The white Indian boy

by Elijah Nicholas Wilson

Caspar W. Hodgson

A snowy road through an Idaho forest.

One of the passengers was a large, strong Irishman, and appeared to be well educated; the other was a sickly looking Englishman. I don’t remember their names, but they called each other Mike and Jimmy. I went back to the buggy and Mike saw that I did not want anything to say to Mr. Smith, so he did the talking. He questioned Mr. Smith and then me for quite a while, and then he said he believed that I was right. He told the driver to turn the team around and follow me. The driver obeyed although it made Mr. Smith very angry.

After turning south we had not traveled over four miles, when one of the remaining horses gave out and we could not get the poor thing to move, so we had to leave the buggy. We went on about three or four hundred yards to a clump of quaking aspen, and built a large fire. When we all got warm, I went to bring up the horses and buggy, and when I got back to the fire, Mr. Smith and Mike were quarreling. Mr. Smith said that we were going away from Soda Springs, and that he intended to turn and go the other way.

It was already quite dark, but we could travel just as well in the night as in the day, for we could not see very far anyhow on account of the fog. I said I knew I was right and for all those who wanted to go to Soda Springs to fall in line, for I was going to start right then. I went to the buggy and got a pair of buffalo moccasins I had there, put them on, and started down the trail. “Hold on,” called Mike, “I will go with you.” Then Jimmy said he was not going to stay there and starve to death, that he would go with us, too. So the three of us went our way and left Mr. Smith and the driver standing there in the fog and snow.

It was about eleven o’clock at night when we left the buggy. We did not feel much like pushing our way through the snow, for we had already walked many miles that day, and had been three days without anything to eat. Mike said he would take the lead to break the path, I was to come next, and Jimmy was to follow me. There was about a foot of snow with a crust on it, not quite hard enough to hold one up, and on top of this was about two feet of lighter snow, so you see it was very hard traveling.

We had not been out over two hours, when Mike said his feet were frozen. I had a few matches in my pocket wrapped in paper, and we kicked around to find some dry sagebrush, but it was all wet and frozen. We broke up some and tried to make a fire, but it would not burn. Pretty soon Mike said we should give him the matches and he would try it. He took them and laid them down by his side while trying to light one, and Jimmy came up, struck them with his foot, and scattered them all through the snow. We could not find a single one of them, so we had to go without any fire.

We trudged along, stumbling over sagebrush and rock until morning. Mike said we must be very near Soda Springs, for he thought we had traveled twenty miles or more during the night, and he could not believe me when I told him we had not made over eight miles. I told them before we left the buggy that it was about thirty miles to Soda Springs, so I knew we had over twenty miles yet.

Jimmy and I were about played out, and had to stop every little while to rest. Mike had long legs, but Jimmy and I were so short that when we tried to step in his tracks we had to jump, and that made it harder for Jimmy and me. During the night we had traveled too far to the east and had left the trail through the lava beds and sagebrush, and had started to cross the big meadow and swamps along the Blackfoot River. The tall slough grass and bulrushes were so tangled and frozen together that we could hardly get through them. Sometimes Mike would forget himself and step about six feet over a large mass of grass and rushes, and Jimmy and I would have to wallow through them.