With Sully into the Sioux Land

by Joseph Mills Hanson

On the third day out from the Yellowstone the boat passed Fort Berthold, a fur trading post and the agency of the Arickaree and Mandan Indians, about midway between Fort Union and Fort Rice. For some hours afterward she continued running at a good speed, and at length passed a little below a beautiful forest on the left shore, called the Painted Woods. At this point there was a large sandbar in the middle of the river, while on the bank opposite to the woods the bluffs came sheer up to the river, and the pilot naturally chose the branch of the stream along their base, as the main channel will usually follow along a bluff bank. But in this case he soon found he had made a mistake, for he ran the boat into a pocket and could go no farther. There remained nothing to do but send out the yawl to sound through the other branch and find out if there was enough water there to carry the boat.

It occurred to Al that it would be a pleasant diversion to accompany the yawl, so he volunteered to pull one of the oars, and was accepted. The mate of the Belle Peoria, who was in charge of the yawl, ran into the other chute and soon found the channel; whereupon he signalled across the bar to the steamer, and while she was backing out and coming around, the crew of the yawl rowed over to the lower end of the Painted Woods and landed. The men pulled the boat's bow a little way out on the bank and then strolled away a few yards into the woods, where it was cool and shady. One man only remained in the yawl, and he, like Al, was a volunteer. He was Jim, the Island City's deck hand who had quarrelled with Al on the up trip. In spite of several attempts to escape while near Fort Union, Jim had been unable to jump his round-trip contract with Captain Lamont, and was now reluctantly returning toward St. Louis and that Southern Confederacy which he supported so loudly in words and so feebly in deeds.

The men who had landed, namely, the mate and Al, four other oarsmen and the leadsman, had been in the woods but a minute or two when, without the least warning, a dozen musket shots rang out from the bushes around them, instantly followed by a chorus of terrifying Indian war whoops. Two of the oarsman fell dead at the first fire; the rest of the party turned and dashed for the boat. But several Indians had crept between them and the landing and a moment elapsed before the mate and Al, who had their revolvers, could drive them back far enough to reach the shore. When they did so, to their horror they discovered the yawl out in mid-stream and some little distance down, rapidly drifting toward the bar. Jim was not to be seen, for he was lying flat in the bottom of the boat to escape the Indian bullets, but he was evidently pulling the rudder ropes to guide the yawl as nearly as possible to the bar. The Belle Peoria had caught the alarm, and her decks were swarming with armed men; but she was just rounding the head of the bar and was still farther away than the yawl, so that her people dared not fire on the Indians for fear of hitting their own men on the bank.

"We'll have to swim for it, boys!" shouted the mate, and flinging off his coat he dived into the river like a duck and struck out for the bar, keeping beneath the surface except when he had to come up for a second to breathe.

Al and the other men followed his example. It was not more than fifty yards to the bar but every inch of the way was fraught with deadly peril. Whenever he came to the surface to breathe, as he had to several times, Al heard the bullets whistling about his head. Once he heard another oarsman, a few feet from him, give a gurgling cry and saw his hands thrust up and clutch the air as he sank, struck by one of the merciless bullets. Before the survivors reached the bar, the fire of those on the steamer had driven the Indians back into the Painted Woods, with probably a greater loss than they had inflicted upon the crew of the yawl, though of the latter, one had drowned and one been shot in the water, besides the two killed on shore at the first fire.

When the survivors were safely back on the Belle Peoria, the mate stepped up to Jim, who had landed in the yawl at the lower end of the bar, and shouted,

"You scoundrel, you ran away and left us to shift for ourselves, didn't you? I've a mind to throw you overboard."

"I didn't run away," snarled Jim. "The yawl slipped off the bank and I couldn't get it back."

Backing up against a stanchion he faced the angry mate and the crowd behind him like a desperate animal at bay and cast one swift, venomous glance at Al which caused the latter to feel a sudden suspicion.

"Did you think you'd get rid of me that way?" he demanded, confronting the deck hand. "Were you willing to see six other men murdered just to get even with me?"