Chapter IV: Part 4

We must pass by Kit’s capture of a gang of thirty-five desperadoes for the sake of a better story. The officer, commanding a detachment of troops on the march, flogged an Indian chief, the result being war. Carson was the first white man to pass, and while the chiefs were deciding how to attack his caravan, he walked alone into the council lodge. So many years were passed since the Cheyennes had seen him that he was not recognized, and nobody suspected that he knew their language, until he made a speech in Cheyenne, introducing himself, recalling ancient friendships, offering all courtesies. As to their special plan for killing the leader of the caravan, and taking his scalp, he claimed that he might have something to say on the point. They parted, Kit to encourage his men, the Indians to waylay the caravan; but from the night camp he despatched a Mexican boy to ride three hundred miles for succor. When the Cheyennes charged the camp at dawn, he ordered them to halt, and walked into the midst of them, explaining the message he had sent, and what their fate would be if the troops found they had molested them. When the Indians found the tracks that proved Kit’s words, they knew they had business elsewhere.

In 1863 Carson was sent with a strong military force to chasten the hearts of the Navajo nation. They had never been conquered, and the flood of Spanish invasion split when it rolled against their terrific sand-rock desert. The land is one of unearthly grandeur where natural rocks take the shapes of towers, temples, palaces and fortresses of mountainous height blazing scarlet in color. In one part a wave of rock like a sea breaker one hundred fifty feet high and one hundred miles in length curls overhanging as though the rushing gray waters had been suddenly struck into ice. On one side lies the hollow Painted Desert, where the sands refract prismatic light like a colossal rainbow, and to the west the walls of the Navajo country drop a sheer mile into the stupendous labyrinth of the Grand Cañon. Such is the country of a race of warriors who ride naked, still armed with bow and arrows, their harness of silver and turquoise....

They are handsome, cleanly, proud and dignified. They till their fields beside the desert springs, and their villages are set in native orchards, while beyond their settlements graze the flocks and herds tended by women herders.

The conquest was a necessity, and it was well that this was entrusted to gentle, just, wise, heroic Carson. He was obliged to destroy their homes, to fell their peach trees, lay waste their crops, and sweep away their stock, starving them to surrender. He herded eleven thousand prisoners down to the lower deserts, where the chiefs crawled to him on their bellies for mercy, but the governor had no mercy, and long after Carson’s death, the hapless people were held in the Boique Redondo. A fourth part of them died of want, and their spirit was utterly broken before they were given back their lands. It is well for them that the Navajo desert is too terrible a region for the white men, and nobody tries to rob their new prosperity.

In one more campaign Colonel Carson was officer commanding and gave a terrible thrashing to the Cheyennes, Kiowas and Comanches.

Then came the end, during a visit to a son of his who lived in Colorado. Early in the morning of May twenty-third, 1868, he was mounting his horse when an artery broke in his neck, and within a few moments he was dead.

But before we part with the frontier hero, it is pleasant to think of him still as a living man whose life is an inspiration and his manhood an example.

Colonel Inman tells of nights at Maxwell’s ranch. “I have sat there,” he writes, “in the long winter evenings when the great room was lighted only by the crackling logs, roaring up the huge throats of its two fireplaces ... watching Maxwell, Kit Carson and half a dozen chiefs silently interchange ideas in the wonderful sign language, until the glimmer of Aurora announced the advent of another day. But not a sound had been uttered during the protracted hours, save an occasional grunt of satisfaction on the part of the Indians, or when we white men exchanged a sentence.”

XIV

A. D. 1845

THE MAN WHO WAS A GOD

John Nicholson was a captain in the twenty-seventh native infantry of India. He was very tall, gaunt, haggard, with a long black beard, a pale face, lips that never smiled, eyes which burned flame and green like those of a tiger when he was angry. He rarely spoke.

Once in a frontier action he was entirely surrounded by the enemy when one of his Afghans saw him in peril from a descending sword. The Pathan sprang forward, received the blow, and died. In a later fight Nicholson saw that warrior’s only son taken prisoner, and carried off by the enemy. Charging alone, cutting a lane with his sword, the officer rescued his man, hoisted him across the saddle, and fought his way back. Ever afterward the young Pathan, whose father had died for Nicholson, rode at the captain’s side, served him at table with a cocked pistol on one hand, slept across the door of his tent. By the time Nicholson’s special service began he had a personal following of two hundred and fifty wild riders who refused either to take any pay or to leave his service.

So was he guarded, but also a sword must be found fit for the hand of the greatest swordsman in India. The Sikh leaders sent out word to their whole nation for such a blade as Nicholson might wear. Hundreds were offered and after long and intricate tests three were found equally perfect, two of the blades being curved, one straight. Captain Nicholson chose the straight sword, which he accepted as a gift from a nation of warriors.

This man was only a most humble Christian, but the Sikhs, observing the perfection of his manhood, supposed him to be divine, and offered that if he would accept their religion they would raise such a temple in his honor as India had never seen. Many a time while he sat at work in his tent, busy with official papers, a dozen Sikh warriors would squat in the doorway silent, watching their god. He took no notice, but sometimes a worshiper, overcome with the conviction of sin, would prostrate himself in adoration. For this offense the punishment was three dozen lashes with the cat, but the victims liked it. “Our god knew that we had been doing wrong, and, therefore, punished us.”

There is no need to explain the Indian mutiny to English readers. It is burned deep into our memory that in 1857 our native army, revolting, seized Delhi, the ancient capital, and set up a descendant of the Great Mogul as emperor of India. The children, the women, the men who were tortured to death, or butchered horribly, were of our own households. Your uncle fought, your cousin fell, my mother escaped. Remember Cawnpore!

Nicholson at Peshawur seized the mails, had the letters translated, then made up his copies into bundles. At a council of officers the colonels of the native regiments swore to the loyalty of their men, but Nicholson dealt out his packages of letters to them all, saying, “Perhaps these will interest you.”

The colonels read, and were chilled with horror at finding in their trusted regiments an abyss of treachery. Their troops were disarmed and disbanded.

To disarm and disperse the native army throughout Northwestern India a flying column was formed of British troops, and Nicholson, although he was only a captain, was sent to take command of the whole force with the rank of brigadier-general. There were old officers under him, yet never a murmur rose from them at that strange promotion.

Presently Sir John Lawrence wrote to Nicholson a fierce official letter, demanding, “Where are you? What are you doing? Send instantly a return of court-martial held upon insurgent natives, with a list of the various punishments inflicted.”

Nicholson’s reply was a sheet of paper bearing his present address, the date, and the words, “The punishment of mutiny is death.” He wanted another regiment to strengthen his column, and demanded the eighty-seventh, which was guarding our women and children in the hills. Lawrence said these men could not be spared. Nicholson wrote back, “When an empire is at stake, women and children cease to be of any consideration whatever.” What chance had they if he failed to hold this district?

Nicholson’s column on the march was surrounded by his own wild guards riding in couples, so that he, their god, searched the whole country with five hundred eyes. After one heart-breaking night march he drew up his infantry and guns, then rode along the line giving his orders: “In a few minutes you will see two native regiments come round that little temple. If they bring their muskets to the ‘ready,’ fire a volley into them without further orders.”

As the native regiments appeared from behind the little temple, Nicholson rode to meet them. He was seen to speak to them and then they grounded their arms. Two thousand men had surrendered to seven hundred, but had the mutineers resisted Nicholson himself must have perished between two fires. He cared nothing for his life.

Only once did this leader blow mutineers from the guns, and then it was to fire the flesh and blood of nine conspirators into the faces of a doubtful regiment. For the rest he had no powder to waste, but no mercy, and from his awful executions of rebels he would go away to hide in his tent and weep.

He had given orders that no native should be allowed to ride past a white man. One morning before dawn the orderly officer, a lad of nineteen, seeing natives passing him on an elephant, ordered them sharply to dismount and make their salaam. They obeyed--an Afghan prince and his servant, sent by the king of Cabul as an embassy to Captain Nicholson. Next day the ambassador spoke of this humiliation. “No wonder,” he said, “you English conquer India when mere boys obey orders as this one did.”

Nicholson once fought a Bengal tiger, and slew it with one stroke of his sword; but could the English subdue this India in revolt? The mutineers held the impregnable capital old Delhi--and under the red walls lay four thousand men--England’s forlorn hope--which must storm that giant fortress. If they failed the whole population would rise. “If ordained to fail,” said Nicholson, “I hope the British will drag down with them in flames and blood as many of the queen’s enemies as possible.” If they had failed not one man of our race would have escaped to the sea.

Nicholson brought his force to aid in the siege of Delhi, and now he was only a captain under the impotent and hopeless General Wilson. “I have strength yet,” said Nicholson when he was dying, “to shoot him if necessary.”

The batteries of the city walls from the Lahore Gate to the Cashmere Gate were manned by Sikh gunners, loyal to the English, but detained against their will by the mutineers. One night they saw Nicholson without any disguise walk in at the Lahore Gate, and through battery after battery along the walls he went in silence to the Cashmere Gate, by which he left the city. At the sight of that gaunt giant, the man they believed to be an incarnate god, they fell upon their faces. So Captain Nicholson studied the defenses of a besieged stronghold as no man on earth had ever dared before. To him was given command of the assault which blew up the Cashmere Gate, and stormed the Cashmere breach. More than half his men perished, but an entry was made, and in six days the British fought their way through the houses, breaching walls as they went until they stormed the palace, hoisted the flag above the citadel, and proved with the sword who shall be masters of India.

But Nicholson had fallen. Mortally wounded he was carried to his tent, and there lay through the hot days watching the blood-red towers and walls of Delhi, listening to the sounds of the long fight, praying that he might see the end before his passing.

Outside the tent waited his worshipers, clutching at the doctors as they passed to beg for news of him. Once when they were noisy he clutched a pistol from the bedside table, and fired a shot through the canvas. “Oh! Oh!” cried the Pathans, “there is the general’s order.” Then they kept quiet. Only at the end, when his coffin was lowered into the earth, these men who had forsaken their hills to guard him, broke down and flung themselves upon the ground, sobbing like children.

Far off in the hills the Nicholson fakirs--a tribe who had made him their only god--heard of his passing. Two chiefs killed themselves that they might serve him in another world; but the third chief spoke to the people: “Nickelseyn always said that he was a man like as we are, and that he worshiped a God whom he could not see, but who was always near us. Let us learn to worship Nickelseyn’s God.” So the tribe came down from their hills to the Christian teachers at Peshawur, and there were baptized.

XV

A. D. 1853

THE GREAT FILIBUSTER

William Walker, son of a Scotch banker, was born in Tennessee, cantankerous from the time he was whelped. He never swore or drank, or loved anybody, but was rigidly respectable and pure, believed in negro slavery, bristled with points of etiquette and formality, liked squabbling, had a nasty sharp tongue, and a taste for dueling. The little dry man was by turns a doctor, editor and lawyer, and when he wanted to do anything very outrageous, always began by taking counsel’s opinion. He wore a black tail-coat, and a black wisp of necktie even when in 1853 he landed an army of forty-five men to conquer Mexico. His followers were California gold miners dressed in blue shirts, duck trousers, long boots, bowie knives, revolvers and rifles. After he had taken the city of La Paz by assault, called an election and proclaimed himself president of Sonora, he was joined by two or three hundred more of the same breed from San Francisco. These did not think very much of a leader twenty-eight years old, standing five feet six, and weighing only nine stone four, so they merrily conspired to blow him up with gunpowder, and disperse with what plunder they could grab. Mr. Walker shot two, flogged a couple, disarmed the rest without showing any sign of emotion. He could awe the most truculent desperado into abject obedience with one glance of his cool gray eye, and never allowed his men to drink, play cards, or swear. “Our government,” he wrote, “has been formed upon a firm and sure basis.”

The Mexicans and Indians thought otherwise, for while the new president of Sonora marched northward, they gathered in hosts and hung like wolves in the rear of the column, cutting off stragglers, who were slowly tortured to death. Twice they dared an actual attack, but Walker’s grim strategies, and the awful rifles of despairing men, cut them to pieces. So the march went on through hundreds of miles of blazing hot desert, where the filibusters dropped with thirst, and blew their own brains out rather than be captured. Only thirty-four men were left when they reached the United States boundary, the president of Sonora, in a boot and a shoe, his cabinet in rags, his army and navy bloody, with dried wounds, gaunt, starving, but too terrible for the Mexican forces to molest. The filibusters surrendered to the United States garrison as prisoners of war.

Just a year later, with six of these veterans, and forty-eight other Californians, Walker landed on the coast of Nicaragua. This happy republic was blessed at the time with two rival presidents, and the one who got Walker’s help very soon had possession of the country. As hero of several brilliant engagements, Walker was made commander-in-chief, and at the next election chosen by the people themselves as president. He had now a thousand Americans in his following, and when the native statesmen and generals proved treacherous, they were promptly shot. Walker’s camp of wild desperadoes was like a Sunday-school, his government the cleanest ever known in Central America, and his dignity all prickles, hard to approach. He depended for existence on the services of Vanderbilt’s steamship lines, but seized their warehouse for cheating. He was surrounded by four hostile republics, Costa Rica, San Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, and insulted them all. He suspended diplomatic relations with the United States, demanded for his one schooner-of-war salutes from the British navy, and had no sense of humor whatsoever. Thousands of brave men died for this prim little lawyer, and tens of thousands fell by pestilence and battle in his wars, but with all his sweet unselfishness, his purity, and his valor, poor Walker was a prig. So the malcontents of Nicaragua, and the republics from Mexico to Peru, joined the steamship company, the United States and Great Britain to wipe out his hapless government.

The armies of four republics were closing in on Walker’s capital, the city of Granada. He marched out to storm the allies perched on an impregnable volcano, and was carrying his last charge to a victorious issue, when news reached him that Zavala with eight hundred men had jumped on Granada. He forsook his victory and rushed for the capital city.

There were only one hundred and fifty invalids and sick in the Granada garrison to man the church, armory and hospital against Zavala, but the women loaded rifles for the wounded and after twenty-two hours of ghastly carnage, the enemy were thrown out of the city. They fell back to lie in Walker’s path as he came to the rescue. Walker saw the trap, carried it with a charge, drove Zavala back into the city, broke him between two fires, then sent a detachment to intercept his flight. In this double battle, fighting eight times his own force, Walker killed half the allied army.

But the pressure of several invasions at once was making it impossible for Walker to keep his communication open with the sea while he held his capital. Granada, the most beautiful of all Central American cities, must be abandoned, and, lest the enemy win the place, it must be destroyed. So Walker withdrew his sick men to an island in the big Lake Nicaragua; while Henningsen, an Englishman, his second in command, burned and abandoned the capital.

But now, while the city burst into flames, and the smoke went up as from a volcano, the American garrison broke loose, rifled the liquor stores and lay drunk in the blazing streets, so the allied army swooped down, cutting off the retreat to the lake. Henningsen, veteran of the Carlist and Hungarian revolts, a knight errant of lost causes, took three weeks to fight his way three miles, before Walker could cover his embarkment on the lake. There had been four hundred men in the garrison, but only one hundred and fifty answered the roll-call in their refuge on the Isle of Omotepe. In the plaza of the capital city they had planted a spear, and on the spear hung a rawhide with this inscription:--

“Here was Granada!”

In taking that heap of blackened ruins four thousand out of six thousand of the allies had perished; but even they were more fortunate than a Costa Rican army of invasion, which killed fifty of the filibusters, at a cost of ten thousand men slain by war and pestilence. It always worked out that the killing of one filibuster cost on the average eight of his adversaries.

Four months followed of confused fighting, in which the Americans slowly lost ground, until at last they were besieged in the town of Rivas, melting the church bells for cannon-balls, dying at their posts of starvation. The neighboring town of San Jorge was held by two thousand Costa Ricans, and these Walker attempted to dislodge. His final charge was made with fifteen men into the heart of the town. No valor could win against such odds, and the orderly retreat began on Rivas. Two hundred men lay in ambush to take Walker at a planter’s house by the wayside, and as he rode wearily at the head of his men they opened fire from cover at a range of fifteen yards. Walker reined in his horse, fired six revolver-shots into the windows, then rode on quietly erect while the storm of lead raged about him, and saddle after saddle was emptied. A week afterward the allies assaulted Rivas, but left six hundred men dead in the field, so terrific was the fire from the ramparts.

It was in these days that a British naval officer came under flag of truce from the coast to treat for Walker’s surrender.

“I presume, sir,” was the filibuster’s greeting, “that you have come to apologize for the outrage offered to my flag, and to the commander of the Nicaraguan schooner-of-war _Granada_.”

“If they had another schooner,” said the Englishman afterward, “I believe they would have declared war on Great Britain.”

Then the United States navy treated with this peppery little lawyer, and on the first of May, 1857, he grudgingly consented to being rescued.

During his four years’ fight for empire, Walker had enlisted three thousand five hundred Americans--and the proportion of wounds was one hundred and thirty-seven for every hundred men. A thousand fell. The allied republics had twenty-one thousand soldiers and ten thousand Indians--and lost fifteen thousand killed.

Two years later, Walker set out again with a hundred men to conquer Central America, in defiance of the British and United States squadrons, sent to catch him, and in the teeth of five armed republics. He was captured by the British, shot by Spanish Americans upon a sea beach in Honduras, and so perished, fearless to the end.

XVI

A. D. 1857

BUFFALO BILL

The Mormons are a sect of Christians with some queer ideas, for they drink no liquor, hold all their property in common, stamp out any member who dares to think or work for himself, and believe that the more wives a man has the merrier he will be. The women, so far as I met them are like fat cows, the men a slovenly lot, and not too honest, but they are hard workers and first-rate pioneers.

Because they made themselves unpopular they were persecuted, and fled from the United States into the desert beside the Great Salt Lake. There they got water from the mountain streams and made their land a garden. They only wanted to be left alone in peace, but that was a poor excuse for slaughtering emigrants. Murdering women and children is not in good taste.

The government sent an army to attend to these saints, but the soldiers wanted food to eat, and the Mormons would not sell, so provisions had to be sent a thousand miles across the wilderness to save the starving troops. So we come to the herd of beef cattle which in May, 1857, was drifting from the Missouri River, and to the drovers’ camp beside the banks of the Platte.

A party of red Indians on the war-path found that herd and camp; they scalped the herders on guard, stampeded the cattle and rushed the camp, so that the white men were driven to cover under the river bank. Keeping the Indians at bay with their rifles, the party marched for the settlements wading, sometimes swimming, while they pushed a raft that carried a wounded man. Always a rear guard kept the Indians from coming too near. And so the night fell.

“I, being the youngest and smallest,” says one of them, “had fallen behind the others.... When I happened to look up to the moonlit sky, and saw the plumed head of an Indian peeping over the bank.... I instantly aimed my gun at his head, and fired. The report rang out sharp and loud in the night air, and was immediately followed by an Indian whoop; and the next moment about six feet of dead Indian came tumbling into the river. I was not only overcome with astonishment, but was badly scared, as I could hardly realize what I had done.”

Back came Frank McCarthy, the leader, with all his men. “Who fired that shot?”

“I did.”

“Yes, and little Billy has killed an Indian stone-dead--too dead to skin!”

At the age of nine Billy Cody had taken the war-path.

In those days the army had no luck. When the government sent a herd of cattle the Indians got the beef, and the great big train of seventy-five wagons might just as well have been addressed to the Mormons, who burned the transport, stole the draft oxen and turned the teamsters, including little Billy, loose in the mountains, where they came nigh starving. The boy was too thin to cast a shadow when in the spring he set out homeward across the plains with two returning trains.

One day these trains were fifteen miles apart when Simpson, the wagon boss, with George Woods, a teamster, and Billy Cody, set off riding mules from the rear outfit to catch up the teams in front. They were midway when a war party of Indians charged at full gallop, surrounding them, but Simpson shot the three mules and used their carcasses to make a triangular fort. The three whites, each with a rifle and a brace of revolvers were more than a match for men with bows and arrows, and the Indians lost so heavily that they retreated out of range. That gave the fort time to reload, but the Indians charged again, and this time Woods got an arrow in the shoulder. Once more the Indians retired to consult, while Simpson drew the arrow from Woods’ shoulder, plugging the hole with a quid of chewing tobacco. A third time the Indians charged, trying to ride down the stockade, but they lost a man and a horse. Four warriors had fallen now in this battle with two men and a little boy, but the Indians are a painstaking, persevering race, so they waited until nightfall and set the grass on fire. But the whites had been busy with knives scooping a hole from whence the loose earth made a breastwork over the dead mules, so that the flames could not reach them, and they had good cover to shoot from when the Indians charged through the smoke. After that both sides had a sleep, and at dawn they were fresh for a grand charge, handsomely repulsed. The redskins sat down in a ring to starve the white men out, and great was their disappointment when Simpson’s rear train of wagons marched to the rescue. The red men did not stay to pick flowers.

It seems like lying to state that at the age of twelve Billy Cody began to take rank among the world’s great horsemen, and yet he rode on the pony express, which closed in 1861, his fourteenth year.

The trail from the Missouri over the plains, the deserts and the mountains into California was about two thousand miles through a country infested with gangs of professional robbers and hostile Indian tribes. The gait of the riders averaged twelve miles an hour, which means a gallop, to allow for the slow work in mountain passes. There were one hundred ninety stations at which the riders changed ponies without breaking their run, and each must be fit and able for one hundred miles a day in time of need. Pony Bob afterward had contracts by which he rode one hundred miles a day for a year.

Now, none of the famous riders of history, like Charles XII, of Sweden; Dick, King of Natal, or Dick Turpin, of England, made records to beat the men of the pony express, and in that service Billy was counted a hero. He is outclassed by the Cossack Lieutenant Peschkov, who rode one pony at twenty-eight miles a day the length of the Russian empire, from Vladivostok to St. Petersburg, and by Kit Carson who with one horse rode six hundred miles in six days. There are branches of horsemanship, too, in which he would have been proud to take lessons from Lord Lonsdale, or Evelyn French, but Cody is, as far as I have seen, of all white men incomparable for grace, for beauty of movement, among the horsemen of the modern world.

But to turn back to the days of the boy rider.

“One day,” he writes, “when I galloped into my home station I found that the rider who was expected to take the trip out on my arrival had gotten into a drunken row the night before, and had been killed.... I pushed on ... entering every relay station on time, and accomplished the round trip of three hundred twenty-two miles back to Red Buttes without a single mishap, and on time. This stands on the record as being the longest pony express journey ever made.”

One of the station agents has a story to tell of this ride, made without sleep, and with halts of only a few minutes for meals. News had leaked out of a large sum of money to be shipped by the express, and Cody, expecting robbers, rolled the treasure in his saddle blanket, filling the official pouches with rubbish. At the best place for an ambush two men stepped out on to the trail, halting him with their muskets. As he explained, the pouches were full of rubbish, but the road agents knew better. “Mark my words,” he said as he unstrapped, “you’ll hang for this.”

“We’ll take chances on that, Bill.”

“If you will have them, take them!” With that he hurled the pouches, and as robber number one turned to pick them up, robber number two had his gun-arm shattered with the boy’s revolver-shot. Then with a yell he rode down the stooping man, and spurring hard, got out of range unhurt. He had saved the treasure, and afterward both robbers were hanged by vigilantes.

Once far down a valley ahead Cody saw a dark object above a boulder directly on his trail, and when it disappeared he knew he was caught in an ambush. Just as he came into range he swerved wide to the right, and at once a rifle smoked from behind the rock. Two Indians afoot ran for their ponies while a dozen mounted warriors broke from the timbered edge of the valley, racing to cut him off. One of these had a war bonnet of eagle plumes, the badge of a chief, and his horse, being the swiftest, drew ahead. All the Indians were firing, but the chief raced Cody to head him off at a narrow pass of the valley. The boy was slightly ahead, and when the chief saw that the white rider would have about thirty yards to spare he fitted an arrow, drawing for the shot. But Cody, swinging round in the saddle, lashed out his revolver, and the chief, clutching at the air, fell, rolling over like a ball as he struck the ground. At the chief’s death-cry a shower of arrows from the rear whizzed round the boy, one slightly wounding his pony who, spurred by the pain, galloped clear, leaving the Indians astern in a ten mile race to the next relay.

After what seems to the reader a long life of adventure, Mr. Cody had just reached the age of twenty-two when a series of wars broke out with the Indian tribes, and he was attached to the troops as a scout. A number of Pawnee Indians who thought nothing of this white man, were also serving. They were better trackers, better interpreters and thought themselves better hunters. One day a party of twenty had been running buffalo, and made a bag of thirty-two head when Cody got leave to attack a herd by himself. Mounted on his famous pony Buckskin Joe he made a bag of thirty-six head on a half-mile run, and his name was Buffalo Bill from that time onward.

That summer he led a squadron of cavalry that attacked six hundred Sioux, and in that fight against overwhelming odds he brought down a chief at a range of four hundred yards, in those days a very long shot. His victim proved to be Tall Bull, one of the great war leaders of the Sioux. The widow of Tall Bull was proud that her husband had been killed by so famous a warrior as Prairie Chief, for that was Cody’s name among the Indians.

There is one very nice story about the Pawnee scouts. A new general had taken command who must have all sorts of etiquette proper to soldiers. It was all very well for the white sentries to call at intervals of the night from post to post: “Post Number One, nine o’clock, all’s well!” “Post Number Two, etc.”

But when the Pawnee sentries called, “Go to hell, I don’t care!” well, the practise had to be stopped.

Of Buffalo Bill’s adventures in these wars the plain record would only take one large volume, but he was scouting in company with Texas Jack, John Nelson, Belden, the White Chief, and so many other famous frontier heroes, each needing at least one book volume, that I must give the story up as a bad job. At the end of the Sioux campaign Buffalo Bill was chief of scouts with the rank of colonel.

(“Buffalo Bill”)]

In 1876, General Custer, with a force of nearly four hundred cavalry, perished in an attack on the Sioux, and the only survivor was his pet boy scout, Billy Jackson, who got away at night disguised as an Indian. Long afterward Billy, who was one of God’s own gentlemen, told me that story while we sat on a grassy hillside watching a great festival of the Blackfeet nation.

After the battle in which Custer--the Sun Child--fell, the big Sioux army scattered, but a section of it was rounded up by a force under the guidance of Buffalo Bill.

“One of the Indians,” he says, “who was handsomely decorated with all the ornaments usually worn by a war chief ... sang out to me ‘I know you, Prairie Chief; if you want to fight come ahead and fight me!’

“The chief was riding his horse back and forth in front of his men, as if to banter me, and I accepted the challenge. I galloped toward him for fifty yards and he advanced toward me about the same distance, both of us riding at full speed, and then when we were only about thirty yards apart I raised my rifle and fired. His horse fell to the ground, having been killed by my bullet. Almost at the same instant my horse went down, having stepped in a gopher-hole. The fall did not hurt me much, and I instantly sprang to my feet. The Indian had also recovered himself, and we were now both on foot, and not more than twenty paces apart. We fired at each other simultaneously. My usual luck did not desert me on this occasion, for his bullet missed me, while mine struck him in the breast. He reeled and fell, but before he had fairly touched the ground I was upon him, knife in hand, and had driven the keen-edged weapon to its hilt in his heart. Jerking his war-bonnet off, I scientifically scalped him in about five seconds....

“The Indians came charging down upon me from a hill in hopes of cutting me off. General Merritt ... ordered ... Company K to hurry to my rescue. The order came none too soon.... As the soldiers came up I swung the Indian chieftain’s topknot and bonnet in the air, and shouted: ‘The first scalp for Custer!’”

Far up to the northward, Sitting Bull, with the war chief Spotted Tail and about three thousand warriors fled from the scene of the Custer massacre. And as they traveled on the lonely plains they came to a little fort with the gates closed. “Open your gates and hand out your grub,” said the Indians.

“Come and get the grub,” answered the fort.

So the gates were thrown open and the three thousand warriors stormed in to loot the fort. They found only two white men standing outside a door, but all round the square the log buildings were loopholed and from every hole stuck out the muzzle of a rifle. The Indians were caught in such a deadly trap that they ran for their lives back to camp.

Very soon news reached the Blackfeet that their enemies the Sioux were camped by the new fort at Wood Mountain, so the whole nation marched to wipe them out, and Sitting Bull appealed for help to the white men. “Be good,” said the fort, “and nobody shall hurt you.”

So the hostile armies camped on either side, and the thirty white men kept the peace between them. One day the Sioux complained that the Blackfeet had stolen fifty horses. So six of the white men were sent to the Blackfoot herd to bring the horses back. They did not know which horses to select so they drove off one hundred fifty for good measure straight at a gallop through the Blackfoot camp, closely pursued by that indignant nation. Barely in time they ran the stock within the fort, and slammed the gates home in the face of the raging Blackfeet. They were delighted with themselves until the officer commanding fined them a month’s pay each for insulting the Blackfoot nation.

The winter came, the spring and then the summer, when those thirty white men arrived at the Canada-United States boundary where they handed over three thousand Sioux prisoners to the American troops. From that time the redcoats of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police of Canada have been respected on the frontier.

And now came a very wonderful adventure. Sitting Bull, the leader of the Sioux nation who had defeated General Custer’s division and surrendered his army to thirty Canadian soldiers, went to Europe to take part in a circus personally conducted by the chief of scouts of the United States Army, Buffalo Bill. Poor Sitting Bull was afterward murdered by United States troops in the piteous massacre of Wounded Knee. Buffalo Bill for twenty-six years paraded Europe and America with his gorgeous Wild West show, slowly earning the wealth which he lavished in the founding of Cody City, Wyoming.

Toward the end of these tours I used to frequent the show camp much like a stray dog expecting to be kicked, would spend hours swapping lies with the cowboys in the old Deadwood Coach, or sit at meat with the colonel and his six hundred followers. On the last tour the old man was thrown by a bad horse at Bristol and afterward rode with two broken bones in splints. Only the cowboys knew, who told me, as day by day I watched him back his horse from the ring with all the old incomparable grace.

He went back to build a million dollar irrigation ditch for his little city on the frontier, and shortly afterward the newspapers reported that my friends--the Buffalo Creek Gang of robbers--attacked his bank, and shot the cashier. May civilization never shut out the free air of the frontier while the old hero lives, in peace and honor, loved to the end and worshiped by all real frontiersmen.

XVII

A. D. 1860

THE AUSTRALIAN DESERT

I

When the Eternal Father was making the earth, at one time He filled the sea with swimming dragons, the air with flying dragons, and the land with hopping dragons big as elephants; but they were not a success, and so He swept them all away. After that he filled the southern continents with a small improved hopping dragon, that laid no eggs, but carried the baby in a pouch. There were queer half-invented fish, shadeless trees, and furry running birds like the emu and the moa. Then He swamped that southern world under the sea, and moved the workshop to our northern continents. But He left New Zealand and Australia just as they were, a scrap of the half-finished world with furry running birds, the hopping kangaroo, the shadeless trees, and half-invented fish.

So when the English went to Australia it was not an ordinary voyage, but a journey backward through the ages, through goodness only knows how many millions of years to the fifth day of creation. It was like visiting the moon or Mars. To live and travel in such a strange land a man must be native born, bush raised, and cunning at that, on pain of death by famine.

The first British settlers, too, were convicts. The laws were so bad in England that a fellow might be deported merely for giving cheek to a judge; and the convicts on the whole were very decent people, brutally treated in the penal settlements. They used to escape to the bush, and runaway convicts explored Australia mainly in search of food. One of them, in Tasmania, used, whenever he escaped, to take a party with him and eat them one by one, until he ran short of food and had to surrender.

Later on gold was discovered, and free settlers drifted in, filling the country, but the miners and the farmers were too busy earning a living to do much exploration. So the exploring fell to English gentlemen, brave men, but hopeless tenderfeet, who knew nothing of bushcraft and generally died of hunger or thirst in districts where the native-born colonial grows rich to-day.

Edgar John Eyre, for instance, a Yorkshireman, landed in Sydney at the age of sixteen, and at twenty-five was a rich sheep-farmer, appointed by government protector of the black fellows. In 1840 the colonists of South Australia wanted a trail for drifting sheep into Western Australia, and young Eyre, from what he had learned among the savages, said the scheme was all bosh, in which he was perfectly right. He thought that the best line for exploring was northward, and set out to prove his words, but got tangled up in the salt bogs surrounding Torrens, and very nearly lost his whole party in an attempt to wade across. After that failure he felt that he had wasted the money subscribed in a wildcat project, so to make good set out again to find a route for sheep along the waterless south coast of the continent. He knew the route was impossible, but it is a poor sort of courage that has to feed on hope, and the men worth having are those who leave their hopes behind to march light while they do their duty.

Eyre’s party consisted of himself and his ranch foreman Baxter, a favorite black boy Wylie, who was his servant, and two other natives who had been on the northward trip. They had nine horses, a pony, six sheep, and nine weeks’ rations on the pack animals.

The first really dry stage was one hundred twenty-eight miles without a drop of water, and it was not the black fellows, but Eyre, the tenderfoot, who went ahead and found the well that saved them. The animals died off one by one, so that the stores had to be left behind, and there was no food but rotten horse-flesh which caused dysentery, no water save dew collected with a sponge from the bushes after the cold nights. The two black fellows deserted, but after three days came back penitent and starving, thankful to be reinstated.

These black fellows did not believe the trip was possible, they wanted to go home, they thought the expedition well worth plundering, and so one morning while Eyre was rounding up the horses they shot Baxter, plundered the camp and bolted. Only Eyre and his boy Wylie were left, but if they lived the deserters might be punished. So the two black fellows, armed with Baxter’s gun, tried to hunt down Eyre and his boy with a view to murder. They came so near at night that Eyre once heard them shout to Wylie to desert. Eyre and the boy stole off, marching so rapidly that the murderers were left behind and perished.

A week later, still following the coast of the Great Bight, Wylie discovered a French ship lying at anchor, and the English skipper fed the explorers for a fortnight until they were well enough to go on. Twenty-three more days of terrible suffering brought Eyre and his boy, looking like a brace of scarecrows, to a hilltop overlooking the town of Albany. They had reached Western Australia, the first travelers to cross from the eastern to the western colonies.

In after years Eyre was governor of Jamaica.

II

Australia, being the harshest country on earth, breeds the hardiest pioneers, horsemen, bushmen, trackers, hunters, scouts, who find the worst African or American travel a sort of picnic. The bushie is disappointing to town Australians because he has no swank, and nothing of the brilliant picturesqueness of the American frontiersman. He is only a tall, gaunt man, lithe as a whip, with a tongue like a whip-lash; and it is on bad trips or in battle that one finds what he is like inside, a most knightly gentleman with a vein of poetry.

Anyway the Melbourne people were cracked in 1860 when they wanted an expedition to cross Australia northward, and instead of appointing bushmen for the job selected tenderfeet. Burke was an Irishman, late of the Hungarian cavalry, and the Royal Irish Constabulary, serving as an officer in the Victorian police. Wills was a Devon man, with some frontier training on the sheep runs, but had taken to astronomy and surveying. There were several other white men, and three Afghans with a train of camels.

They left Melbourne with pomp and circumstance, crossed Victoria through civilized country, and made a base camp on the Darling River at Menindie. There Burke sacked two mutinous followers and his doctor scuttled in a funk, so he took on Wright, an old settler who knew the way to Cooper’s Creek four hundred miles farther on. Two hundred miles out Wright was sent back to bring up stores from Menindie, while the expedition went on to make an advanced base at Cooper’s Creek. Everything was to depend on the storage of food at that base.

While they were waiting for Wright to come up with their stores, Wills and another man prospected ninety miles north from Cooper’s Creek to the Stony Desert, a land of white quartz pebbles and polished red sandstone chips. The explorer Sturt had been there, and come back blind. No man had been beyond.

Wills, having mislaid his three camels, came back ninety miles afoot without water, to find the whole expedition stuck at Cooper’s Creek, waiting for stores. Mr. Wright at Menindie burned time, wasting six weeks before he attempted to start with the stores, and Burke at last could bear the delay no longer. There were thunder-storms giving promise of abundant water for once in the northern desert, so Burke marched with Wills, King and Gray, taking a horse and six camels.

William Brahe was left in charge at the camp at Cooper’s Creek, to remain with ample provisions until Wright turned up, but not to leave except in dire extremity.

Burke’s party crossed the glittering Stony Desert, and watching the birds who always know the way to water, they came to a fine lake, where they spent Christmas day. Beyond that they came to the Diamantina and again there was water. The country improved, there were northward flowing streams to cheer them on their way, and at last they came to salt water at the head of the Gulf of Carpentaria. They had crossed the continent from south to north.

With blithe hearts they set out on their return, and if they had to kill the camels for food, then to eat snakes, which disagreed with them, still there would be plenty when they reached Cooper’s Creek. Gray complained of being ill, but pilfering stores is not a proper symptom of any disease, so Burke gave him a thrashing by way of medicine. When he died, they delayed one day for his burial; one day too much, for when they reached Cooper’s Creek they were just nine hours late. Thirty-one miles they made in the last march and reeled exhausted into an empty camp ground. Cut in the bark of a tree were the words “Dig, 21 April 1861.” They dug a few inches into the earth where they found a box of provisions, and a bottle containing a letter.

“The depot party of the V. E. E. leave this camp to-day to return to the Darling. I intend to go S. E. from camp sixty miles to get into our old track near Bulloo. Two of my companions and myself are quite well; the third, Patten, has been unable to walk for the last eighteen days, as his leg has been severely hurt when thrown from one of the horses. No person has been up here from Darling. We have six camels and twelve horses in good working condition. William Brahe.”

It would be hopeless with two exhausted camels to try and catch up with that march. Down Cooper’s Creek one hundred fifty miles the South Australian Mounted Police had an outpost, and the box of provisions would last out that short journey.

They were too heart-sick to make an inscription on the tree, but left a letter in the bottle, buried. A few days later Brahe returned with the industrious Mr. Wright and his supply train. Here is the note in Wright’s diary:--

“May eighth. This morning I reached the Cooper’s Creek depot and found no sign of Mr. Burke’s having visited the creek, or the natives having disturbed the stores.”

Only a few miles away the creek ran out into channels of dry sand where Burke, Wills and King were starving, ragged beggars fed by the charitable black fellows on fish and a seed called nardoo, of which they made their bread. There were nice fat rats also, delicious baked in their skins, and the natives brought them fire-wood for the camp.

Again they attempted to reach the Mounted Police outpost, but the camels died, the water failed, and they starved. Burke sent Wills back to Cooper’s Creek. “No trace,” wrote Wills in his journal, “of any one except the blacks having been here since we left.” Brahe and Wright had left no stores at the camp ground.

Had they only been bushmen the tracks would have told Wills of help within his reach, the fish hooks would have won them food in plenty. It is curious, too, that Burke died after a meal of crow and nardoo, there being neither sugar nor fat in these foods, without which they can not sustain a man’s life. Then King left Burke’s body, shot three crows and brought them to Wills, who was lying dead in camp. Three months afterward a relief party found King living among the natives “wasted to a shadow, and hardly to be distinguished as a civilized being but by the remnants of the clothes upon him.”

“They should not have gone,” said one pioneer of these lost explorers. “They weren’t bushmen.” Afterward a Mr. Collis and his wife lived four years in plenty upon the game and fish at the Innaminka water-hole where poor Burke died of hunger.

Such were the first crossings from east to west, and from south to north of the Australian continent.

XVIII

A. D. 1867

THE HERO-STATESMAN

There is no greater man now living in the world than Diaz the hero-statesman, father of Mexico. What other soldier has scored fourteen sieges and fifty victorious battles? What other statesman, having fought his way to the throne, has built a civilized nation out of chaos?

This Spanish-red Indian half-breed began work at the age of seven as errand boy in a shop. At fourteen he was earning his living as a private tutor while he worked through college for the priesthood. At seventeen he was a soldier in the local militia and saw his country overthrown by the United States, which seized three-fourths of all her territories. At the age of twenty-one, Professor Diaz, in the chair of Roman law at Oaxaca, was working double tides as a lawyer’s clerk.

In the Mexican “republic” it is a very serious offense to vote for the Party-out-of-office, and the only way to support the opposition is to get out with a rifle and fight. So when Professor Diaz voted at the next general election he had to fly for his life. After several months of hard fighting he emerged from his first revolution as mayor of a village.