundred miles for succor. When the Cheyennes charged the camp at dawn, he ordered them to halt, and walked into the midst of them, explaining the message he had sent, and what their fate would be if the troops found they had molested them. When the Indians found the tracks that proved Kit’s words, they knew they had business elsewhere.
In 1863 Carson was sent with a strong military force to chasten the hearts of the Navajo nation. They had never been conquered, and the flood of Spanish invasion split when it rolled against their terrific sand-rock desert. The land is one of unearthly grandeur where natural rocks take the shapes of towers, temples, palaces and fortresses of mountainous height blazing scarlet in color. In one part a wave of rock like a sea breaker one hundred fifty feet high and one hundred miles in length curls overhanging as though the rushing gray waters had been suddenly struck into ice. On one side lies the hollow Painted Desert, where the sands refract prismatic light like a colossal rainbow, and to the west the walls of the Navajo country drop a sheer mile into the stupendous labyrinth of the Grand Cañon. Such is the country of a race of warriors who ride naked, still armed with bow and arrows, their harness of silver and turquoise....
They are handsome, cleanly, proud and dignified. They till their fields beside the desert springs, and their villages are set in native orchards, while beyond their settlements graze the flocks and herds tended by women herders.
The conquest was a necessity, and it was well that this was entrusted to gentle, just, wise, heroic Carson. He was obliged to destroy their homes, to fell their peach trees, lay waste their crops, and sweep away their stock, starving them to surrender. He herded eleven thousand prisoners down to the lower deserts, where the chiefs crawled to him on their bellies for mercy, but the governor had no mercy, and long after Carson’s death, the hapless people were held in the Boique Redondo. A fourth part of them died of want, and their spirit was utterly broken before they were given back their lands. It is well for them that the Navajo desert is too terrible a region for the white men, and nobody tries to rob their new prosperity.
In one more campaign Colonel Carson was officer commanding and gave a terrible thrashing to the Cheyennes, Kiowas and Comanches.
Then came the end, during a visit to a son of his who lived in Colorado. Early in the morning of May twenty-third, 1868, he was mounting his horse when an artery broke in his neck, and within a few moments he was dead.
But before we part with the frontier hero, it is pleasant to think of him still as a living man whose life is an inspiration and his manhood an example.
Colonel Inman tells of nights at Maxwell’s ranch. “I have sat there,” he writes, “in the long winter evenings when the great room was lighted only by the crackling logs, roaring up the huge throats of its two fireplaces ... watching Maxwell, Kit Carson and half a dozen chiefs silently interchange ideas in the wonderful sign language, until the glimmer of Aurora announced the advent of another day. But not a sound had been uttered during the protracted hours, save an occasional grunt of satisfaction on the part of the Indians, or when we white men exchanged a sentence.”
XIV
A. D. 1845 THE MAN WHO WAS A GOD
John Nicholson was a captain in the twenty-seventh native infantry of India. He was very tall, gaunt, haggard, with a long black beard, a pale face, lips that never smiled, eyes which burned flame and green like those of a tiger when he was angry. He rarely spoke.
Once in a frontier action he was entirely surrounded by the enemy when one of his Afghans saw him in peril from a descending sword. The Pathan sprang forward, received the blow, and died. In a later fight Nicholson saw that warrior’s only son taken prisoner, and carried off by the enemy. Charging alone, cutting a lane with his sword, the officer rescued his man, hoisted him across the saddle, and fought his way back. Ever afterward the young Pathan, whose father had died for Nicholson, rode at the captain’s side, served him at table with a cocked pistol on one hand, slept across the door of his tent. By the time Nicholson’s special service began he had a personal following of two hundred and fifty wild riders who refused either to take any pay or to leave his service.
So was he guarded, but also a sword must be found fit for the hand of the greatest swordsman in India. The Sikh leaders sent out word to their whole nation for such a blade as Nicholson might wear. Hundreds were offered and after long and intricate tests three were found equally perfect, two of the blades being curved, one straight. Captain Nicholson chose the straight sword, which he accepted as a gift from a nation of warriors.
This man was only a most humble Christian, but the Sikhs, observing the perfection of his manhood, supposed him to be divine, and offered that if he would accept their religion they would raise such a temple in his honor as India had never seen. Many a time while he sat at work in his tent, busy with official papers, a dozen Sikh warriors would squat in the doorway silent, watching their god. He took no notice, but sometimes a worshiper, overcome with the conviction of sin, would prostrate himself in adoration. For this offense the punishment was three dozen lashes with the cat, but the victims liked it. “Our god knew that we had been doing wrong, and, therefore, punished us.”
There is no need to explain the Indian mutiny to English readers. It is burned deep into our memory that in 1857 our native army, revolting, seized Delhi, the ancient capital, and set up a descendant of the Great Mogul as emperor of India. The children, the women, the men who were tortured to death, or butchered horribly, were of our own households. Your uncle fought, your cousin fell, my mother escaped. Remember Cawnpore!
Nicholson at Peshawur seized the mails, had the letters translated, then made up his copies into bundles. At a council of officers the colonels of the native regiments swore to the loyalty of their men, but Nicholson dealt out his packages of letters to them all, saying, “Perhaps these will interest you.”
The colonels read, and were chilled with horror at finding in their trusted regiments an abyss of treachery. Their troops were disarmed and disbanded.
To disarm and disperse the native army throughout Northwestern India a flying column was formed of British troops, and Nicholson, although he was only a captain, was sent to take command of the whole force with the rank of brigadier-general. There were old officers under him, yet never a murmur rose from them at that strange promotion.
Presently Sir John Lawrence wrote to Nicholson a fierce official letter, demanding, “Where are you? What are you doing? Send instantly a return of court-martial held upon insurgent natives, with a list of the various punishments inflicted.”
Nicholson’s reply was a sheet of paper bearing his present address, the date, and the words, “The punishment of mutiny is death.” He wanted another regiment to strengthen his column, and demanded the eighty-seventh, which was guarding our women and children in the hills. Lawrence said these men could not be spared. Nicholson wrote back, “When an empire is at stake, women and children cease to be of any consideration whatever.” What chance had they if he failed to hold this district?
General Nicholson
Nicholson’s column on the march was surrounded by his own wild guards riding in couples, so that he, their god, searched the whole country with five hundred eyes. After one heart-breaking night march he drew up his infantry and guns, then rode along the line giving his orders: “In a few minutes you will see two native regiments come round that little temple. If they bring their muskets to the ‘ready,’ fire a volley into them without further orders.”
As the native regiments appeared from behind the little temple, Nicholson rode to meet them. He was seen to speak to them and then they grounded their arms. Two thousand men had surrendered to seven hundred, but had the mutineers resisted Nicholson himself must have perished between two fires. He cared nothing for his life.
Only once did this leader blow mutineers from the guns, and then it was to fire the flesh and blood of nine conspirators into the faces of a doubtful regiment. For the rest he had no powder to waste, but no mercy, and from his awful executions of rebels he would go away to hide in his tent and weep.
He had given orders that no native should be allowed to ride past a white man. One morning before dawn the orderly officer, a lad of nineteen, seeing natives passing him on an elephant, ordered them sharply to dismount and make their salaam. They obeyed—an Afghan prince and his servant, sent by the king of Cabul as an embassy to Captain Nicholson. Next day the ambassador spoke of this humiliation. “No wonder,” he said, “you English conquer India when mere boys obey orders as this one did.”
Nicholson once fought a Bengal tiger, and slew it with one stroke of his sword; but could the English subdue this India in revolt? The mutineers held the impregnable capital old Delhi—and under the red walls lay four thousand men—England’s forlorn hope—which must storm that giant fortress. If they failed the whole population would rise. “If ordained to fail,” said Nicholson, “I hope the British will drag down with them in flames and blood as many of the queen’s enemies as possible.” If they had failed not one man of our race would have escaped to the sea.
Nicholson brought his force to aid in the siege of Delhi, and now he was only a captain under the impotent and hopeless General Wilson. “I have strength yet,” said Nicholson when he was dying, “to shoot him if necessary.”
The batteries of the city walls from the Lahore Gate to the Cashmere Gate were manned by Sikh gunners, loyal to the English, but detained against their will by the mutineers. One night they saw Nicholson without any disguise walk in at the Lahore Gate, and through battery after battery along the walls he went in silence to the Cashmere Gate, by which he left the city. At the sight of that gaunt giant, the man they believed to be an incarnate god, they fell upon their faces. So Captain Nicholson studied the defenses of a besieged stronghold as no man on earth had ever dared before. To him was given command of the assault which blew up the Cashmere Gate, and stormed the Cashmere breach. More than half his men perished, but an entry was made, and in six days the British fought their way through the houses, breaching walls as they went until they stormed the palace, hoisted the flag above the citadel, and proved with the sword who shall be masters of India.
But Nicholson had fallen. Mortally wounded he was carried to his tent, and there lay through the hot days watching the blood-red towers and walls of Delhi, listening to the sounds of the long fight, praying that he might see the end before his passing.
Outside the tent waited his worshipers, clutching at the doctors as they passed to beg for news of him. Once when they were noisy he clutched a pistol from the bedside table, and fired a shot through the canvas. “Oh! Oh!” cried the Pathans, “there is the general’s order.” Then they kept quiet. Only at the end, when his coffin was lowered into the earth, these men who had forsaken their hills to guard him, broke down and flung themselves upon the ground, sobbing like children.
Far off in the hills the Nicholson fakirs—a tribe who had made him their only god—heard of his passing. Two chiefs killed themselves that they might serve him in another world; but the third chief spoke to the people: “Nickelseyn always said that he was a man like as we are, and that he worshiped a God whom he could not see, but who was always near us. Let us learn to worship Nickelseyn’s God.” So the tribe came down from their hills to the Christian teachers at Peshawur, and there were baptized.
XV
A. D. 1853 THE GREAT FILIBUSTER
William Walker, son of a Scotch banker, was born in Tennessee, cantankerous from the time he was whelped. He never swore or drank, or loved anybody, but was rigidly respectable and pure, believed in negro slavery, bristled with points of etiquette and formality, liked squabbling, had a nasty sharp tongue, and a taste for dueling. The little dry man was by turns a doctor, editor and lawyer, and when he wanted to do anything very outrageous, always began by taking counsel’s opinion. He wore a black tail-coat, and a black wisp of necktie even when in 1853 he landed an army of forty-five men to conquer Mexico. His followers were California gold miners dressed in blue shirts, duck trousers, long boots, bowie knives, revolvers and rifles. After he had taken the city of La Paz by assault, called an election and proclaimed himself president of Sonora, he was joined by two or three hundred more of the same breed from San Francisco. These did not think very much of a leader twenty-eight years old, standing five feet six, and weighing only nine stone four, so they merrily conspired to blow him up with gunpowder, and disperse with what plunder they could grab. Mr. Walker shot two, flogged a couple, disarmed the rest without showing any sign of emotion. He could awe the most truculent desperado into abject obedience with one glance of his cool gray eye, and never allowed his men to drink, play cards, or swear. “Our government,” he wrote, “has been formed upon a firm and sure basis.”
The Mexicans and Indians thought otherwise, for while the new president of Sonora marched northward, they gathered in hosts and hung like wolves in the rear of the column, cutting off stragglers, who were slowly tortured to death. Twice they dared an actual attack, but Walker’s grim strategies, and the awful rifles of despairing men, cut them to pieces. So the march went on through hundreds of miles of blazing hot desert, where the filibusters dropped with thirst, and blew their own brains out rather than be captured. Only thirty-four men were left when they reached the United States boundary, the president of Sonora, in a boot and a shoe, his cabinet in rags, his army and navy bloody, with dried wounds, gaunt, starving, but too terrible for the Mexican forces to molest. The filibusters surrendered to the United States garrison as prisoners of war.
Just a year later, with six of these veterans, and forty-eight other Californians, Walker landed on the coast of Nicaragua. This happy republic was blessed at the time with two rival presidents, and the one who got Walker’s help very soon had possession of the country. As hero of several brilliant engagements, Walker was made commander-in-chief, and at the next election chosen by the people themselves as president. He had now a thousand Americans in his following, and when the native statesmen and generals proved treacherous, they were promptly shot. Walker’s camp of wild desperadoes was like a Sunday-school, his government the cleanest ever known in Central America, and his dignity all prickles, hard to approach. He depended for existence on the services of Vanderbilt’s steamship lines, but seized their warehouse for cheating. He was surrounded by four hostile republics, Costa Rica, San Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, and insulted them all. He suspended diplomatic relations with the United States, demanded for his one schooner-of-war salutes from the British navy, and had no sense of humor whatsoever. Thousands of brave men died for this prim little lawyer, and tens of thousands fell by pestilence and battle in his wars, but with all his sweet unselfishness, his purity, and his valor, poor Walker was a prig. So the malcontents of Nicaragua, and the republics from Mexico to Peru, joined the steamship company, the United States and Great Britain to wipe out his hapless government.
The armies of four republics were closing in on Walker’s capital, the city of Granada. He marched out to storm the allies perched on an impregnable volcano, and was carrying his last charge to a victorious issue, when news reached him that Zavala with eight hundred men had jumped on Granada. He forsook his victory and rushed for the capital city.
There were only one hundred and fifty invalids and sick in the Granada garrison to man the church, armory and hospital against Zavala, but the women loaded rifles for the wounded and after twenty-two hours of ghastly carnage, the enemy were thrown out of the city. They fell back to lie in Walker’s path as he came to the rescue. Walker saw the trap, carried it with a charge, drove Zavala back into the city, broke him between two fires, then sent a detachment to intercept his flight. In this double battle, fighting eight times his own force, Walker killed half the allied army.
But the pressure of several invasions at once was making it impossible for Walker to keep his communication open with the sea while he held his capital. Granada, the most beautiful of all Central American cities, must be abandoned, and, lest the enemy win the place, it must be destroyed. So Walker withdrew his sick men to an island in the big Lake Nicaragua; while Henningsen, an Englishman, his second in command, burned and abandoned the capital.
But now, while the city burst into flames, and the smoke went up as from a volcano, the American garrison broke loose, rifled the liquor stores and lay drunk in the blazing streets, so the allied army swooped down, cutting off the retreat to the lake. Henningsen, veteran of the Carlist and Hungarian revolts, a knight errant of lost causes, took three weeks to fight his way three miles, before Walker could cover his embarkment on the lake. There had been four hundred men in the garrison, but only one hundred and fifty answered the roll-call in their refuge on the Isle of Omotepe. In the plaza of the capital city they had planted a spear, and on the spear hung a rawhide with this inscription:—
“Here was Granada!”
In taking that heap of blackened ruins four thousand out of six thousand of the allies had perished; but even they were more fortunate than a Costa Rican army of invasion, which killed fifty of the filibusters, at a cost of ten thousand men slain by war and pestilence. It always worked out that the killing of one filibuster cost on the average eight of his adversaries.
Four months followed of confused fighting, in which the Americans slowly lost ground, until at last they were besieged in the town of Rivas, melting the church bells for cannon-balls, dying at their posts of starvation. The neighboring town of San Jorge was held by two thousand Costa Ricans, and these Walker attempted to dislodge. His final charge was made with fifteen men into the heart of the town. No valor could win against such odds, and the orderly retreat began on Rivas. Two hundred men lay in ambush to take Walker at a planter’s house by the wayside, and as he rode wearily at the head of his men they opened fire from cover at a range of fifteen yards. Walker reined in his horse, fired six revolver-shots into the windows, then rode on quietly erect while the storm of lead raged about him, and saddle after saddle was emptied. A week afterward the allies assaulted Rivas, but left six hundred men dead in the field, so terrific was the fire from the ramparts.
It was in these days that a British naval officer came under flag of truce from the coast to treat for Walker’s surrender.
“I presume, sir,” was the filibuster’s greeting, “that you have come to apologize for the outrage offered to my flag, and to the commander of the Nicaraguan schooner-of-war Granada.”
“If they had another schooner,” said the Englishman afterward, “I believe they would have declared war on Great Britain.”
Then the United States navy treated with this peppery little lawyer, and on the first of May, 1857, he grudgingly consented to being rescued.
During his four years’ fight for empire, Walker had enlisted three thousand five hundred Americans—and the proportion of wounds was one hundred and thirty-seven for every hundred men. A thousand fell. The allied republics had twenty-one thousand soldiers and ten thousand Indians—and lost fifteen thousand killed.
Two years later, Walker set out again with a hundred men to conquer Central America, in defiance of the British and United States squadrons, sent to catch him, and in the teeth of five armed republics. He was captured by the British, shot by Spanish Americans upon a sea beach in Honduras, and so perished, fearless to the end.
XVI
A. D. 1857 BUFFALO BILL
The Mormons are a sect of Christians with some queer ideas, for they drink no liquor, hold all their property in common, stamp out any member who dares to think or work for himself, and believe that the more wives a man has the merrier he will be. The women, so far as I met them are like fat cows, the men a slovenly lot, and not too honest, but they are hard workers and first-rate pioneers.
Because they made themselves unpopular they were persecuted, and fled from the United States into the desert beside the Great Salt Lake. There they got water from the mountain streams and made their land a garden. They only wanted to be left alone in peace, but that was a poor excuse for slaughtering emigrants. Murdering women and children is not in good taste.
The government sent an army to attend to these saints, but the soldiers wanted food to eat, and the Mormons would not sell, so provisions had to be sent a thousand miles across the wilderness to save the starving troops. So we come to the herd of beef cattle which in May, 1857, was drifting from the Missouri River, and to the drovers’ camp beside the banks of the Platte.
A party of red Indians on the war-path found that herd and camp; they scalped the herders on guard, stampeded the cattle and rushed the camp, so that the white men were driven to cover under the river bank. Keeping the Indians at bay with their rifles, the party marched for the settlements wading, sometimes swimming, while they pushed a raft that carried a wounded man. Always a rear guard kept the Indians from coming too near. And so the night fell.
“I, being the youngest and smallest,” says one of them, “had fallen behind the others.... When I happened to look up to the moonlit sky, and saw the plumed head of an Indian peeping over the bank.... I instantly aimed my gun at his head, and fired. The report rang out sharp and loud in the night air, and was immediately followed by an Indian whoop; and the next moment about six feet of dead Indian came tumbling into the river. I was not only overcome with astonishment, but was badly scared, as I could hardly realize what I had done.”
Back came Frank McCarthy, the leader, with all his men. “Who fired that shot?”
“I did.”
“Yes, and little Billy has killed an Indian stone-dead—too dead to skin!”
At the age of nine Billy Cody had taken the war-path.
In those days the army had no luck. When the government sent a herd of cattle the Indians got the beef, and the great big train of seventy-five wagons might just as well have been addressed to the Mormons, who burned the transport, stole the draft oxen and turned the teamsters, including little Billy, loose in the mountains, where they came nigh starving. The boy was too thin to cast a shadow when in the spring he set out homeward across the plains with two returning trains.
One day these trains were fifteen miles apart when Simpson, the wagon boss, with George Woods, a teamster, and Billy Cody, set off riding mules from the rear outfit to catch up the teams in front. They were midway when a war party of Indians charged at full gallop, surrounding them, but Simpson shot the three mules and used their carcasses to make a triangular fort. The three whites, each with a rifle and a brace of revolvers were more than a match for men with bows and arrows, and the Indians lost so heavily that they retreated out of range. That gave the fort time to reload, but the Indians charged again, and this time Woods got an arrow in the shoulder. Once more the Indians retired to consult, while Simpson drew the arrow from Woods’ shoulder, plugging the hole with a quid of chewing tobacco. A third time the Indians charged, trying to ride down the stockade, but they lost a man and a horse. Four warriors had fallen now in this battle with two men and a little boy, but the Indians are a painstaking, persevering race, so they waited until nightfall and set the grass on fire. But the whites had been busy with knives scooping a hole from whence the loose earth made a breastwork over the dead mules, so that the flames could not reach them, and they had good cover to shoot from when the Indians charged through the smoke. After that both sides had a sleep, and at dawn they were fresh for a grand charge, handsomely repulsed. The redskins sat down in a ring to starve the white men out, and great was their disappointment when Simpson’s rear train of wagons marched to the rescue. The red men did not stay to pick flowers.
It seems like lying to state that at the age of twelve Billy Cody began to take rank among the world’s great horsemen, and yet he rode on the pony express, which closed in 1861, his fourteenth year.
The trail from the Missouri over the plains, the deserts and the mountains into California was about two thousand miles through a country infested with gangs of professional robbers and hostile Indian tribes. The gait of the riders averaged twelve miles an hour, which means a gallop, to allow for the slow work in mountain passes. There were one hundred ninety stations at which the riders changed ponies without breaking their run, and each must be fit and able for one hundred miles a day in time of need. Pony Bob afterward had contracts by which he rode one hundred miles a day for a year.
Now, none of the famous riders of history, like Charles XII, of Sweden; Dick, King of Natal, or Dick Turpin, of England, made records to beat the men of the pony express, and in that service Billy was counted a hero. He is outclassed by the Cossack Lieutenant Peschkov, who rode one pony at twenty-eight miles a day the length of the Russian empire, from Vladivostok to St. Petersburg, and by Kit Carson who with one horse rode six hundred miles in six days. There are branches of horsemanship, too, in which he would have been proud to take lessons from Lord Lonsdale, or Evelyn French, but Cody is, as far as I have seen, of all white men incomparable for grace, for beauty of movement, among the horsemen of the modern world.
But to turn back to the days of the boy rider.
“One day,” he writes, “when I galloped into my home station I found that the rider who was expected to take the trip out on my arrival had gotten into a drunken row the night before, and had been killed.... I pushed on ... entering every relay station on time, and accomplished the round trip of three hundred twenty-two miles back to Red Buttes without a single mishap, and on time. This stands on the record as being the longest pony express journey ever made.”
One of the station agents has a story to tell of this ride, made without sleep, and with halts of only a few minutes for meals. News had leaked out of a large sum of money to be shipped by the express, and Cody, expecting robbers, rolled the treasure in his saddle blanket, filling the official pouches with rubbish. At the best place for an ambush two men stepped out on to the trail, halting him with their muskets. As he explained, the pouches were full of rubbish, but the road agents knew better. “Mark my words,” he said as he unstrapped, “you’ll hang for this.”
“We’ll take chances on that, Bill.”
“If you will have them, take them!” With that he hurled the pouches, and as robber number one turned to pick them up, robber number two had his gun-arm shattered with the boy’s revolver-shot. Then with a yell he rode down the stooping man, and spurring hard, got out of range unhurt. He had saved the treasure, and afterward both robbers were hanged by vigilantes.
Once far down a valley ahead Cody saw a dark object above a boulder directly on his trail, and when it disappeared he knew he was caught in an ambush. Just as he came into range he swerved wide to the right, and at once a rifle smoked from behind the rock. Two Indians afoot ran for their ponies while a dozen mounted warriors broke from the timbered edge of the valley, racing to cut him off. One of these had a war bonnet of eagle plumes, the badge of a chief, and his horse, being the swiftest, drew ahead. All the Indians were firing, but the chief raced Cody to head him off at a narrow pass of the valley. The boy was slightly ahead, and when the chief saw that the white rider would have about thirty yards to spare he fitted an arrow, drawing for the shot. But Cody, swinging round in the saddle, lashed out his revolver, and the chief, clutching at the air, fell, rolling over like a ball as he struck the ground. At the chief’s death-cry a shower of arrows from the rear whizzed round the boy, one slightly wounding his pony who, spurred by the pain, galloped clear, leaving the Indians astern in a ten mile race to the next relay.
After what seems to the reader a long life of adventure, Mr. Cody had just reached the age of twenty-two when a series of wars broke out with the Indian tribes, and he was attached to the troops as a scout. A number of Pawnee Indians who thought nothing of this white man, were also serving. They were better trackers, better interpreters and thought themselves better hunters. One day a party of twenty had been running buffalo, and made a bag of thirty-two head when Cody got leave to attack a herd by himself. Mounted on his famous pony Buckskin Joe he made a bag of thirty-six head on a half-mile run, and his name was Buffalo Bill from that time onward.
That summer he led a squadron of cavalry that attacked six hundred Sioux, and in that fight against overwhelming odds he brought down a chief at a range of four hundred yards, in those days a very long shot. His victim proved to be Tall Bull, one of the great war leaders of the Sioux. The widow of Tall Bull was proud that her husband had been killed by so famous a warrior as Prairie Chief, for that was Cody’s name among the Indians.
There is one very nice story about the Pawnee scouts. A new general had taken command who must have all sorts of etiquette proper to soldiers. It was all very well for the white sentries to call at intervals of the night from post to post: “Post Number One, nine o’clock, all’s well!” “Post Number Two, etc.”
But when the Pawnee sentries called, “Go to hell, I don’t care!” well, the practise had to be stopped.
Of Buffalo Bill’s adventures in these wars the plain record would only take one large volume, but he was scouting in company with Texas Jack, John Nelson, Belden, the White Chief, and so many other famous frontier heroes, each needing at least one book volume, that I must give the story up as a bad job. At the end of the Sioux campaign Buffalo Bill was chief of scouts with the rank of colonel.
Colonel Cody
(“Buffalo Bill”)
In 1876, General Custer, with a force of nearly four hundred cavalry, perished in an attack on the Sioux, and the only survivor was his pet boy scout, Billy Jackson, who got away at night disguised as an Indian. Long afterward Billy, who was one of God’s own gentlemen, told me that story while we sat on a grassy hillside watching a great festival of the Blackfeet nation.
After the battle in which Custer—the Sun Child—fell, the big Sioux army scattered, but a section of it was rounded up by a force under the guidance of Buffalo Bill.
“One of the Indians,” he says, “who was handsomely decorated with all the ornaments usually worn by a war chief ... sang out to me ‘I know you, Prairie Chief; if you want to fight come ahead and fight me!’
“The chief was riding his horse back and forth in front of his men, as if to banter me, and I accepted the challenge. I galloped toward him for fifty yards and he advanced toward me about the same distance, both of us riding at full speed, and then when we were only about thirty yards apart I raised my rifle and fired. His horse fell to the ground, having been killed by my bullet. Almost at the same instant my horse went down, having stepped in a gopher-hole. The fall did not hurt me much, and I instantly sprang to my feet. The Indian had also recovered himself, and we were now both on foot, and not more than twenty paces apart. We fired at each other simultaneously. My usual luck did not desert me on this occasion, for his bullet missed me, while mine struck him in the breast. He reeled and fell, but before he had fairly touched the ground I was upon him, knife in hand, and had driven the keen-edged weapon to its hilt in his heart. Jerking his war-bonnet off, I scientifically scalped him in about five seconds....
“The Indians came charging down upon me from a hill in hopes of cutting me off. General Merritt ... ordered ... Company K to hurry to my rescue. The order came none too soon.... As the soldiers came up I swung the Indian chieftain’s topknot and bonnet in the air, and shouted: ‘The first scalp for Custer!’”
Far up to the northward, Sitting Bull, with the war chief Spotted Tail and about three thousand warriors fled from the scene of the Custer massacre. And as they traveled on the lonely plains they came to a little fort with the gates closed. “Open your gates and hand out your grub,” said the Indians.
“Come and get the grub,” answered the fort.
So the gates were thrown open and the three thousand warriors stormed in to loot the fort. They found only two white men standing outside a door, but all round the square the log buildings were loopholed and from every hole stuck out the muzzle of a rifle. The Indians were caught in such a deadly trap that they ran for their lives back to camp.
Very soon news reached the Blackfeet that their enemies the Sioux were camped by the new fort at Wood Mountain, so the whole nation marched to wipe them out, and Sitting Bull appealed for help to the white men. “Be good,” said the fort, “and nobody shall hurt you.”
So the hostile armies camped on either side, and the thirty white men kept the peace between them. One day the Sioux complained that the Blackfeet had stolen fifty horses. So six of the white men were sent to the Blackfoot herd to bring the horses back. They did not know which horses to select so they drove off one hundred fifty for good measure straight at a gallop through the Blackfoot camp, closely pursued by that indignant nation. Barely in time they ran the stock within the fort, and slammed the gates home in the face of the raging Blackfeet. They were delighted with themselves until the officer commanding fined them a month’s pay each for insulting the Blackfoot nation.
The winter came, the spring and then the summer, when those thirty white men arrived at the Canada-United States boundary where they handed over three thousand Sioux prisoners to the American troops. From that time the redcoats of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police of Canada have been respected on the frontier.
And now came a very wonderful adventure. Sitting Bull, the leader of the Sioux nation who had defeated General Custer’s division and surrendered his army to thirty Canadian soldiers, went to Europe to take part in a circus personally conducted by the chief of scouts of the United States Army, Buffalo Bill. Poor Sitting Bull was afterward murdered by United States troops in the piteous massacre of Wounded Knee. Buffalo Bill for twenty-six years paraded Europe and America with his gorgeous Wild West show, slowly earning the wealth which he lavished in the founding of Cody City, Wyoming.
Toward the end of these tours I used to frequent the show camp much like a stray dog expecting to be kicked, would spend hours swapping lies with the cowboys in the old Deadwood Coach, or sit at meat with the colonel and his six hundred followers. On the last tour the old man was thrown by a bad horse at Bristol and afterward rode with two broken bones in splints. Only the cowboys knew, who told me, as day by day I watched him back his horse from the ring with all the old incomparable grace.
He went back to build a million dollar irrigation ditch for his little city on the frontier, and shortly afterward the newspapers reported that my friends—the Buffalo Creek Gang of robbers—attacked his bank, and shot the cashier. May civilization never shut out the free air of the frontier while the old hero lives, in peace and honor, loved to the end and worshiped by all real frontiersmen.