I should like to read once more, those diary entries. Was there anything written, I wonder, about those silhouettes upon the hills? What did it tell, if anything, about the alarm that was spread through our Company? Had we—the unlearned—known more about the ways of the Indian we would have realized that they—those shadows—were no Sioux. Yet it was disturbing to the unknowing to see those figures, those mysteriously moving horsemen of the night. Thank heaven! It was but our own scouting herdsmen. But for once, to those assembled within the corral centre, O, how too long seemed the hymn, and even the prayer! How impatient we were to know the truth.
In “The Cedar Bluffs” the wagons that are sketched corralled are not our own. They comprised a small freight train, and right glad would they have been to, and most likely they did, creep along, as it were, in our wake. There were no women or children in that train, its members were all of the daring “freighter.” These were men willing to meet with any danger. Perhaps there might be among them men inexperienced, but they must have possessed intrepid hearts. Rough of the rough, but daring they certainly were. Woe to that little band if later they met the Sioux. It would mean, for them, annihilation. What rude pranks the Indian did sometimes play! The Sioux or Cheyenne, he would take bales of bright stuffs which he sometimes found in the freighters’ wagons, fasten one end of it to his pony and let the hundred yards unravel and flaunt on the winds as wildly he dashed across the plain. There was a brutally comic side to the character of the western Indian.
A brutal side! Yes, and there was often a comic side to the white man’s fear. Well, indeed, a friend of mine has told it. Twelve young men comprised a company; two wagons and six yoke of oxen made up their outfit. That certainly was taking their risks in those perilous times! Yet they were unmolested. Once, indeed, they thought themselves at the mercy of the Sioux; as truly, in another way they were. Death and the scalping-knife appeared their lot. But it was all a hoax. What had been taken for the painted savage was but a party of whites with blankets over their heads to keep away the rain. Taking into consideration the really dangerous position of the little band, there was a tragic-farcical touch in their list of arms. My friend’s sole means of defense was a butcher-knife some six inches long.
But in a later adventure, so he told me, the farcical part was left out. That was an experience in which, if the tragedy was also wanting, there was a most severe test upon his nerves. He had left the camp, taking a fowling piece with him, and he wandered along a stream. He had just taken sight upon a skein of wild fowl, and was about to fire, when suddenly a band of Indians came from behind a bank, and in another instant the shot would have been among them. But luckily he had not pulled the trigger. However his attitude, the pointed gun made him an object of suspicion. The Indians were upon the war-path, but not with the whites just then. My friend was surrounded, and he must explain to the satisfaction of the savages who he was, and why he was there. He was finally released, however, upon proof that he was from a camp of whites near by. But all the same it was an ordeal to stand surrounded by those painted savages, scalps dangling from their pony saddles. And it was one that the actor therein would not have cared to repeat.
Laramie Peak from the Black Hills.
It did produce upon one a disturbing sensation; that knowledge, I mean, of how often the eyes of ambushed Indians might be fixed upon one. And the wild animals, too! From the distance they watched. Herds of buffalo, perhaps, or of deer, looked upon our moving train from the plateau tops. Beyond the flaming yellow sun-flowers, amid the bright red of the rocky hills, the Sioux was often concealed. His face was painted of the same gaudy colors, and he looked with blood lust upon us. We knew not when this might be; yet that it was always possible gave a sort of aspect of menace to the bluffs and hills along the way.
Many a time had Captain Holladay with his natural caution gained from experience; his sagacity and knowledge, given a timely warning. The girls must not be led too far by their passion for the gathering of flowers. How often had the desire to possess some especially beautiful or brilliant, some alluring bunch of desert bloom tempted them beyond the lines of safety. Especially true was this among the Black Hills and the mountain ranges, too, beyond them. There was danger, also, in the going for water, the dipping places were often at quite a distance from the camp. How terrible an example was that which occurred in one of the trains which crossed the Hills the year before our own. It was on the banks of the La Bonte River. A band of five Sioux suddenly dashed out from amid a clump of trees on the river bank, and carried away, beyond all hope of rescue, one of two girls who had rashly gone too far down the stream. The train remained at the river for a period of three days, the Indians were pursued for many miles, but it was all in vain. The young husband never saw his young wife again. One of the young women was slightly in advance of the other, and those few steps made this difference, that one was lost, the other saved. And the young woman who escaped was the writer’s sister.
Something of all the passions; something of all the passions—joy, love, hope, fear, and the others, too, must have been recorded in the pages of that diary. Or, rather, there should have been had the youthful writer of those pages put down upon them what he once actually looked upon, as now he recalls them mentally. They must have told, too, how a foe even stronger than the Sioux, one not to be gainsaid, took away a sister at last. We took the oaken wagon seats to make her little coffin. Did it tell how we laid her away to rest; after those days of suffering, when she was carried by turns in our arms, to save her what pain we could; did it tell, then, how she was laid beneath the cottonwoods, where ripple the waters of the Laramie, and how the soil was hardly replaced in the grave ere we must depart? Did it tell of the wild night of storm and darkness, through which later we passed? The remainder of “The Journey” was for us, darkened by that ever-remembered tragedy.