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

by Elizabeth Bacon Custer

NEGROES FORM THEIR OWN PICKET-LINE.

Poor Fort Wallace! In another attack on the post, where several of our men were killed, there chanced to be some engineers stopping at the garrison, en route to New Mexico, where a Government survey was to be undertaken. One of them, carrying a small camera, photographed a sergeant lying on the battle-ground after the enemy had retreated. The body was gashed and pierced by twenty-three arrows. Everything combined to keep that little garrison in a state of siege, and a gloomy pall hung over the beleaguered spot.

As the stage-stations were one after another attacked, burned, the men murdered and the stock driven off for a distance of three hundred miles, the difficulty of sending mail became almost insurmountable. Denver lay out there at the foot of the mountains, as isolated as if it had been a lone island in the Pacific Ocean. Whenever a coach went out with the mail, a second one was filled with soldiers and led the advance. The Seventh Cavalry endeavored to fortify some of the deserted stage-stations; but the only means of defense consisted in burrowing underground. After the holes were dug, barely large enough for four men standing, and a barrel of water and a week's provision, it was covered over with logs and turf, leaving an aperture for firing. Where the men had warning, they could "stand off" many Indians, and save the horses in another dug-out adjacent.

After a journey along the infested route, where one of our officers was detailed to post a corporal and four men at the stations when the stage company endeavored to reinstate themselves, he decided to go on into Denver for a few days. The detention then was threatening to be prolonged, and at the stage company's headquarters the greatest opposition was encountered before our officer could induce them to send out a coach. Fortunately, as it afterward proved, three soldiers who had orders to return to their troop, accompanied him. The stage company opposed every move, and warned him that he left at his own risk. But there was no other alternative, as he was due and needed at Fort Wallace. At one of the stage-stations nearest Denver a woman still endeavored to brave it out; but her nerve deserted her at last, and she implored our officer to take her as far as he went on her way into the States. Her husband, trying to protect the company's interests, elected to remain, but begged that his wife might be taken away from the deadly peril of their surroundings. Our officer frankly said there was very little chance that the stage would ever reach Fort Wallace. She replied that she had been frightened half to death all summer, and was sure to be murdered if she remained, and might as well die in the stage, as there was no chance for her at the station.

Every revolution of the wheels brought them into greater danger. The three soldiers on the top of the stage kept a lookout on every side, while the officer inside sat with rifle in hand, looking from the door on either side the trail. Even with all this vigilance, the attack, when it came, was a surprise. The Indians had hidden in a wash-out near the road. Their first shot fatally wounded one of the soldiers, who, dropping his gun, fell over the coach railing, and with dying energy, half swung himself into the door of the stage, gasping out a message to his mother. Our officer replied that he would listen to the parting words later, helped the man to get upon the seat, and, without a preliminary, pushed the woman down into the deep body of the coach, bidding her, as she valued the small hope of life, not to let herself be seen. As has been said before, those familiar with Indian warfare know well with what redoubled ferocity the savage fights, if he finds that a white woman is likely to fall into his hands. It is well known, also, that the squaws are ignored if the chiefs have a white woman in their power, and it brings a more fearful agony to her lot, for when the warriors are absent from the village, the squaws, wild with jealousy, heap cruelty and exhausting labor upon the helpless victim. All this the frontier woman knew, as we all did, and it needed no second command to keep her imperiled head on the floor of the coach.

The instant the dying soldier had dropped his gun, the driver—ah, what cool heads those stage-drivers had!—seized the weapon, thrusting his lines between his agile and muscular knees, inciting his mules, and every shot had a deadly aim. The soldiers fired one volley, and then leaped to the ground as the officer sprang from the stage door, and following beside the vehicle, continued to fire as they walked. The first two shots from the roof of the coach had killed two Indians hidden in the hole made by the wash-out. By that means our men got what they term the "morale" on them, and though they pursued, it was at a greater distance than it would have been had not two of their number fallen at the beginning of the attack.

AN ATTACK ON A STAGE-COACH.

This running fire continued for five miles, when, fortunately for the little band, one of the stage stations, where a few men had been posted on our officer's trip out, was reached at last. Here a halt was made, as the Indians congregated on a bluff where they could watch safely. The coach was a wreck. The large lamps on either side of the driver's seat were shattered completely, and there were six bullet-holes between the roof and the wooden body of the coach. When the door of the stage was opened, and the crouching woman lifted her face from the floor and was helped out, she was so unmoved, so calm, the officer and soldiers were astonished at her nerve. She looked about, and said, "But I don't see any Indians yet." The officer told her that if she would take the trouble to look over on the bluff, she would find them on dress parade. Then she told him about her experience in the stage. The dying soldier had breathed his last soon after he fell into the coach, and all the five miles his dead body kept slipping from the seat on to the prostrate woman. In vain she pushed it one side; the violence with which the vehicle rocked from side to side, as the driver urged his animals to their utmost speed, made it impossible for her to protect herself from contact with the heavy corpse, that rolled about with the plunging of the coach. All this, repeated without agitation, with no word of fear for the remaining portion of the journey, which, happily, was safely finished, drew from our officer, almost dumb with amazement at the fortitude displayed, a speech that would rarely be set down by the novelist who imagines conversations, but which is just what is likely to be said in real life—"By Jove! you deserve a chromo!"