And then, what a generous being a soldier is! How often I have seen them pass the precious nectar—it seemed so then, in spite of its being warm and alkaline; and I speak from experience, for they have given me a chance also—flavored with poor whiskey sometimes, as that old tin receptacle which Government furnishes holds coffee, whiskey or water, whichever is attainable. I fear that, had I scratched and dug slowly into the soil with the point of a sabre, and scooped up a minimum of water, my eye on the bluff near, watching and in fear of an Indian, I should have remembered my own parched throat and let the whole American army go thirsty. But I am thankful to say the soldier is made of different stuff. It is enough to weld strongest bonds of friendship, like those in our army, when it is share and share alike; and I am reminded of a stanza of soldier poetry:
"There are bonds of all sorts in this world of ours,
Fetters of friendship and ties of flowers,
And true-lover's knots, I ween;
The boy and the girl are bound by a kiss,
But there's never a bond of old friends like this—
We have drunk from the same canteen."
I have, among our Plains photographs, a picture of one of the Western rivers, with no sort of tree or green thing growing on its banks. It is the dreariest picture I ever saw, and as it appears among the old photographs of merry groups taken in camp or on porches covered with our garrison family, it gives me a shudder even now. Among the photographs of the bright side of our life, this is the skeleton at the feast which comes up so persistently.
Since all rivers and streams in the States are fringed with trees, it is difficult to describe how strange some of our Western water-ways appeared without so much as a border of shrubs or reeds. In looking over the country, as we ascended to a divide higher than the rest, the stream lay before us, winding on in the curving lines of our own Eastern rivers, but for miles and miles not a vestige of green bordered the banks. It seemed to me for all the world like an eye without an eyelash. It was strange, unnatural, weird. The white alkali was the only border, and that spread on into the scorched brown grass, too short to protect the traveler from the glare that was heightened by the sun in a cloudless sky. A tree was often a landmark, and was mentioned on the insufficient maps of the country, such as "Thousand-mile Tree," a name telling its own story; or, "Lone Tree," known as the only one within eighty miles, as was the one in Dakota, where so many Indians buried their dead.
What made those thirsty marches a thousand times worse was the alluring, aggravating mirage. This constantly deceived even old campaigners, and produced the most harrowing sort of illusions. Such a will-o'-the-wisp, too! for, as we believed ourselves approaching the blessed water, imagined the air was fresher, looked eagerly and expectantly for the brown, shriveled grass to grow green, off floated the deluding water farther and farther away.
As I try to write something of the sacrifices of the soldier, who will not speak of himself, and for whom so few have spoken, there comes to me another class of heroes, for whom my husband had such genuine admiration, and in whose behalf he gave up his life—our Western pioneer. A desperate sort of impatience overcomes me when I realize how incapable I am of paying them proper tribute. And yet how fast they are passing away, with no historians! and hordes of settlers are sweeping into the western States and Territories, quite unmindful of the soldiers and frontiersmen, who fought, step by step, to make room for the coming of the over-crowded population of the East. My otherwise charming journeys West now are sometimes marred by the desire I feel for calling the attention of the travelers, who are borne by steam swiftly over the Plains, to the places where so short a time since men toilsomely traveled in pursuit of homes. I want to ask those who journey for pleasure or for a new home, if they realize what men those were who took their lives in their hands and prepared the way.[H] Their privations are forgotten, or carelessly ignored, by those who now go in and possess the land. The graphic pens of Bret Harte and others, who have written of the frontier, arrest the attention of the Eastern man, and save from oblivion some of the noble characters of those early days. Still, these poets naturally seized for portraiture the picturesque, romantic characters who were miners or scouts—the isolated instances of desperate men who had gone West from love of adventure, or because of some tragic history in the States, that drove them to seek forgetfulness in a wild, unfettered existence beyond the pale of civilization.
Who chronicles the patient, plodding, silent pioneer, who, having been crowded out of his home by too many laborers in a limited field, or, because he could no longer wring subsistence from a soil too long tilled by sire and grandsire; or possibly a returned volunteer from our war, who, finding all places he once filled closed up, was compelled to take the grant of land that the Government gives its soldiers, and begin life all over again, for the sake of wife and children! There is little in these lives to arrest the poetical fancy of those writers who put into rhyme (which is the most lasting of all history) the lives otherwise lost to the world.
How often General Custer rode up to these weary, plodding yeomen, as they turned aside their wagons to allow the column of cavalry to pass! He was interested in every detail of their lives, admired their indomitable pluck, and helped them, if he could, in their difficult journeys. Sometimes, after a summer of hardships and every sort of discouragement, we met the same people returning East, and the General could not help being amused at the grim kind of humor that led these men to write the history of their season in one word on the battered cover of the wagon—"Busted."
We were in Kansas during all the grasshopper scourge, when our Government had to issue rations to the starving farmers deprived of every source of sustenance. What a marvel that men had the courage to hold out at all, in those exasperating times, when the crops were no sooner up than every vestige of green would be stripped from the fields! Then, too, the struggle for water was great. The artesian wells that now cover the Western States were too expensive to undertake with the early settlers. The windmills that now whirl their gay wheels at every zephyr of the Plains, and water vast numbers of cattle on the farms, were then unthought of. . . . A would-be settler in Colorado, in those times of deprivation and struggle, wrote his history on a board and set it up on the trail, as a warning to others coming after him: "Toughed it out here two years. Result: Stock on hand, five towheads and seven yaller dogs. Two hundred and fifty feet down to water. Fifty miles to wood and grass. Hell all around. God bless our home."