With Sully into the Sioux Land

by Joseph Mills Hanson

"Yes, I saw him," interrupted Al. "There are just six days' full rations left now."

"That's what he said when he came back," Wallace continued. "He was a good deal worked up, and told the guides they must find a way for the army to march straight west from here across the Little Missouri. But all of them said it was impossible, except one Yanktonais. He declared he had been back and forth across the Bad Lands of the Little Missouri a number of times on hunting expeditions, and he is sure he can lead the army through if some digging is done in the worst places to make a road for the wagons and artillery."

"Just one man?" exclaimed Al. "My gracious! suppose he should lead us into a trap?"

Wallace shrugged his shoulders.

"Well, of course, he might," he agreed. "But what else can be done? There are not rations enough to last over the other route, nor even enough to take us back to Fort Rice. Anyway, the General has decided to trust this chap and make the attempt and we shall start up Heart River to-morrow morning. You know our rations are to be cut down from one-half to one-third, so as to make them last."

"Yes, I know," answered Al. "We were issuing reduced rations this evening. I hope we are not going to run into an ambush," he added. "But there is no doubt General Sully knows what he is doing; he always does."

That evening the troops were paraded and heard the General's congratulatory orders on their conduct in the recent battle. Soon after, they retired to rest, and it seemed that but a few moments had passed in this refreshing occupation when reveille called them up to their labors again. The advance guard soon moved out, followed by the military wagon train with strong columns of troops of the Second Brigade on each flank, the First Brigade bringing up the rear. Then with much confusion and shouting, the Montana emigrant train finally got under way and moved out of the intrenched camp, leaving the latter to lie, with parapets slowly crumbling under the rains of summer and the blizzards of winter, an object of curiosity and vague uneasiness to straggling Indians and prowling wolves.

For three days the army pushed steadily westward up the valley of the Heart, through a pleasant country whose hills often showed the outcroppings of large veins of coal. Each night's camp was made in a spot well supplied with water, grass, and wood, and the men began to believe that the terrors of the country ahead, so vividly described by the Indian guides, had no existence save in the imaginations of the latter. No hostiles were seen, but the column passed one camp ground, recently abandoned, which showed the sites of several hundred lodges; so no one could doubt that the stealthy enemy was still in the neighborhood and probably watching the progress of the column closely.

Toward evening on August 5, the third day of the march, the advance guard on arriving at the crest of a hill, similar to dozens of other hills they had crossed that day, suddenly came to a halt. The troops behind them could see by their gestures of excitement that they had discovered something unusual ahead. The army and the trains were halted and the General rode forward to the advance guard, accompanied by his staff.

When they reached the crest of the hill and looked out beyond it, not a man spoke for a moment, though at the first glance a few uttered ejaculations of astonishment or dismay and then became silent. Before them in the brilliant sunlight and lengthening shadows of late afternoon spread a scene of such weird and desolate grandeur as has few parallels in the world. Six hundred feet below lay the bottom of a vast basin, apparently twenty-five or thirty miles in diameter. From rim to rim it was piled with cones and pyramids of volcanic rock or baked clay and other hills of every imaginable fantastic shape, some of the peaks rising to a level with the surrounding country and some lower, but all glowing with confused and varied color, from gray and yellow to blue and brick red. Over all this huge, extinct oven of what had doubtless been, sometime in ages gone, a great coal bed which had burned out, hardly a sign of vegetation was visible save here and there a few small, straggling cedars or bushes on the barren hillsides. The place resembled strongly the ruins of some mighty, prehistoric city, but more strongly still it reminded the beholder of some of Dante's vivid descriptions of the infernal regions.