The first matter to be considered upon reaching your starting point, the point I mean at which the locomotive leaves you, is the question of transport, a very serious matter to the man who has been ‘dumped’ down for the first time in his life at a frontier station with a huge pile of belongings and not even a friendly porter to carry them under shelter for him.
In North America (indeed, in most countries) the commonest method of transporting freight from one point to another in regions where the railway does not run is by pack animals, for which reason we will treat of ‘packing’ with pack ponies first.
In all the countries known to the writer the cheapest way is to buy your ponies, taking your chances of selling them when you don’t require them any longer. Hiring your animals is an expensive plan, especially in America, where the hire of a pack pony is at least one dollar per diem, whereas his cost would not exceed thirty dollars. Thus even if you gave your ponies away (and you cannot always do much better) at the end of a two months’ trip, you would have saved thirty dollars by purchasing outright. In buying your pack animals don’t leave the purchase of them until the last moment. If you do, there is no one in the world who better understands the art of extracting the highest price from a man who must buy than the ‘untutored savage.’
Choose animals of short cobby build rather than those which are more ‘leggy,’ and in addition to all the ordinary precautions observed in dealing with horse-flesh, take care to examine your purchases to see whether they have ever had sore backs. If you find scars, however well the wound has healed, don’t buy the pony, as backs which have once been sore are extremely apt to break out again at the first opportunity.
You may estimate the number of ponies wanted for your expedition by the weight which you require them to carry, allowing from 150 to 200 lbs. to each pony, and although professional packers will sometimes put as much as 400 lbs. upon a beast on a road, 200 lbs. is a full load for such a creature as the ordinary cayuse on such trails as those which generally lead to game countries.
Having bought your ponies and hired a man as camp cook who can pack and look after the beasts, take precautions against losing your animals. Of course your packer ought to do this, but he won’t. Buy picket pegs and ropes for your saddle-horses, and good leather hobbles for the pack animals, as well as a bell for the leader of the pack train, and see, personally, that for the first few nights, at any rate, every horse is hobbled or picketed, including even your hunter’s horse, in spite of his protestations that ‘that cayuse won’t stray’; and see, too, that one of the horses has the bell on at night. During the day you can take the bell off or silence it by shoving a fir cone into it, or some such simple device, if you hope to see game along the trail; but at night, insist upon the bell and the hobbles being worn, and in this way even if your beasts have only poor feed they won’t stray far, whilst if they do the bell will help you to find them. As I pen these lines I am as sure that some one of my readers will curse his luck for having neglected this advice as I am that death and the taxman will arrive in due season. In passing, I may remark that the man who takes the trouble to silence his pack train’s bell and his packers’ mouths, whilst he rides half a mile ahead of his train when on the march, will secure many a shot which would otherwise never have fallen to his share.
In picketing your horses use a bowline knot, see that the loop made will run easily round the tree to which each horse is tied if you are not using a proper picket, and in any case see that there are no bushes or stumps in his way round which he can get tied up in the night.
Next to your ponies your pack-saddles are the most important part of your equipment, and though you can no doubt pack either with ordinary pack-saddles, or with parfleches (mere leathern envelopes depending from either side of the pony), still the best of all the many contrivances for packing is, to my mind, the aparejo, an arrangement of Mexican origin obtainable for about twenty-five dollars all over America.
With good aparejos, sweat-pads and saddle-blankets of stout material, and a man who knows how to put them all on, there need be no sore backs, and very few halts to rearrange packs during the longest trip in the roughest country.