CROSSING THE PLAINS.
I left Fairbury, Livingston county, Illinois, March 4, 1864, in company with James Gibb, John Jackson, James Martin, and Sam Dempster and wife, destined for the new gold fields in Idaho, for the Territory of Montana had not then been created.
Our mode of traveling was with a four-horse team and a farm wagon. A great portion of Illinois and Iowa was then but sparsely settled; we would travel for hours without seeing any signs of habitation. The roads were very bad through those states; and it took us twenty-five days to come to Council Bluffs, which was then but a small frontier settlement. An old man, one of the inhabitants of the place, called my attention to two small hills on the bluff above the village and said: “It was there General Fremont, with his men, held a council before crossing the river to traverse the plains to California, and from this incident the town derives its name.” We crossed the Missouri on a ferry boat. Omaha had scarcely twelve hundred people. Here we made up a train of sixty-five wagons, some drawn by oxen. It was a mixed train as far as the destination was concerned. Some were going to California, Oregon, Washington, and Salt Lake, but mostly to the new gold diggings in Idaho. We were to travel together as far as Utah.
Our trail was on the north side of the North Platte river as far as Fort Laramie, following most of the way the surveying stakes on the line of the Union Pacific Railway. For several hundred miles, while we traveled in the Platte river valley, we passed over fine land for agriculture. Here we met a great many Indians of the Pawnee tribe, but all appeared to be friendly. I was approached by one of them, who came and asked me to give him some coffee; he was over six feet tall, and had a very large bow and arrows. I made a mark on a big cottonwood tree and stepped off fifty paces and told him if he put an arrow in that mark I would give him some coffee. At once he began sending his arrows, every one piercing the tree about two inches in depth, and the fourth one into the center of the mark. I gave him his coffee. On another occasion I put my hat on a bunch of sage brush for two Indian boys to shoot at for a piece of bread; the next thing I knew there was an arrow through my hat. Several days, when traveling in this valley, not a stick of timber of any kind could be had; the only fuel we could obtain was buffalo chips which were abundant.
The mail carrier told us that after passing a place called “Pawnee Swamp,” which was about fifty miles west of Fort Kearney, we would be in the Cheyenne and Sioux country, and that those Indians were very hostile to the whites. It was two days after we crossed this line before we saw an Indian. The third morning at day break, when I was on guard, I discovered one from a distance who was coming towards our camp. I kept watching him; finally he came to me and spoke, at the same time making signs; of course I did not understand either. While going on with his gibberish and making those motions with his hands he stepped up and patted me on the breast and on my vest pocket. I told him in plain English that he was getting a little too familiar for a stranger, and to keep away from me. Then he picked up a stem of some dried weed about the size of a match and scratched it on a stone as a person would when lighting a match. This convinced me that he wanted some matches. I gave him half a dozen and he thanked me, or at least I thought he did, for he gave a kind of grunt with a faint smile and went back in the direction he came from.
In the afternoon of the same day we crossed a small creek; on its bank there was a newly made grave in which a young woman twenty-two years of age had been laid to rest. At the head of the grave, for a head-board, a round stick, which had been used at one time for a picket pin, was placed, and on this some unskilled hand had written with a pencil “In memory of ——,” the name I could not decipher, but the words “dear daughter” were plainly written, which indicated that there was a parent present to kiss her marble brow before it was lowered into the silent tomb. This instance made a deep impression on me then when viewing that lonely grave in the heart of the wilderness and thinking of its occupant, who possibly was once the center star in some lovable family, but was left there alone in her earthen couch to sleep and rest forever; and when, on the coming of spring, no one would be there to even pluck wild flowers and lay them on the grave of the unfortunate young traveler. What more sorrowful sight could there be than witnessing those parents leaving that sacred spot before continuing their westward journey, and, when on that ridge, taking the last look at the little mound by the winding brook in the valley below? Here the curtain drops on this pitiful scene; the emigrant train is out of sight and all is over.
At Fort Laramie we met the noted frontiersman, John Bozeman, after whom the city of Bozeman, Montana, was named. He sought to organize a train to take a cut-off route east of the Big Horn mountains. There was also a man by the name of McKnight, who was a trader at this place. He had two wagons loaded with goods for Alder Gulch, each wagon being drawn by four fine mules, and he was getting up a train to go west of the Big Horn mountains and through the Wind River country. McKnight said to me that he wanted about one hundred wagons and about five hundred good, resolute, determined men and they would get through all right. I told him that there were five of us, and that we would accompany him. There were scores of wagons passing Laramie every day and most of them were bound for the new gold diggings.
The first day we got twenty wagons to join the McKnight train, and we pulled out about a quarter of a mile in the direction we were to travel. This new camp was a kind of “refinery;” here one and all might consider the perils, dangers and privations likely to be encountered. The faint-hearted ones took the safer route by way of the South Pass. However, in a few days we had four hundred and fifty men and over one hundred wagons. We were aware that we were going to travel through several hundred miles of an untrodden wilderness, where Red Cloud and Sitting Bull reigned over twenty or twenty-five thousand savages, so it was very necessary for us to be well armed and organized. Before starting we took a vote and selected a captain and two lieutenants, and a committee of three to examine every one and see if he was prepared with guns, sufficient ammunition, and if his outfit was substantial enough to make the trip. A paper was drawn in which was inserted a provision that we were to stand by and defend each other at all hazards; to this we all signed our names. We realized that it was a perilous undertaking, but we pressed onward. We depended a great deal on our guide. He was a tall, well-built, straight, dark-complexioned, resolute and intelligent man; he was reared in Canada and had been in the employ of the Hudson’s Bay Company. He was a famous scout and versed in the language of every Indian tribe from the Platte to the Saskatchewan, and was both feared and respected by all. He was a brave and true man, whose tact and courage, on more than one occasion, resulted in avoiding trouble with hostile redskins.