For three hours plans were discussed, and it was finally determined to go to work with shovels and picks, but not until after Christmas. Our caravan included a blacksmith's forge, also a regular wrecking outfit, and in a short time big wooden shovels were made from blocks of pine with handles stoutly attached with iron bands.
The cook was a youth of twenty and had all the enthusiasm of the adventurer. He had spent a year on a whaler and knew what it meant to drift in the ice north of Point Barrow. This present situation, he said, was a picnic; so was the one in the Arctic. It couldn't be so bad that he wished to be snuggled away in a feather bed somewhere east of the Missouri River. That would be too ordinary.
"If I could sit down to a table at the best hotel in the land," he said, "I'd prefer to eat the dinner that I'm going to cook for you fellows tomorrow."
Williams sneered. "Yes," he said, "we put old Tex (a long-horn bull) out of his starving misery and the boys have found his liver to be O. K. Maybe you can give us a liver pie."
"I'll do better than that," said the boy; "I'll not only give you a beef stew, but a pudding that you can't buy outside of London or Liverpool—a plum duff—and a cake. Old Tex will also be on the menu in several places, for his tenderloin looks good, and there are a few steaks which, when properly treated with a maul on the top of a stump, will be as good as you will get in a 'Frisco water front lodging, and better than any of you fellows have had since we hit the drifts."
I have eaten meals that mother used to cook, I've been famished during a sea voyage, and devoured a Norwegian sailor's pea soup; I've participated in several real banquets in New York; I've dined at Delmonico's and at Sherry's, at Young's in Boston, and I've feasted in a circus cook tent; but my Christmas dinner in the foothills of Wyoming in 1874, under the circumstances I have but faintly described, still is a fond memory and holds the record as the best meal I ever ate. It was as follows:
MENU
Marrowbone Soup—"Tex" Water Cress
Beef Stew—"Tex"
Hamburg Steak—"Tex"
Planked Porterhouse Steak—"Tex"
Tenderloin Steak-"Tex" Roast Beef—"Tex"
Corn Bread Wheat Bread
English Plum Pudding—Hard and Soft Sauce
Raisins Cake Coffee Tea
(No butter or milk) (Lots of salt and pepper)
The corn bread was made from meal milled by the cook from shelled corn in the cargo. The "plums" were raisins, of which the cook had a few pounds. He used wheat flour, baking powder and grease saved from the final ration of the bacon which gave out a week before Christmas. The hard sauce was made with sugar and grease and a flavoring extract. The soft or liquid sauce contained a "remedy" requisitioned from a homeopathic quantity found in the wagon-boss' medicine chest—a few spoonfuls of brandy. The watercress was found two miles away at a spring. The boys called it "pepper grass." There it was fresh and green, protected by spring water which never freezes, and in some places it was peeping out from the edge of the snow at the brookside.
And now about whisky. There were sixty men in this camp, and in one of the big wagons were three barrels of whisky, but it belonged to the post trader at Fort Fetterman, and it was a tradition not even broken on this exceptional passage from Medicine Bow on the U. P. to Fort Fetterman on the North Platte that a consignment of hard liquor was as safe in a bull train as it would be anywhere on earth, and that it would reach its destination untouched. Few men drank intoxicants on these trips. It was a crime to be found with whisky, punishable by banishment from camp, and that might have meant death. But at both ends of the journey—that's another story.