“Well,” said the person addressed as “general” (by the way, you could have bought generals there as they buy hobnails) “I have had a pretty sharp run. Ten or fifteen Indians began running me after crossing the Blue Fork. They fired three or four shots at me. Here’s the mark of one,” he continued, pointing to a bullet-hole in the body of the red buggy. “They came mighty near getting me. And they would have got me were it not for Old Whity here.” And he patted the white horse affectionately.
Thus the Indian Question, at the very outset, was brought home to the bosoms of the passengers by the Misty Mountain coach. They asked many questions of the “general.” The Indian agent—who had never seen an Indian of the wild tribes in his life—made a pretence of experience, and offered a few suggestions. But a few remarks from the stock-tenders at the dug-out stable raised a laugh at his expense, and he “was squelched for the rest of the trip,” as the conductor expressed it.
The conductor and the driver looked to their Henry rifles, and hurriedly inventoried the arms in the party. The Indian agent had a double-barrelled shot-gun—both barrels unloaded—no ammunition; the congressman had a diminutive five-shooter which would scarcely have tickled a papoose—five barrels unloaded, one round of cartridges on hand, no reserve ammunition; the divine, the ladies, and the small boy were unarmed; the reader’s humble servant had one six-shooter—Colt’s navy pattern—with half-a-dozen rounds of ammunition for the same. This weapon he had never yet used. He was not fully enlightened as to the modus of loading it. It was in the reader’s humble servant’s trunk at the bottom of the pile of baggage which towered behind the coach. Of course, he didn’t wish to give the conductor or the driver the trouble of changing the luggage. With remarkable good nature, he preferred going out defenceless to troubling these gentlemen. Like most human feelings, however, this one was perhaps not quite pure. It must be owned the idea crossed his mind that it was as well not to introduce the factor of premature explosion into the quantity of danger to which he was about to be exposed.
We changed mules and started. Everybody saw Indians for the first few miles. But the objects appearing as Indians to our excited vision had been so often pronounced by the conductor to be “soap-weeds,” “old buffalo carcasses,” etc., that the number seen began greatly to diminish. Once we thought there was no doubt about it. They came dashing along in “Indian file,” fifteen or twenty in number, directly toward us. I felt “very queer.” Here were Indians now, not a doubt about it. I was seized by a sudden desire to have something to shoot with. I mentally resolved, if I got out of this scrape alive, never again to travel unarmed in an Indian country.
“Antelope,” remarked the conductor.
Antelope it was; a herd of fifteen or twenty. They crossed the road a few hundred yards in front of us.
We had travelled about five miles without an incident or a sight to break the monotony of the waste around us, when above a rising ground before us the Stars and Stripes, relieved against the sky, gladdened our eyes. How that sight revived us! We remembered that “the home of the brave” was our home; and I think that, if Indians had appeared at that moment, or within five minutes thereafter, we would have received them in heroic attitudes. But they did not appear.
As we ascended the ridge between us and Fort Jones, that post came gradually into view. It looked to us like a collection of very miserable “shanties” dropped down haphazard on the prairie.
A large stone building—the hospital, the conductor informed me—was in course of erection. It seemed larger than all the rest of the post put together. The officers’ quarters were such constructions as we have seen inhabited by the squatters on the vacant lots up-town in New York or in “Jackson’s Hollow” in Brooklyn.
The “Fort” disappointed me very much. I expected to enter the guarded precincts over a drawbridge and under an arched portcullis. But Fort Jones was destitute of ditch, rampart, or parapet, and uninclosed by stockade, palisade, or even by a common board fence. The coach drove up to the sutler’s store—there the post-office was established—without let or hindrance from warder or sentinel.