The road crossed the timber-belt, and emerged on a lake-like prairie. It was that hour when the soft light of the morning heightened the peculiar beauty which this march revealed. The rising sun gilded the tree-tops beside us, and tinged the soft expanse before. The herds were moving slowly; some so near that we could hear the sullen bellow of the bulls; and some so distant that we could see only their long horns moving above the green, looking like wild fowl floating on the surface of the grassy sea. The prairie rose and fell in occasional swells, the distant timber swept around it in the graceful windings of a serpentine shore, and islets of trees waved upon the bosom of this green and wood-bound lake.
Before the morning passed, I had an illustration of a folly which pervades our army. The guards had warned us that it was sixteen miles across this prairie, and until it should be crossed, we should find no water. Every canteen was therefore filled, as was a two-gallon keg that had followed me through the lines. Several years ago, Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick Townsend, of the Eighteenth United States Infantry, in recounting to me his sufferings while crossing the Gila desert, had laid great stress upon the fact, that during the journey he had made it a rule to go without drinking till he halted for the night. Remembering this when I entered the army, I subjected myself to like discipline, drinking only when I ate. A single week made this a habit, and left me comparatively comfortable and independent. On this morning, I accordingly loaned my canteen to some one foolish enough to need it, and walked along without the slightest feeling of thirst. It was not eleven o’clock, and we had not marched six hours, when we came to a puddle of water, filling the wagon-track. The water was apparently the result of some local shower; it was clear, but the road was dirty, and on one side, lying in the water, were the putrid remains of an ox. I was turning out to go around the puddle, when I heard my friends behind shout to me to stop.
“What for?” I asked, in much amazement at the idea of halting in the wettest spot we could find.
“Why, for a drink.”
“A drink! What, drink that filthy water?”
Yes, they were thirsty enough to drink anything. They must drink something; the canteens and keg had been empty two hours. With accelerated speed, they hurried to the margin of the puddle. Some knelt down and drank, others ladled it up in their mugs, and several actually filled their canteens with the decoction. Thus had the little period of six hours swept away the niceties of men who, in their own homes, would have sickened at the thought of this loathsome draught; and thus did a childish habit destroy the whole pleasure of their walk, hide all the beauties of the landscape, divert their attention from objects of interest, and subject them to a needless annoyance, sometimes little less than torture.
The following day passed much like the others—our road still leading us across several wood-encircled prairies, separated from each other by narrow timber-belts and trivial, dried-up bayous. Early in the afternoon, after a march of twenty-three miles, we reached a bayou possessed of two or three names. From these, I selected as the one easiest to be remembered, “Indian,” and after crossing the place where the water of Indian Bayou ought to have been, I found that we were to encamp beyond the “timber,” and in a little grove. This word “grove” is in constant use through western Louisiana and Texas, and when first heard, it strikes the educated ear as a specimen of the fine talk so common in all parts of our country. But when these natural groves are seen, the purest taste acknowledges that the word is not misapplied. The one in which we now encamped was an oval clump of the live-oak, so clear and clean below, so exact and regular in form, that one could hardly believe nature had not been aided by the gardener’s art.
The next morning our breakfast disclosed the fact, that the Confederate bacon ration is not so large as the military appetite. The lieutenant informed me that he had no intention of starving in the midst of plenty, and had sent forward two men to shoot a yearling, near a certain bayou, and there we would halt and “barbecue” the meat. From the time of leaving the Teche, the prairies had been steadily growing drier. The atmosphere, too, was clearer, the sky brighter, the air more bracing and elastic, and though the sun was intensely hot, yet there was not the damp, vaporous heat that is so oppressive in the lower prairies of Louisiana. This day we were to cross a “dry-prairie,” and as we had at last succeeded in an early start (4–45), we reached it before the heat of the day had begun. A very dreary waste it was, unenlivened by the usual herds, its scanty herbage dried and withered up, and its wide expanse barren and desolate. It was, if I remember aright, nine miles across, but seemed much farther, for the road was soft and sandy, and with every breeze, a cloud of dust travelled down upon us. As the nine miles lessened into one, and the stunted trees that bordered the dry-prairie came in view, our two beef-hunters also could be seen driving down their half-wild game toward the road. Being somewhat in advance, I struck off to join them. Ere I accomplished this, a young heifer broke from the herd and bounded away. Instantly one of the rifles flashed and the heifer fell. The shot attracted the corporal, and in a moment his little bay was coming pell-mell across the broken ground, leaping some gullies and scrambling in and out of others, until he threw himself back on his haunches beside us. The corporal looked with great interest at what they called the “yuhlin,” inquired how far they had driven it (some eight miles), and enlarged on our great luck in getting so fat a “beef” on so poor a “range.”
It was somewhat of a mystery to me how the “yuhlin” would be carried to camp. When I asked whether the wagon, or perhaps the leading pair of mules, would be brought round to tow it in, the corporal laughed, and said in his merry way, that he would show us how they carried their game home in Texas. Forthwith he took his ever-useful lariat, and making fast one end to the “yuhlin’s” horns, wound the other round the horn of his Mexican saddle. One of the men attached another in like manner, and thus harnessed, the two horses dragged the heifer as they would a log. The saddles, girthed for “roping” cattle, did not yield, and the horses tugged away with as much unconcern as though they were pulling by the ordinary collar and traces.
The mile between us and the halting-place was soon passed over, and all hands seemed to feel a deep, immediate interest in the “yuhlin.” Although we had marched eighteen miles that morning, it was not eleven o’clock; nevertheless there were suggestions of fresh steaks, and the deserter (who really seemed to try to eat all he could, so as to be in some measure even with men who had less ripened chances of being shot) proceeded to bake a dodger. The corporal had unsaddled his horse in a trice, and was now elbow deep in breaking up the “yuhlin.” Another corporal—a quiet, hardworking, unassuming German—prepared the frame for barbecuing the meat. This consisted of poles placed horizontally, about three feet from the ground. Beneath it a slow fire was made, and the meat, cut up in thin slices, was spread on the poles. In three or four hours it was partly dried and partly cooked into a half-hard state, and was then said to be barbecued. Meanwhile an army of hogs came out of the woods, lean and savage, and grunted impatiently for their share of the “yuhlin.” A smaller but not less impatient party waited, with drawn knives and sharpened sticks, till the steaks could be cut, and then hurried with them to their several fires. A steak thus cooked upon hard-wood embers retains a flavor that the best French chef, with charcoal range, only approaches. And when this flavor is intensified by the fresh breezes of the prairie, and the long miles of a day’s march, it is not wonderful that men affirm that steaks cut from buffalo or stag, or even from a poor little half-tamed “yuhlin,” are better than the best butcher’s meat that can be bought at home.