The ride of the next two days brought us again to rising ground, the approach to Pryor's Gap. On the 13th I rode on ahead with George Houston, and had an unsuccessful buffalo-hunt. We saw about forty head, but by no device could we get near enough for effective shooting. I had, however, the luck to kill a buck antelope and two does. Rejoining the command in great triumph, I found Jump, to my amusement, waving over his head a red cotton umbrella which some wandering Crow had dropped on the trail. The umbrella being, from the Crow point of view, a highly-prized ornament, it was not strange to find it on our trail. In an evil moment I asked Jump to hand it to me. As he did so it fell, open, over the nose of my cayoose. As to what happened I decline to explain: there have been many calumnies concerning what Mr. Jump called "that 'ere horse-show."
On this day we rode through the last range of considerable hills, past a vast rock which meant "medicine" of some kind for the Indian, as its clefts were dotted with sacrificial beads, arrows and bits of calico. A brief scramble and a long descent carried us through Pryor's Gap, and out again on to boundless plains, thick with the fresh dung of the buffaloes, which must have been here within two days and been hurried southward by Crow hunting-parties. This to our utter disgust, as we had been promised abundance of buffalo beyond Pryor's Gap.
A thirty-mile march brought us to a poor camp by a marshy stream. Man and beast showed the effects of the alkaline waters, which seemed to me more nasty every day. There is no doubt, however, that it is possible to become accustomed to their use, and no lands are more capable of cultivation than these if the water be sufficient for irrigation. The camp was enlivened by an adventure of the major's, which revenged for us his atrocious habit of rising at 3 a. m. and saying "Now, gentlemen!" as he stood relentless at the tent-doors. C. and I had found a cañon near by about one hundred feet deep and having a good bathing stream. As we returned toward it at evening we saw the gallant major standing barelegged on the edge of the cañon, gesticulating wildly, his saddle-bags and toilette matters far below beside the creek. Still suffering with the sunburn, he had been cooling his feet in the water preparatory to a bath, when, lo! a bear standing on his hind legs eating berries at a distance of only about fifteen feet! The major promptly availed himself of the shelter offered by the bank of the stream; but once there, how was he to escape unseen? The water was cold, the bear big, the major shoeless. Perhaps a bark simulative of a courageous dog might induce the bear to leave. No doubt, under such inspirations, it was well done. The bear, amazed at the resources of the army, fled—alas! not pursued by the happy major, who escaped up the cañon-wall, leaving his baggage to a generous foe, which took no advantage of comb or toothbrush. How the whole outfit turned out to hunt that bear, and how he was never found, I have not space to tell more fully.
All of twelve hours the next day we rode on under a blinding sunlight, a cloudless sky, over dreary, rolling, dusty plains, where the only relief from dead grasses was the gray sage-brush and cactus, from the shelter of which, now and again, a warning rattle arose or a more timid snake fled swiftly through the dry grasses. Tinted cones of red and brown clays or toadstool forms of eroded sandstone added to the strange desolateness of the view; so that no sorrow was felt when, after forty miles of it, we came upon a picturesque band of Crows with two chiefs, Raw Hide and Tin Belly.
It was an amazing sight to fresh eyes—the clever ponies, these bold-featured, bareheaded, copper-tinted fellows with bead-decked leggins, gay shirts or none, and their rifles slung in brilliantly-decorated gun-covers across the saddle-bows. We rode down the bluffs with them to the flat valley of Beauvais Creek, where a few lodges were camped with the horses, twelve hundred or more, in a grove of lordly cottonwood—a wild and picturesque sight. Tawny squaws surrounded us in crowds, begging. A match, a cartridge, anything but a quill toothpick, was received with enthusiasm. I rode ahead to the ford of the Beauvais Creek, and met the squaws driving in the cayooses. Altogether, it was much like a loosely-organized circus. Our own camp being set, we took our baths tranquilly, watched by the squaws seated like men on their ponies. One of them kindly accepted a button and my wornout undershirt.
The cottonwood tree reigns supreme throughout this country wherever there is moisture, and marks with its varied shades of green the sinuous line of every water-course. Despised even here as soft and easily rotted, "warping inside out in a week," it is valuable as almost the sole resource for fuel and timber, and as making up in speed of growth for a too ready rate of decay. Four or five years' growth renders it available for rails, and I should think it must equal the eucalyptus for draining moist lands. Many a pretty face is the more admired for its owner's wealth, and were the now-despised cottonwood of greater market-value it could not, I think, have escaped a reputation for beauty. A cottonwood grove of tall trees ten to eighteen feet in diameter, set twenty to forty feet apart, with dark-green shining leaves spreading high in air over a sod absolutely free of underbrush, struck such of us as had no Western prejudices as altogether a noble sight. Between Forts Custer and Keogh the cottonwoods are still finer, and what a mocking-bird is among birds are these among trees—now like the apple tree, now like the olive, now resembling the cork or the red-oak or the Lombardy poplar, and sometimes quaintly deformed so as to exhibit grotesque shapes,—all as if to show what one tree can do in the way of mimicking its fellows.
To our delight, General Sheridan's old war-scout, Mr. Campbell, rode in with letters at dusk, and we had the happiness to learn that our long absence had made ill news for none of us. By six next day we were up and away to see the great Crow camp, which we reached by crossing a long ford of the swift Big Horn River. There were one hundred and twenty lodges, about one thousand Crows, about two thousand dogs and as many ponies. I think it was the commissary who dared to say that every dog could not have his day among the Crows, as there would not be enough days to go round; but surely never on earth was such a canine chorus. It gave one a respect for Crow nerves. Let me add, as a Yankee, my veneration for the Crow as a bargainer, and you will have the most salient ideas I carried away from this medley of dogs, horses, sullen, lounging braves with pipes, naked children warmly clad with dirt, hideous squaws, skin lodges, medicine-staffs gay with bead and feathers, and stenches for the describing of which civilized language fails.
Crossing a branch of the Big Horn, we rode away again over these interminable, lonely grass-plains; past the reaping-machines and the vast wagons, with a dozen pairs of oxen to each, sent out to gather forage for the winter use of the fort; past dried-up streams, whitewashed with snowy alkaline deposits, cheating the eye at a distance with mockery of foaming water. Still, mile on mile, across rolling lands, with brief pause at the river to water horses, scaring the gay little prairie-dogs and laughing at the swift scuttle away of jack-rabbits, until by noon the long lines of Custer came into sight.
These three days of sudden descent from high levels to the terrible monotony of the thirsty plains, without shade, with the thermometer still in the nineties, began to show curiously in the morale of the outfit. The major got up earlier and rode farther: our English captain walked more and more around the camp-fire. On one day the coffee gave out, and on the next the sugar, and everything except the commissary's unfailing good-humor, which was, unluckily, not edible. Mr. T. rode in silence beside the judge, grimly calculating how soon he could get a railroad over these plains. Even the doctor fell away in the "talk" line. Says Mr. Jump: "These 'ere plains ain't as social as they might be." Some one is responsible for the following brief effort to evolve in verse the lugubrious elements of a ride over alkali plains with failing provender, weary horses, desiccating heat and quenchless thirst:
Silent and weary and sun-baked, we rode o'er the alkaline grass-plains,
Into and out of the coolies and through the gray green of the sage-brush—
All the long line of the horses, with jingle of spur and of bridle,
All the brown line of the mule-train, tired and foot-sore and straggling;
Nothing to right and to left, nothing before and behind us,
Save the dry yellowing grass, and afar on the hazy horizon,
Sullen, and grim, and gray, sunburnt, monotonous sand-heaps.
So we rode, sombre and listless, day after day, while the distance
Grew as we rode, till the eyeballs ached with the terrible sameness.