On the Border with Crook

by John Gregory Bourke

In personal appearance General Crook was manly and strong; he was a little over six feet in height, straight as a lance, broad and square-shouldered, full-chested, and with an elasticity and sinewiness of limb which betrayed the latent muscular power gained by years of constant exercise in the hills and mountains of the remoter West.

In his more youthful days, soon after being graduated from the Military Academy, he was assigned to duty with one of the companies of the Fourth Infantry, then serving in the Oregon Territory. It was the period of the gold-mining craze on the Pacific coast, and prices were simply prohibitory for all the comforts of life. Crook took a mule, a frying-pan, a bag of salt and one of flour, a rifle and shotgun, and sallied out into the wilderness. By his energy and skill he kept the mess fully supplied with every kind of wild meat—venison, quail, duck, and others—and at the end of the first month, after paying all the expenses on account of ammunition, was enabled from the funds realized by selling the surplus meat to miners and others, to declare a dividend of respectable proportions, to the great delight of his messmates.

His love for hunting and fishing, which received its greatest impetus in those days of his service in Oregon and Northern California, increased rather than diminished as the years passed by. He became not only an exceptionally good shot, but acquired a familiarity with the habits of wild animals possessed by but few naturalists. Little by little he was induced to read upon the subject, until the views of the most eminent ornithologists and naturalists were known to him, and from this followed in due sequence a development of his taste for taxidermy, which enabled him to pass many a lonesome hour in the congenial task of preserving and mounting his constantly increasing collection of birds and pelts.

There were few, if any, of the birds or beasts of the Rocky Mountains and the country west of them to the waters of the Pacific, which had not at some time furnished tribute to General Crook’s collection. In the pursuit of the wilder animals he cared nothing for fatigue, hunger, or the perils of the cliffs, or those of being seized in the jaws of an angry bear or mountain lion.

He used to take great, and, in my opinion, reprehensible risks in his encounters with grizzlies and brown bears, many of whose pelts decorated his quarters. Many times I can recall in Arizona, Wyoming, and Montana, where he had left the command, taking with him only one Indian guide as a companion, and had struck out to one flank or the other, following some “sign,” until an hour or two later a slender signal smoke warned the pack-train that he had a prize of bear-meat or venison waiting for the arrival of the animals which were to carry it back to camp.

Such constant exercise toughened muscle and sinew to the rigidity of steel and the elasticity of rubber, while association with the natives enabled him constantly to learn their habits and ideas, and in time to become almost one of themselves.

If night overtook him at a distance from camp, he would picket his animal to a bush convenient to the best grass, take out his heavy hunting-knife and cut down a pile of the smaller branches of the pine, cedar, or sage-brush, as the case might be, and with them make a couch upon which, wrapped in his overcoat and saddle-blanket, he would sleep composedly till the rise of the morning star, when he would light his fire, broil a slice of venison, give his horse some water, saddle up and be off to look for the trail of his people.

His senses became highly educated; his keen, blue-gray eyes would detect in a second and at a wonderful distance the slightest movement across the horizon; the slightest sound aroused his curiosity, the faintest odor awakened his suspicions. He noted the smallest depression in the sand, the least deflection in the twigs or branches; no stone could be moved from its position in the trail without appealing at once to his perceptions. He became skilled in the language of “signs” and trails, and so perfectly conversant with all that is concealed in the great book of Nature that, in the mountains at least, he might readily take rank as being fully as much an Indian as the Indian himself.

There never was an officer in our military service so completely in accord with all the ideas, views, and opinions of the savages whom he had to fight or control as was General Crook. In time of campaign this knowledge placed him, as it were, in the secret councils of the enemy; in time of peace it enabled him all the more completely to appreciate the doubts and misgivings of the Indians at the outset of a new life, and to devise plans by which they could all the more readily be brought to see that civilization was something which all could embrace without danger of extinction.

But while General Crook was admitted, even by the Indians, to be more of an Indian than the Indian himself, it must in no wise be understood that he ever occupied any other relation than that of the older and more experienced brother who was always ready to hold out a helping hand to the younger just learning to walk and to climb. Crook never ceased to be a gentleman. Much as he might live among savages, he never lost the right to claim for himself the best that civilization and enlightenment had to bestow. He kept up with the current of thought on the more important questions of the day, although never a student in the stricter meaning of the term. His manners were always extremely courteous, and without a trace of the austerity with which small minds seek to hedge themselves in from the approach of inferiors or strangers. His voice was always low, his conversation easy, and his general bearing one of quiet dignity.