Next morning Jim and I went to the place agreed upon. We were mounted and had our guns all ready for business, and in a few minutes there were forty-three men all mounted and anxious to go with us on the hunt for Antelope.
Jim told them that the hunting ground was eight or ten miles away from camp, and he said, "I will guarantee that you will see a thousand Antelope today. Now we will all travel together until we begin to see the Antelope."
The place called Truckee Meadows was about twenty miles long and ten miles wide and very level and covered with the tallest sage brush in all the country around and with an abundance of fine grass. We crossed the Truckee river just below where the city of Reno now stands, and then we struck out south east, Jim and I taking the lead and the others following us.
When we were about five miles from camp, I discovered a band of Antelope. They were probably a half a mile from us, and they were feeding in a northeasterly direction. I called Jim's attention to them at once. After he got a good look at them, he said, "I will bet my old hat that there is a thousand Antelope in that band."
We stopped our horses and waited for all the crowd to come up to us, and Jim pointed to the Antelope, saying, "There is your game. Did you ever see a prettier sight? Now my friends, I want every one of you to have an Antelope across your saddle when we go back to camp. It don't make any difference who kills it so we all have an Antelope."
Jim then turned to me and said, "Will, do you see that open ridge yonder?" and he pointed to a low ridge about a mile from us right in the direction towards which the Antelope were feeding. I told him, yes, I saw it. He then said, "I will take all the men but you and two others, and I will station them all along on that little ridge at the edge of sage brush. Now, Will, you pick out your two men and ride clear around the south end of the band, and when they start to run towards us, crowd them as hard as you can, but give us time to locate before you start the band."
My men and I rode probably a mile and a half before we got around the herd, and it looked to us as if the whole valley was covered with Antelope. I told the men not to shoot at first, but to give a whoop or two to get them started and then to crowd them for all they were worth, and when the Antelope got to the open ridge to shoot.
In a few minutes, after we started the herd of Antelope, we heard the guns of Jim and his men, and it sounded as if they kept up a continual fire. When we struck the opening, I told the boys to get all the Antelope they could, and we had a plenty to choose from, for there were hundreds in the herd ahead of us. I fired my rifle and knocked one down, and then I pulled my pistol and got another. Just then I heard someone shouting at the top of his voice just ahead of me. I looked to see who it was and saw Jim Bridger, shaking his hat at me. I held up my horse so I could hear what he said. He cried, "For pity's sake, Will, don't kill any more Antelope, for we have more now than we can carry to camp."
I called my men to me, and we rode to where Jim and his men were waiting for us. Jim said, "Will, I have been in the Antelope country twenty years most of the time, and I never saw so many Antelope together at one time as I saw here this morning; why, there must be fifty or seventy-five laying around here at this minute, that we have shot, and you would not miss them out of the herd."
One of the men said, "It did not need any skill with the rifle, that hunt, for a blind man could not help hitting one of them, for as far as I could see, there was a mass of Antelope."