On the Border with Crook

by John Gregory Bourke

The cavalry companies each morning were exercised at a walk, trot, and gallop. In the afternoon the soldiers were allowed to roam about the country in small parties, hunting and seeing what they could see. They were all the better for the exercise, and acted as so many additional videttes. The packers organized a mule race, which absorbed all interest. It was estimated by conservative judges that fully five dollars had changed hands in ten-cent bets. Up to the end of June no news of any kind, from any source excepting Crow Indians, had been received of General Terry and his command, and much comment, not unmixed with uneasiness, was occasioned thereby.

CHAPTER XIX.

KILLING DULL CARE IN CAMP—EXPLORING THE SNOW-CRESTED BIG HORN MOUNTAINS—FINERTY KILLS HIS FIRST BUFFALO—THE SWIMMING POOLS—A BIG TROUT—SIBLEY’S SCOUT—A NARROW ESCAPE—NEWS OF THE CUSTER MASSACRE—THE SIOUX TRY TO BURN US OUT—THE THREE MESSENGERS FROM TERRY—WASHAKIE DRILLS HIS SHOSHONES—KELLY THE COURIER STARTS TO FIND TERRY—CROW INDIANS BEARING DESPATCHES—THE SIGN-LANGUAGE—A PONY RACE—INDIAN SERENADES—HOW THE SHOSHONES FISHED—A FIRE IN CAMP—THE UTES JOIN US.

In the main, this absence of news from Terry was the reason why General Crook took a small detachment with him to the summit of the Big Horn Mountains and remained four days. We left camp on the 1st of July, 1876, the party consisting of General Crook, Colonel Royall, Lieutenant Lemly, Major Burt, Lieutenants Carpenter, Schuyler, and Bourke, Messrs. Wasson, Finerty, Strahorn, and Davenport, with a small train of picked mules under Mr. Young. The climb to the summit was effected without event worthy of note, beyond the to-be-expected ruggedness of the trail and the beauty and grandeur of the scenery. From the highest point gained during the day Crook eagerly scanned the broad vista of country spread out at our feet, reaching from the course of the Little Big Horn on the left to the country near Pumpkin Buttes on the right. Neither the natural vision nor the aid of powerful glasses showed the slightest trace of a marching or a camping column; there was no smoke, no dust, to indicate the proximity of either Terry or Gibbon.

Frank Gruard had made an inspection of the country to the northwest of camp several days before to determine the truth of reported smokes, but his trip failed to confirm the story. The presence of Indians near camp had also been asserted, but scouting parties had as yet done nothing beyond proving these camp rumors to be baseless. In only one instance had there been the slightest reason for believing that hostiles had approached our position. An old man, who had been following the command for some reason never very clearly understood, had come into camp on Tongue River and stated that while out on the plain, letting his pony have a nibble of grass, and while he himself had been sleeping under a box elder, he had been awakened by the report of a gun and had seen two Indian boys scampering off to the north: he showed a bullet hole through the saddle, but the general opinion in camp was that the story had been made up out of whole cloth, because parties of men had been much farther down Tongue River that morning, scouting and hunting, without perceiving the slightest sign or trace of hostiles. Thirty miners from Montana had also come into camp from the same place, and they too had been unable to discover traces of the assailants.

The perennial character of the springs and streams watering the pasturage of the Tongue River region was shown by the great masses of snow and ice, which were slowly yielding to the assaults of the summer sun on the flanks of “Cloud Peak” and its sister promontories. Every few hundred yards gurgling rivulets and crystal brooks leaped down from the protecting shadow of pine and juniper groves and sped away to join the Tongue, which warned us of its own near presence in a cañon on the left of the trail by the murmur of its current flowing swiftly from basin to basin over a succession of tiny falls. Exuberant Nature had carpeted the knolls and dells with vernal grasses and lovely flowers; along the brook-sides, wild rose-buds peeped; and there were harebells, wild flax, forget-me-nots, and astragulus to dispute with their more gaudy companions—the sunflowers—possession of the soil. The silicious limestones, red clays, and sandstones of the valley were replaced by granites more or less perfectly crystallized. Much pine and fir timber was encountered, at first in small copses, then in more considerable bodies, lastly in dense forests. A very curious variety of juniper made its appearance: it was very stunted, grew prone to the ground, and until approached closely might be mistaken for a bed of moss. In the protecting solitude of these frozen peaks, lakes of melted snow were frequent; upon their pellucid surface ducks swam gracefully, admiring their own reflection.

We did not get across the snowy range that night, but were compelled to bivouac two or three miles from it, in a sheltered nook offering fairly good grass for the mules, and any amount of fuel and water for our own use. There might be said to be an excess of timber, as for more than six miles we had crawled as best we could through a forest of tall pines and firs, uprooted by the blasts of winter. Game trails were plenty enough, but we did not see an animal of any kind; neither could we entice the trout which were jumping to the surface of the water, to take hold of the bait offered them. General Crook returned with a black-tailed deer and the report that the range as seen from the top of one of the lofty promontories to which he had climbed appeared to be studded with lakelets similar to the ones so near our bivouac. We slashed pine branches to make an odorous and elastic mattress, cut fire-wood for the cook, and aided in the duty of preparing the supper for which impatient appetites were clamoring. We had hot strong coffee, bacon and venison sliced thin and placed in alternate layers on twigs of willow and frizzled over the embers, and bread baked in a frying-pan.

Our appetites, ordinarily good enough, had been aggravated by the climb of twelve miles in the keen mountain air, and although epicures might not envy us our food, they certainly would have sighed in vain for the pleasure with which it was devoured. After supper, each officer staked his mule in a patch of grass which was good and wholesome, although not equal to that of the lower slopes, and then we gathered around the fire for the post-prandial chat prior to seeking blankets and repose, which fortunately was not disturbed by excessive cold or the bites of mosquitoes, the twin annoyances of these great elevations. We arose early next morning to begin a march of great severity, which taxed to the utmost the strength, nervous system, and patience of riders and mules; much fallen timber blocked the trail, the danger of passing this being increased a hundredfold by boulders of granite and pools of unknown depth; the leaves of the pines had decayed into a pasty mass of peat, affording no foothold to the pedestrian or horseman, and added the peril of drowning in a slimy ooze to the terrors accumulated for the intimidation of the explorer penetrating these wilds.

We floundered along in the trail made by our Shoshones on their way back to their own homes, and were the first white men, not connected with that band of Indians, who had ever ascended to this point. Immense blocks of granite, some of them hundreds of feet high, towered above us, with stunted pine clinging to the scanty soil at their bases; above all loomed the majestic rounded cone of the Cloud Peak, a thousand feet beyond timber line. The number of springs increased so much that it seemed as if the ground were oozing water from every pore; the soil had become a sponge, and travel was both difficult and dangerous; on all sides were lofty banks of snow, often pinkish in tint; the stream in the pass had diminished in breadth, but its volume was unimpaired as its velocity had trebled. At every twenty or thirty feet of horizontal distance there was a cascade of no great height, but so choked up with large fragments of granite that the current, lashed into fury, foamed like milk. The sun’s rays were much obscured by the interlacing branches of the majestic spruce and fir trees shading the trail, and the rocky escarpments looming above the timber line. We could still see the little rivulet dancing along, and hear it singing its song of the icy granite peaks, the frozen lakes, and piny solitudes that had watched its birth. The “divide,” we began to congratulate ourselves, could not be far off; already the pines had begun to thin out, and the stragglers still lining the path were dwarfed and stunted. Our pretty friend, the mountain brook, like a dying swan, sang most sweetly in its last moments; we saw it issue from icy springs above timber line, and bade it farewell to plunge and flounder across the snow-drifts lining the crest. In this last effort ourselves and animals were almost exhausted. On the “divide” was a lake, not over five hundred yards long, which supplied water to the Big Horn on the west and the Tongue on the east side of the range. Large cakes and floes of black ice, over a foot in thickness, floated on its waters. Each of these was covered deep with snow and regelated ice.

It was impossible to make camp in this place. There was no timber—nothing but rocks and ice-cold water, which chilled the hands dipped into it. Granite and granite alone could be seen in massy crags, timberless and barren of all trace of vegetation, towering into the clouds, in bold-faced ledges, the home of the mountain sheep; and in cyclopean blocks, covering acres upon acres of surface. Continuing due west we clambered over another ridge of about the same elevation, and as deep with snow and ice, and then saw in the distance the Wind River range, one hundred and thirty miles to the west. With some difficulty a way was made down the flank of the range, through the asperous declivities of the cañon of “No Wood” Creek, and, after being sated with the monotonous beauties of precipices, milky cascades, gloomy forests, and glassy springs, the welcome command was given to bivouac.