The natural goodness of the young girl's nature, fostered by the teachings of her guardian mother, thus exerted itself to save three lives from the assassin's stroke.
She gladly accompanied the lady on her route the following morning, and ever remained her attached protegé.
Montana is one of the newest and wildest of our territories. Its position so far to the north and the peculiarly rugged face of the country, make it the fitting abode for the genius of the storms. Gathering their battalions the tempests sweep the summits and whirling round the flanks of the mountains, roar through the deep, lonely gorges with a sound louder than the ocean surges in a hurricane. The snows fill the ravines in drifts one hundred feet in depth, and such are the rigors of winter that the women who live in the fur-trading posts on that section of our northern border, are often carried across the mountains into Oregon or Washington territory, to shield them from the severities of the inclement season.
Late in the fall of 1868, a party consisting of thirty soldiers, while faring on through the mountains of that territory, were overtaken by one of these fearful snowstorms. The wind blew from the north directly in their faces, and the snow was soon piled in drifts which put a thorough embargo upon their further progress. Selecting the fittest place that could be found they pitched their tents on the snow, but hardly had they fastened the tent ropes when a blast lifted the tents in a moment, and whirled them into the sky. After a night of great suffering they found in the morning that all their mules were missing. They had probably strayed or been driven by the fury of the blast into a deep ravine south of the camp, where they had been buried beneath the enormous drifts.
The storm raged and the snow fell nearly all day. The rations were all gone, and progress against the wind and through the drifts was impossible. Another night of such bitter cold and exposure would in all probability be their last.
They shouted in unison, but their shouts were drowned in the shrieks of the tempest. Towards night the storm lulled and again they shouted, but no sound came back but the sigh of the blast. Help! help! they cried. Unhappy men, could help come to them except from on high! What was left to them but to wind their martial cloaks around them and die like soldiers in the path of duty!
But what God-sent messenger is this coming through the drifts to meet them? Not a woman! Yes, a poor, weak woman has heard their despairing cry and has hastened to succor them. Drenched and shivering with the storm she told them to follow her, and conducted them to a recess in the crags, where beneath an overhanging ledge and between projecting cliffs, a spacious shelter was afforded them. They crowded in and warmed their numbed limbs before a great fire, while their preserver brought out her stores of food for the wayfarers.
But how could a woman be there in the heart of the mountains in the wintry weather, with only the storm to speak to her?
Her husband was a miner and she a brave and self-reliant woman. He had left her two weeks before to carry his treasure of gold dust to the nearest settlement She was all alone! Alone in that rock-encompassed cabin in the realms of desolation, and still the heroine-guardian who had snatched thirty fellow beings from the jaws of death.
Solitude is the theatre where untold thousands of devoted women—the brave, the good, the loving—for ages past have acted their unviewed and unrecorded dramas in the great battle of frontier life. Warriors and statesmen have their need of praise, and crowds surround them to throw the wreath of laurel or of bay upon their fainting brows, or to follow their plumed hearse to the mausoleum which a grateful people has raised to their memory.