The summer that I was fourteen father shipped me off to the Black Hills for a camping trip with Seth Bullock. I had often seen him in the East, so the tall, spare figure and the black Stetson were familiar to me when the Captain boarded the train a few stations before reaching Deadwood. Never shall I forget the romance of that first trip in the West. It was all new to me. Unfortunately I had to leave for the East for the start of school before the opening of the deer season; but we caught a lot of trout, and had some unsuccessful bear-hunts—hunts which were doomed to unsuccess before they started, but which supplied the requisite thrill notwithstanding. All we ever found of the bear was their tracks, but we had a fleeting glimpse of a bobcat, and that was felt amply to repay any amount of tramping. Our bag consisted of one jack-rabbit. The Captain told us that we were qualified to join a French trapper whom he had known. The Frenchman was caught by an unusually early winter and snowed in away off in the hills. In the spring, a good deal to every one’s surprise, he turned up, looking somewhat thin, but apparently totally unconcerned over his forced hibernation. When asked what he had lived on, he replied: “Some day I keel two jack-rabeet, one day one, one day none!”
The Captain and I took turns at writing my diary. I find his entry for August 26:
Broke camp at Jack Boyden’s on Sand Creek at 6.30 A. M., and rode via Redwater Valley and Hay Creek to Belle Fourche, arriving at the S. B. ranch at two o’clock; had lunch of cold cabbage; visited the town; returned to camp at five P. M.; had supper at the wagon and fought mosquitoes until ten o’clock.
Broke camp and rode via Owl Creek divide and Indian Creek through several very large towns inhabited chiefly by prairie dogs, to our camp on Porcupine Creek. Fought mosquitoes from 3 A. M. to breakfast time.
I had long been an admirer of Bret Harte, and many of the people I met might have stepped from the pages of his stories. There was the old miner with twenty-two children, who couldn’t remember all their names. His first wife had presented him with ten of them, but when he married again he had told his second wife that it was his initial venture in matrimony. He gave a vivid description of the scene when some of the progeny of his first marriage unexpectedly put in an appearance. Time had smoothed things over, and the knowledge of her predecessor had evidently only acted as a spur to greater deeds, as exemplified in the twelve additions to the family.
Then there was the old lady with the vinegar jug. She was the postmistress of Buckhorn. We had some difficulty in finding the post-office, but at length we learned that the postmistress had moved it fifteen miles away, to cross the State border, in order that she might live in Wyoming and have a vote. We reached the shack to find it deserted, but we had not long to wait before she rode in, purple in the face and nearly rolling off her pony from laughter. She told us that she had got some vinegar from a friend, and while she was riding along the motion exploded the jug, and the cork hit her in the head; what with the noise and the blow she made sure the Indians were after her, and rode for her life a couple of miles before she realized what had happened.
What could have surpassed the names of the trails along which we rode and the canyons in which we camped? There was Hidden Treasure Gulch and Calamity Hollow, and a score more equally satisfying. That first trip was an immense success, and all during the winter that followed whenever school life became particularly irksome I would turn to plans for the expedition that we had scheduled for the next summer.
When the time to leave for the West arrived I felt like an old stager, and indulged for the first time in the delight of getting out my hunting outfit, deciding what I needed, and supplementing my last summer’s rig with other things that I had found would be useful. Like all beginners I imagined that I required a lot for which I had in reality no possible use. Some men always set off festooned like Christmas-trees, and lose half the pleasure of the trip through trying to keep track of their belongings. They have special candles, patented lanterns, enormous jack-knives with a blade to fulfil every conceivable purpose, rifles and revolvers and shotguns galore; almost anything that comes under the classification of “it might come in handy.” The more affluent hunter varies only in the quality and not the quantity of his “gadjets.” He usually has each one neatly tucked away in a pigskin case. The wise man, however, soon learns that although anything may “come in handy” once on a trip, you could even on that occasion either get along without it or find a substitute that would do almost as well. It is surprising with what a very little one can make out perfectly comfortably. This was a lesson which I very quickly learned from the Captain.
The second trip that we took was from Deadwood, South Dakota, to Medora, North Dakota. I had never seen the country in which father ranched, and Seth Bullock decided to take me up along the trail that father had been travelling when they met for the first time.
We set off on Friday the 13th, and naturally everything that happened was charged up to that inauspicious day. We lost all our horses the first night, and only succeeded in retrieving a part of them. Thereafter it started in raining, and the gumbo mud became all but impassable for the “chuck-wagon.” The mosquitoes added to our misery, and I find in my diary in the Captain’s handwriting a note to the effect that “Paul shot three mosquitoes with a six-shooter. Stanley missed with a shotgun.”