Part of that regiment of negro soldiers were afterwards transferred to Wyoming to stop a war that broke out between the stock men and cattle rustlers, and they pulled off another job about like they did in Scooptown.
There was a little town established at the end of the Burlington Railroad on Powder River. It was named Sugs. The town consisted mostly of saloons and the sporting element. Those negro soldiers got into some difficulty with some of the citizens of the town and decided to have revenge. They were camped a little ways outside of Sugs in tents. So one night they stole some ammunition and guns like they had done before at Scooptown, and started in to town to shoot it up.
It was quite a dark night and the only lights the town had was coal oil lamps. The town had about 500 population and one street. Those soldiers lined up at the end of the street and started shooting at every building, tent, or any form they saw, and everybody that could run for cover—in half finished cellars, out houses or any hole they could get into.
There was an old man there—(he was a Jew)—who had started a little hardware store, and had a few dish pans hung on the wall of his tent store, and about the first bullet that hit anything of consequence was those dish pans. They were hung one on top of another, and the bullet went through all of them. And while everyone was running for cover the Jew saw his pans wrecked. He stopped right there and said, “Oh my God, look at what they have done to my hardware.”
Now there was two cattle rustlers came to town that night, making their get-away, headed north, and had put their horses away, and got a room in the only hotel in town, which was at the opposite end from where the soldiers entered. Those men had gone to bed and when they heard the shooting they thought it was a posse after them, and as they didn’t have time to get to their horses, they decided to put up a fight. They both had Winchesters. They put all their bullets in their hats, came out of the hotel, and laid down in the middle of the street, and when they saw this body of soldiers moving their way shooting everywhere, they opened fire on them. I believe they killed three of those negro soldiers and wounded several more. It became so hot for the soldiers they broke and run. Meantime the officer at the Post had heard of the trouble, ordered out his whole force, and came riding into town and demanded law and order. It was quite a while before the officer could be made to understand his own men had caused all the excitement, as he did not know they had stolen away.
CHAPTER III
I START TO PUNCH COWS
In the year of 1885 I got my first job as a real cowboy. I went to work for the “7D” outfit on the Belle Fouche River in the Black Hills night herding horses on the roundup. There was twenty outfits working together and there was about 300 riders—that was more cowboys than I ever saw hi one bunch before, or since. Also there was more grass and water that spring than I ever saw since that time and the range was open for a thousand miles in every direction and the country was just alive with cattle and it was not unusual to work and handle 5,000 cattle in one day.
Each outfit had from 150 to 200 saddle horses and from 15 to 30 cowboys. Each outfit had a grub-wagon and a bedwagon, four horses to each wagon. Each outfit had a day horse wrangler and a night wrangler and a cook. When we moved camp, the night wrangler drove the bedwagon to haul the cowboys’ beds. We didn’t have any stoves or tents those days. The cook’s outfit consisted of Dutch ovens, iron pots and coffee pot and boy, what a meal them old cooks could set up!
In the spring of 1886 I helped to gather and take a herd of cattle from the Black Hills to Miles City, Montana. The cattle belonged to a Jew by the name of Strauss and he owned the “54” Ranch on a creek named Mizpah—I don’t know where that creek got its name, but it must mean alkali, for the water there would take the skin off your lips and was equal to any dose of Epsom salts that anyone ever took.
Mr. Strauss lived in Milwaukee and had been on the ranch about a week when we arrived, and the weather was very warm and he drank plenty of that water. So one day about noon he told his foreman there was something seriously wrong with him and he had to go to Milwaukee at once. He had black whiskers and I think that water was so bad it even had an effect on his whiskers. He looked so bad he scared me.