Ten years in the ranks, U.S. Army

by Augustus Meyers

On a recent tour of the northwestern states I visited Sioux City. There, in September, 1913, I found a large and prosperous city with many fine buildings, where there had been only a wilderness in 1855. The river-front was unrecognizable to me. The early houses that once clustered there had been replaced by a railroad yard.

I had the good fortune to meet Mr. J. M. Pinkney, a congenial business man who had lived in Sioux City almost from its foundation. He was well informed and we had a long and interesting conversation about the early days when the city was a mere frontier settlement. Mr. Pinkney introduced me at the office of the Sioux City Journal where I was courteously received. I found the Journal to be a large up-to-date newspaper such as one would expect to find only in a great metropolis.

I was seized with a strong desire to revisit Fort Pierre, although I had no pleasant recollections of it. To me it brought only thoughts of suffering. I left Sioux City on a late night train and arrived at Pierre, the capital of South Dakota, in the middle of the next afternoon. Pierre, built mainly on hills overlooking the Missouri River, is a city of only about three thousand inhabitants, but boasts a large and magnificent capital building surpassed by few in the western states. There is also a modern fire-proof hotel, a government post office, a Carnegie library and other buildings worthy of note. A substantial railroad bridge crosses the Missouri.

The smaller town of Fort Pierre, the county seat of Stanley County, South Dakota, is directly opposite on the west bank of the river. A small motorboat makes hourly ferry trips, communication by way of the railroad bridge being infrequent.

I boarded the motorboat next morning, September eighth, to go to Fort Pierre, where I had arrived fifty-eight years ago in the same month. I found the Missouri River just as muddy and treacherous for navigation as of yore. A large sandbar made a long detour necessary to reach the channel on the western side of it. The boat ran aground several times, and finally it was caught so hard and fast that we had to wait for the other ferry to haul us off on its return trip.

There were two other passengers on the boat beside myself, one a white citizen and the other a full blooded young Sioux who had been educated at Carlisle School. I learned from them that the old stockade fort no longer existed. It had been a few miles further up the river, but they could not tell me its exact location. They offered to take me to the office of Mr. Stanley Philip, the owner of a large ranch near the site of the fort. Mr. Philip was out, but they introduced me to Mr. C. H. Fales, a prominent business man of the town, who kindly volunteered to show me the site of the old fort.

As we were preparing to start, Mr. Philip arrived in an automobile and invited both of us to go to the place in his machine. He soon set us down at the site of the old stockade about two and one-half miles up the river. Not a stick remained of the old fort. It had left no mark save a depression in the ground where a cellar had been. I recognized the contour of the low hills on the west and of the higher hills across the river. There was the same bleak prairie extending back to the foothills with its colonies of barking prairie dogs, who appeared to me to be somewhat bolder than of old.

The Indian burial place had disappeared, but the island in the river below the fort was still there. The most noticeable change was in the river front. The channel was much further out, and a wide strip of bottom land, covered with willows and brush, had formed at what was once an abrupt bank. As I gazed upon this changed scene, I thought of the time when I had seen the plain dotted with the tepees of thousands of Indians who had assembled at that very spot to sign a treaty with General Harney.

After a while we went about a mile up the river to Mr. Philip's large ranch where he has thirteen thousand acres fenced in for a buffalo preserve. There are more than three hundred of the animals roaming at large among the hills and the number is being increased by the annual addition of some dozens of calves.

Much of the ranch on the high bottom lands along the shore of the Missouri is under cultivation and is yielding good crops. All this great estate I had seen as a wilderness that I was glad to get away from. In those days I would not have taken the whole county as a gift had I been required to live there. Mr. Philip, who manages his own ranch, is a young man. His father, a Scotchman, lately deceased, was one of the early settlers and accumulated the property.