It is natural enough that the boy author, while travelling for the first time through the buffalo range, should think and write chiefly about buffalo, yet he finds time to tell of the prairie-dog towns through which they passed, and of the odd ways of the dogs and the curious apparent companionship or at least co-habitation of the snakes and the prairie owls with them. As they passed through this region north of the Arkansas in the hot, dry weather of the early fall, they suffered sometimes from thirst. The first grave passed by the train aroused melancholy and sympathetic feelings in the boy’s heart.
One day Garrard went out hunting with Mr. St. Vrain and another, and a band of buffalo were discovered on their way to water. Here Garrard first found himself near a wounded bull, and the picture that he paints of the monster is a true and a striking one. “Mr. St. Vrain, dismounting, took his rifle, and soon was on the ‘approach,’ leaving us cached behind a rise of the ground to await the gun report. We laid down with our blankets, which we always carried strapped to the saddle, and, with backs to the wind, talked in a low tone, until hearing Mr. St. Vrain’s gun, when we remounted. Again and again the rifle was heard, in hasty succession, and hastening to him, we found a fat cow stretched, and a wounded male limping slowly off. The animals were tied to the horns of our cow; and, with butcher knives, we divested the body of its fine coat; but, finding myself a ‘green hand,’ at least not an adept, in the mysteries of prairie butchering, I mounted Paint for the wounded fellow, who had settled himself, with his fore legs doubled under him, three hundred yards from us. Mine was a high pommeled, Mexican saddle, with wooden stirrups; and, when once seated, it was no easy matter to be dislodged. Paint went up within twenty yards of the growling, wounded, gore-covered bull, and there stood trembling, and imparting some of his fear to myself.
“With long, shaggy, dirt-matted, and tangled locks falling over his glaring, diabolical eyes, blood streaming from nose and mouth, he made the most ferocious looking object it is possible to conceive; and, if nurses could portray to obstinate children in true colors the description of a mad buffalo bull, the oft-repeated ‘bugaboo’ would soon be an obsolete idea.
“While looking with considerable trepidation on the vanquished monarch of the Pawnee plains, he started to his feet; and, with a jump, materially lessened the distance between us, which so scared Paint that he reared backward, nearly sliding myself and gun over his tail; and before the bridle rein could be tightened, ran some rods; but, turning his head, and setting the rowels of my spurs in his flanks, I dashed up within thirty feet of the bull; and at the crack of the gun, the ‘poor buffler’ dropped his head, his skin convulsively shook, his dark eyes, no longer fired with malignancy, rolled back in the sockets, and his spirit departed for the region of perpetual verdure and running waters, beyond the reach of white man’s rifle or the keen lance of the prairie warrior.”
And then the picture with which he closes the chapter covering the march through the buffalo range! How boyish, and yet how charming and how true it is!
“Good humor reigned triumphant throughout camp. Canadian songs of mirth filled the air; and at every mess fire, pieces of meat were cooking en appolas; that is, on a stick sharpened, with alternate fat and lean meat, making a delicious roast. Among others, boudins were roasting without any previous culinary operation, but the tying of both ends, to prevent the fat, as it was liquified, from wasting; and when pronounced ‘good’ by the hungry, impatient judges, it was taken off the hot coals, puffed up with the heat and fat, the steam escaping from little punctures, and coiled on the ground, or a not particularly clean saddle blanket, looking for all the world like a dead snake.
“The fortunate owner shouts, ‘Hyar’s the doin’s, and hyar’s the ’coon as savys “poor bull” from “fat cow”; freeze into it, boys!’ And all fall to, with ready knives, cutting off savory pieces of this exquisitely appetizing prairie production.
“At our mess fire there was a whole side of ribs roasted. When browned thoroughly we handled the long bones, and as the generous fat dripped on our clothes, we heeded it not, our minds wrapped up with the one absorbing thought of satisfying our relentless appetites; progressing in the work of demolition, our eyes closed with ineffable bliss. Talk of an emperor’s table—why, they could imagine nothing half so good! The meal ended, the pipe lent its aid to complete our happiness, and, at night we retired to the comfortable blankets, wanting nothing, caring for nothing.”
Late in October the train met with the advance guard of a party of Cheyenne warriors, then on the warpath for scalps and horses against the Pawnee nation. These were the first really wild Indians that Garrard had seen, and their picturesqueness and unusual appearance greatly interested him. In those days the Cheyennes had never been at war with the white people, and they were on terms of especial friendliness with Bent and St. Vrain, from whose trading posts they obtained their supplies. A little later, on the way to Bent’s Fort, they passed a Cheyenne medicine lodge, with its sweat-house, and later still Indian graves on scaffolds which rested on the horizontal limbs of the cottonwood trees. A day or two after this they reached Fort William, or Bent’s Fort, where they met William Bent, in his day one of the best-known men of the southern plains. A few days were spent there, and then came the most interesting adventure that the boy had had.
Early in November he started for the Cheyenne village with John Smith, who, with his wife, his little boy Jack, and a Canadian, were setting out for the village to trade for robes.