Tenting on the Plains; or, General Custer in Kansas and Texas

by Elizabeth Bacon Custer

CONESTOGA WAGON, OR PRAIRIE-SCHOONER.

The General and I took great interest in the names given to the animals that pulled our traveling-wagon or hauled the supplies. As we rode by, the voice of the driver bringing out the name he had chosen, and sometimes affectionately, made us sure that the woman for whom the beast was christened was the sweetheart of the apparently prosaic teamster. I was avowedly romantic, and the General was equally so, though, after the fashion of men, he did not proclaim it. Our place at the head of the column was sometimes vacant, either because we were delayed for our luncheon, or because my husband remained behind to help the quartermaster or the head teamster get the train over a stream. It was then that we had the advantage of hearing the names conferred on the mules. They took in a wide range of female nomenclature, and we found it great fun to watch the family life of one human being and his six beasts. My husband had the utmost respect for a mule's sense. When I looked upon them as dull, half-alive animals, he bade me watch how deceitful were appearances, as they showed such cunning, and evinced the wisdom of a quick-witted thoroughbred, when apparently they were unobserving, sleepy brutes. It was the General who made me notice the skill and rapidity with which a group of six mules would straighten out what seemed to be a hopeless tangle of chains and harness, into which they had kicked themselves when there was a disturbance among them. One crack of the whip from the driver who had tethered them after a march, accompanied by a plain statement of his opinion of such "fools," would send the whole collection wide apart, and it was but a twinkling before they extricated themselves from what I thought a hopeless mess. No chains or straps were broken, and a meek, subdued look pervading the group left not a trace of the active heels that a moment before had filled the air. "There," the General used to say, "don't ever flatter yourself again that a mule hasn't sense. He's got more wisdom than half the horses in the line." It took a good while to convince me, as a more logy-looking animal can hardly be found than the army mule, which never in his existence is expected to go off from a walk, or to vary his life, from the day he is first harnessed until he drops by the way, old or exhausted.

At the time we were first on the Plains, many of the teamsters were Mexicans, short, swarthy, dull, and hardly a grade above the animal. The only ambition of these creatures seemed to be to vie with one another as to who could snap the huge "black-snake" the loudest. They learned to whisk the thong at the end around the ears of a shirking off leader, and crack the lash with such an explosive sound that I never got over jumping in my whole Plains life. I am sorry to say my high-strung horse usually responded with a spring that sent me into thin air anywhere between his ears and his tail, with a good deal of uncertainty as to where I should alight. I suspect it was an innocent little amusement of the drivers, when occasionally we remained behind at nooning, and had to ride swiftly by the long train to reach the head of the column.

The prairie-schooner disappeared with the advancing railroad; but I am glad to see that General Meigs has perpetuated its memory, by causing this old means of transportation to be made one of the designs in the beautiful frieze carved around the outside of the Pension Office at Washington. Ungainly and cumbersome as these wagons were, they merit some such monument, as part of the history of the early days of frontier life in our country. We were in the West several years before the railroad was completed to Denver, and the overland trains became an every-day sight to us. Citizens used oxen a great deal for transportation, and there is no picture that represents the weariness and laggard progress of life like an ox-train bound for Santa Fé or Denver. The prairie-schooner might set out freshly painted, or perhaps washed in a creek, but it soon became gray with layer upon layer of alkali dust. The oxen—well, nothing save a snail can move more slowly, and the exhaustion of these beasts, after weeks of uninterrupted travel, was pitiful. Imagine, also, the unending vigil when the trains were insecurely guarded; for in those days there was an immense unprotected frontier, and seemingly only a handful of cavalry. The regiments looked well on the roster, but there were in reality but few men. A regiment should number twelve hundred enlisted men; but at no time, unless during the war, does the recruiting officer attempt to fill it to the maximum; seventy men to a company is a large number. The desertions during the first years of the reorganization of the army after the war thinned the ranks constantly. Recruits could not be sent out fast enough to fill up the companies. The consequence was, that all those many hundred miles of trail where the Government undertook to protect citizens who carried supplies to settlements and the mines, as well as its own trains of material for building new posts, and commissary and quartermaster's stores for troops, were terribly exposed and very poorly protected.

"The Indians were, unfortunately, located on the great highway of Western travel; and commerce, not less than emigration, demanded their removal." There are many conflicting opinions as to the course pursued to clear the way; but I only wish to speak now of the impression the trains made upon me, as we constantly saw the long, dusty, exhausted-looking column wending its serpentine way over the sun-baked earth. A group of cavalry, with their drooping horses, rode in front and at the rear. The wagon-master was usually the very quintessence of valor, It is true he formed such a habit of shooting that he grew indiscriminate, and should any of the lawless desperadoes whom he hired as teamsters or trainmen ruffle his blood, kept up to boiling-heat by suspense, physical exposure, and exasperating employees, he knew no way of settling troubles except the effectual quietus that a bullet secures. I well remember my husband and Tom, who dearly loved to raise my indignation, and create signs of horror and detestation at their tales, walking me down to the Government train to see a wagon-master who had shot five men. He had emigrated from the spot where he bade fair to establish a private cemetery with his victims. No one needed a reason for his sudden appearance after the number of his slain was known. And yet no questions were put as to his past. He made a capital wagon-master; he was obedient to his superiors, faithful, and on time every morning, and the prestige of his past record answered so well with the citizen employees, that his pistol remained unused in the holster.

It seemed to be expected that the train-master would be a villain. Whatever was their record as to the manner of arranging private disputes, a braver class of men never followed a trail, and some of them were far superior to their chance lot. Their tender care of women who crossed in these slow-moving ox-trains, to join their husbands, ought to be commemorated. I have somewhere read one of their remarks when a girl, going to her mother, had been secreted in a private wagon and there was no knowledge of her presence until the Indians were discovered to be near. "Tain't no time to be teamin' women folks over the trail with sech a fearsom sperit for Injuns as I be." He, like some of the bravest men I have known, spoke of himself as timid, while he knew no fear. It certainly unnerved the most valiant man when Indians were lurking near, to realize the fate that hung over women entrusted to their care. In a later portion of my story occurs an instance of an officer hiding the woman whose husband had asked him to take her into the States, even before firing a shot at the adversary, as he knew with what redoubled ferocity the savage would fight, at sight of the white face of a woman. It makes the heart beat, even to look at a picture of the old mode of traversing the highway of Western travel. The sight of the pictured train, seemingly so peacefully lumbering on its sleepy way, the scarcely revolving wheels, creaking out a protest against even that effort, recalls the agony, the suspense, the horror with which every inch of that long route has been made. The heaps of stones by the wayside, or the buffalo bones, collected to mark the spot where some man fell from an Indian arrow, are now disappearing. The hurricanes beating upon the hastily prepared memorials have scattered the bleached bones of the bison, and rolled into the tufted grass the few stones with which the train-men, at risk of their own lives, have delayed long enough to mark their comrade's grave.

The faded photographs or the old prints of those overland trains speak to me but one story. Instantly I recall the hourly vigilance, the restless eyes scanning the horizon, the breathless suspense, when the pioneers or soldiers knew from unmistakable signs that the Indian was lying in wait. In what contrast to the dull, logy, scarcely moving oxen were these keen-eyed heroes, with every nerve strained, every sense on the alert. And how they were maddened by the fate that consigned them, at such moments, to the mercy of "dull, driven cattle." When I have seen officers and soldiers lay their hands lovingly on the neck of their favorite horse, and perhaps, when no one was near to scoff at sentiment, say to me, "He saved my life," I knew well what a man felt when his horse took fire at knowledge of danger to his rider and sped on the wings of the wind, till he was lost to his pursuers, a tiny black speck on the horizon. The pathos of a soldier's parting with his horse moved us to quick sympathy. It often happens that a trooper retains the same animal through his entire enlistment, and it comes to be his most intimate friend. There is nothing he will not do to provide him with food; if the forage runs low or the grazing is insufficient, stealing for his horse is reckoned a virtue among soldiers. Imagine, then, the anxiety, the real suffering, with which a soldier watches his faithful beast growing weaker day by day, from exhaustion or partial starvation. He walks beside him to spare his strength, and finally, when it is no longer possible to keep up with the column, and the soldier knows how fatal the least delay may be in an Indian country, it is more pitiful than almost any sight I recall, the sadness of his departure from the skeleton, whose eyes follow his master in wondering affection, as he walks away with the saddle and accoutrements. It is the most merciful farewell if a bullet is lodged in the brain of the famished or exhausted beast, but some one else than his sorrowing master has to do the trying deed.