We traded our hides to Springer for provisions, ammunition, etc. Here I was fortunate enough to get me two fair suits of underwear, stockings, boots, and such necessaries as I was in need of.
Springer told us he thought there was no danger of the Indians bothering us before spring; thought we were perfectly safe to go anywhere except to cross the one-hundredth meridian, which was the line between the Indian Territory and the Panhandle of Texas. He said: "If you are caught over the line you will be arrested by some deputy United States Marshal and put to lots of trouble." But we had no desire to go that way at the time.
The next day we hauled over to Springer all the hides we had on hand, receiving $2.50 for the old bull-hides, $3 for the choice robe cow-hides, and $1.75 each for all the others.
Buck and I found a place four miles southwest of the Springer ranch, about two hundred yards from the river, on the south side, and at the mouth of a dry sand creek, where there was a large grove of cottonwood timber, and in the sand creek at the south end of the grove were several holes of fresh water. Here we decided to build a log cabin, it being the first house built on the South Canadian river, in the Panhandle of Texas, inhabited by a pale-face family. While cutting the logs and building this cabin, we occasionally killed a straggling buffalo, until we had on hand the day we moved into the house (which we were more than two weeks in building), thirty-one hides.
These we hauled to Springer, and while there we met a party of regular buffalo-hunters. They informed us that the great mass of the buffaloes was south of the Red river, and that there would be no profitable buffalo-hunting here until the next May or June. Here I was fortunate enough to buy of one of these hunters a Sharp's 44-caliber rifle, reloading outfit, belt, and 150 shells. The man had used the gun only a short time, and seventy-five of the shells had never been loaded. I got the gun and his interest in the entire buffalo range for thirty-six dollars, he having met with the misfortune of shooting himself seriously, but not fatally, in the right side with the same gun which proved a "hoodoo" to me as the hunters afterwards sometimes remarked. It was an elegant fine-sighted gun, with buckhorn sights.
Wild turkeys were plentiful all about our cabin, and were so tame that it was no trouble at all to kill them in daytime, and in bright moonlight nights one could get up close to their roosts, and by getting them between the hunter and the moon, they were frequently shot from the trees.
On the north side of the river from the cabin, and a half-mile or so from the river was quite a grove of persimmon trees, some of them twenty-five or thirty feet high, and some with trunks eight inches in diameter. About the time we first commenced the building of the cabin the fruit must have been in its prime, but when we found them they were nearly gone.
This particular morning that we found it we had crossed the river on horseback and were riding north toward the hills to look for chance buffalo, when Buck's attention was attracted toward the grove, which was on our left about two hundred yards from us.
"Look! look! See how that tree shakes." We stopped, and presently saw a violent trembling or shaking of another tree some little distance from the first. "John," said he, "that's a 'simmon grove and that's a bear in there."
We had seen bear-tracks along the river-bars several times while building the cabin. He told me to keep around the right of the grove between it and the hills.