[53] From the St. Joseph (Mo.) Gazette: “Obituary.—Departed this life, at his residence in this city, on Wednesday, the 29th day of August, 1860, after a long illness, Antoine Robidoux, in the sixty-sixth year of his age. Mr. Robidoux was born in the city of St. Louis, in the year 1794. He was one of the brothers of Mr. Joseph Robidoux, founder of the city of St. Joseph. He was possessed of a sprightly intellect and a spirit of adventure. When not more than twenty-two years of age he accompanied Gen. Atkinson to the then very wild and distant region of the Yellow Stone. At the age of twenty-eight he went to Mexico, and lived there fifteen years. He then married a very interesting Mexican lady, who returned with him to the States. For many years he traded extensively with the Navajoes and Apaches. In 1840 he came to this city with his family, and has resided here ever since. In 1845 he went out to the mountains on a trading expedition, and was caught by the most terrible storms, which caused the death of one or two hundred of his horses, and stopped his progress. His brother Joseph, the respectable founder of this city, sent to his relief and had him brought in, or he would have perished. He was found in a most deplorable condition, and saved. In 1846 he accompanied Gen. Kearney, as interpreter and guide, to Mexico. In a battle with the Mexicans he was lanced severely in three places, but he survived his wounds, and returned to St. Joseph in 1849. Soon after that he went to California, and remained until 1854. In 1855 he removed to New Mexico with his family, and in 1856 he went to Washington, and remained there a year, arranging some business with the government. He then returned to St. Joseph, and has remained here ever since. Mr. Robidoux was a very remarkable man. Tall, slender, athletic, and agile, he possessed the most graceful and pleasing manners, and an intellect of a superior order. In every company he was affable, graceful, and highly pleasing. His conversation was always interesting and instructive, and he possessed many of those qualities which, if he remained in the States, would have raised him to positions of distinction. He suffered for several years before his death with a terrible soreness of the eyes, which defied the curative skill of the doctors; and for the past ten years he has been afflicted with dropsy. A week or two ago he was taken with a violent hemorrhage of the lungs, which completely prostrated him, and from the effects of which he never recovered. He was attended by the best medical skill, and his wife and many friends were with him to the hour of his dissolution, which occurred on Monday morning, at four o’clock, at his residence in this city. He will be long remembered as a courteous, cultivated, agreeable gentleman, whose life was one of great activity and public usefulness, and whose death will be long lamented.”
SCOTT’S BLUFFS.
SCOTT’S BLUFFS.“Scott’s Bluffs,” situated 285 miles from Fort Kearney and 51 from Fort Laramie, was the last of the great marl formations which we saw on this line, and was of all by far the most curious. In the dull uniformity of the prairies, it is a striking and attractive object, far excelling the castled crag of Drachenfels or any of the beauties of romantic Rhine. From a distance of a day’s march it appears in the shape of a large blue mound, distinguished only by its dimensions from the detached fragments of hill around. As you approach within four or five miles, a massive medieval city gradually defines itself, clustering, with a wonderful fullness of detail, round a colossal fortress, and crowned with a royal castle. Buttress and barbican, bastion, demilune, and guard-house, tower, turret, and donjon-keep, all are there: in one place parapets and battlements still stand upon the crumbling wall of a fortalice like the giant ruins of Château Gaillard, the “Beautiful Castle on the Rock;” and, that nothing may be wanting to the resemblance, the dashing rains and angry winds have cut the old line of road at its base into a regular moat with a semicircular sweep, which the mirage fills with a mimic river. Quaint figures develop themselves; guards and sentinels in dark armor keep watch and ward upon the slopes, the lion of Bastia crouches unmistakably overlooking the road; and as the shades of an artificial evening, caused by the dust-storm, close in, so weird is its aspect that one might almost expect to see some spectral horseman, with lance and pennant, go his rounds about the deserted streets, ruined buildings, and broken walls. At a nearer aspect again, the quaint illusion vanishes; the lines of masonry become yellow layers of boulder and pebble imbedded in a mass of stiff, tamped, bald marly clay; the curtains and angles change to the gashings of the rains of ages, and the warriors are metamorphosed into dwarf cedars and dense shrubs, scattered singly over the surface. Travelers have compared this glory of the mauvaises terres to Gibraltar, to the Capitol at Washington, to Stirling Castle. I could think of nothing in its presence but the Arabs’ “City of Brass,” that mysterious abode of bewitched infidels, which often appears at a distance to the wayfarer toiling under the burning sun, but ever eludes his nearer search.
Scott’s Bluffs derive their name from an unfortunate fur-trader there put on shore in the olden time by his boat’s crew, who had a grudge against him: the wretch, in mortal sickness, crawled up the mound to die. The politer guide-books call them “Capitol Hills:” methinks the first name, with its dark associations, must be better pleasing to the genius loci. They are divided into three distinct masses. The largest, which may be 800 feet high, is on the right, or nearest the river. To its left lies an outwork, a huge, detached cylinder whose capping changes aspect from every direction; and still farther to the left is a second castle, now divided from, but once connected with the others. The whole affair is a spur springing from the main range, and closing upon the Platte so as to leave no room for a road.
After gratifying our curiosity we resumed our way. The route lay between the right-hand fortress and the outwork, through a degraded bed of softer marl, once doubtless part of the range. METEOROLOGICAL PHENONMENON.The sharp, sudden torrents which pour from the heights on both sides, and the draughty winds—Scott’s Bluffs are the permanent head-quarters of hurricanes—have cut up the ground into a labyrinth of jagged gulches steeply walled in. We dashed down the drains and pitch-holes with a violence which shook the nave-bands from our sturdy wheels.[54] Ascending, the driver showed a place where the skeleton of an “elephant” had been lately discovered. On the summit he pointed out, far over many a treeless hill and barren plain, the famous Black Hills and Laramie Peak, which has been compared to Ben Lomond, towering at a distance of eighty miles. The descent was abrupt, with sudden turns round the head of earth-cracks deepened to ravines by snow and rain; and one place showed the remains of a wagon and team which had lately come to grief. After galloping down a long slope of twelve miles, with ridgelets of sand and gravel somewhat raised above the bottom, which they cross on their way to the river, we found ourselves, at 5 30 P.M., once more in the valley of the Platte. I had intended to sketch the Bluffs more carefully from the station, but the western view proved to be disappointingly inferior to the eastern. After the usual hour’s delay we resumed our drive through alternate puffs of hot and cold wind, the contrast of which was not easy to explain. The sensation was as if Indians had been firing the prairies—an impossibility at this season, when whatever herbage there is is still green. It may here be mentioned that, although the meteorology of the earlier savans, namely, that the peculiar condition of the atmosphere known as the Indian summer[55] might be produced by the burning of the plain-vegetation, was not thought worthy of comment, their hypothesis is no longer considered trivial. The smoky canopy must produce a sensible effect upon the temperature of the season. “During a still night, when a cloud of this kind is overhead, no dew is produced; the heat which is radiated from the earth is reflected or absorbed, and radiated back again by the particles of soot, and the coating of the earth necessary to prevent the deposition of water in the form of dew or hoar-frost is prevented.” According to Professor Henry, of Washington, “it is highly probable that a portion of the smoke or fog-cloud produced by the burning of one of the Western prairies is carried entirely across the eastern portion of the continent to the ocean.”
[54] The dry heat of the prairies in summer causes the wood to warp by the percolation of water, which the driver restores by placing the wheels for a night to stand in some stream. Paint or varnish is of little use. Moisture may be drawn out even through a nail-hole, and exhaust the whole interior of the wood-work.
[55] These remarks are borrowed from a paper by Professor Joseph Henry, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, entitled “Meteorology in its Connection with Agriculture.”
The Indian summer is synonymous with our St. Martin’s or Allhallows summer, so called from the festival held on the 11th of November. “The Indians avail themselves of this delightful time for harvesting their corn; and the tradition is that they were accustomed to say they always had a second summer of nine days before the winter set in. It is a bland and genial time, in which the birds, insects, and plants feel a new creation, and enjoy a short-lived summer ere they shrink finally from the rigor of the winter’s blast. The sky, in the mean time, is generally filled with a haze of orange and gold, intercepting the direct rays of the sun, yet possessing enough of light and heat to prevent sensations of gloom or chill, while the nights grow sharp and frosty, and the necessary fires give cheerful forecast of the social winter evenings near at hand.”—The National Intelligencer, Nov. 26th, 1857, quoted by Mr. Bartlett.
Presently we dashed over the Little Kiowa Creek, forded the Horse Creek, and, enveloped in a cloud of villainous musquetoes, entered at 8 30 P.M. the station in which we were to pass the night. It was tenanted by one Reynal, a French Creole—the son of an old soldier of the Grand Armée, who had settled at St. Louis—a companionable man, but an extortionate: he charged us a florin for every “drink” of his well-watered whisky. The house boasted of the usual squaw, a wrinkled old dame, who at once began to prepare supper, when we discreetly left the room. These hard-working but sorely ill-favored beings are accused of various horrors in cookery, such as grinding their pinole, or parched corn, in the impurest manner, kneading dough upon the floor, using their knives for any purpose whatever, and employing the same pot, unwashed, for boiling tea and tripe. In fact, they are about as clean as those Eastern pariah servants who make the knowing Anglo-Indian hold it an abomination to sit at meat with a new arrival or with an officer of a “home regiment.” The daughter was an unusually fascinating half-breed, with a pale face and Franco-American features. How comes it that here, as in Hindostan, the French half-caste is pretty, graceful, amiable, coquettish, while the Anglo-Saxon is plain, coarse, gauche, and ill-tempered? The beauty was married to a long, lean down-Easter, who appeared most jealously attentive to her, occasionally hinting at a return to the curtained bed, where she could escape the admiring glances of strangers. Like her mother, she was able to speak English, but she could not be persuaded to open her mouth. This is a truly Indian prejudice, probably arising from the savage, childish sensitiveness which dreads to excite a laugh; even a squaw married to a white man, after uttering a few words in a moment of épanchement, will hide her face under the blanket.