Chapter V: Part IV (2)

About mid-winter, scurvy made its appearance. We had been fed on a salt meat diet for nearly eight months and, with the exception of a few wild fruits, had had no vegetables. Those who were attacked became pale and listless. After awhile their gums began to bleed and their teeth loosened. Their joints swelled and the flesh became soft. If a finger was pressed hard into the fleshy part of the arm, it left a dent that remained for hours. We did not suffer so much from scurvy at Cantonment Miller as did the soldiers at Fort Pierre. The few serious cases we had we sent to the hospital there. Little could be done for them, except to give them lime-juice, which was among the medical stores. With great trouble some potatoes were obtained during the winter from the "States," as we called it. These were given to the sick, raw, scraped fine and mixed with vinegar and improved their condition very much. However, a few men died of the disease in the hospital at Fort Pierre. In the early spring, when the snow melted, we dug up roots that grew in the woods, a few inches below the ground as we saw the squaws do. The roots resembled a thin sweet potato in shape and were white in color. They could be eaten raw or boiled and were quite mealy and palatable. Not knowing the proper name for these roots we called them artichokes. The sick improved rapidly upon eating them, and as spring progressed, they all recovered.

An Indian camp of about twenty lodges, belonging to the Yonktonna tribe of the Dakotas, had located within easy distance of Cantonment Miller and remained there until the following spring. We soon had a well beaten path through the deep snow leading to the camp. There I had the best opportunity during my entire service to observe the Indians closely in their domestic relations. I became known to some of them myself and made progress in the study of their language. For a period of more than five months, I went to the camp very often in the day time and sometimes in the evening. I often remained for hours in one or two of some half a dozen lodges which I had selected as my favorites, after having made the round of the entire camp. The lodges had fires in them and were warmer and more comfortable than our huts and never ceased to interest me. The Indians seemed to have plenty to eat and lived quite comfortably. They had stores of pemican, corn, roots, dried fruits and buffalo tallow, which had been melted and put into bladders for preservation. They also had some game when the bucks went hunting.

I was invited to eat with them and did so a few times when they had cooked meat of some sort; but I excused myself when I saw any mysterious dish. I brought them some coffee and sugar once in a while and showed the squaws how to make coffee, of which they became very fond. When any of them visited the cantonment, which happened almost daily, I often gave those that I knew, part of my ration of bread for the papooses, or a piece of tobacco for the bucks. This, in a measure, repaid their hospitality. A singular thing which I noticed was that many of their children, from about three to five years of age, had abnormally developed paunches, which made them look ridiculous when they toddled almost naked about the teepee.

When the children attained their fifth or sixth year they became slender and graceful. I was told that an almost constant meat diet was supposed to be the cause of their curious development.

One day I saw a little toddler step into his father's dish of food. The man, without a word of scolding, took off the child's moccasin, scraped it clean with his horn spoon, then dug a hole in the dirt floor beside his dish, buried and covered up the scrapings and continued his meal, undisturbed by the incident.

Both parents showed affection for their children, and in my presence, at least, I never saw the Indians act with brutality toward their squaws or children. The children had dolls and played much as white children do. The older boys often practised shooting at a mark with a bow and arrow. They were very shy with the soldiers and so were the wolfish looking dogs. It was almost impossible to win the confidence of either. Nevertheless, a soldier of company I got the consent of the parents to take an Indian boy to our quarters and keep him there. He made a suit of soldier's clothes for him and slept with him all the winter. "Paddy," as we called him, became quite a pet in the company and was learning English with a comical Irish accent, acquired from his tutor, when his mother came and took him away in the spring. At the same time the rest of the Indians went away, and we never saw or heard of him again.

The Indians played games among themselves, and the soldiers tried to teach them the use of cards, but they were unable to learn or understand the simplest of such games. We, therefore, invented a special game for them, in which the greatest number of spots on a card took the trick, for they could count up to ten at least. They admired the Jacks more than the Kings. They were the big chiefs and the Kings next. Any card could beat the Queen, which was the "Wee-a" or squaw. They took great interest in this game. I could do a few simple tricks with cards, which mystified and amused them. Some of them had a considerable sense of humor and often laughed heartily.

I was shown some Indian scalps, which had long black hair dangling from them. The skin was soft, and looked and felt as though it had been tanned. To me it seemed very thick. I do not know if they had any white scalps. If so, they never showed us any.

Sometimes one of the Indians produced a buckskin bag ornamented with beads, wherein he kept his most cherished treasures, and drew therefrom a written paper, which some white trader or hunter had given to him. This he would proudly hand to us for examination. These papers were very much of the same tone as this model: "O-kee-ha (red heart) is a good and trustworthy Indian, and I recommend him to anyone who wants a safe guide and a good hunter." One of the Indians had several such papers, one of which he would always show last. This had evidently been written by some wag or, perhaps, a truthful man, and ran something like this: "Beware of this Indian, Big Crow, he is a thief and a liar, and will murder you if he gets a chance. Take warning!" As this paper never failed to provoke a laugh, he no doubt set a greater value on it than on all the others he owned.

When the weather was bad I sometimes watched the bucks making arrows and pipes, while the squaws were industriously employed on moccasins or some article of clothing. The making of arrows was quite a delicate operation, with the few tools they had. The stem of the arrow had to be true, straight and balanced properly. The feathers must be carefully glued on and the head firmly affixed with sinew, thread and gum. Metal arrow heads were made by laboriously grinding pieces of hoopiron, or the like, which they had picked up somewhere, to the required size and shape. Other heads were made of chipped flint. War arrow heads were made with sharp barbs to prevent them from being easily extracted.

Some of the pipes they manufactured were plain, and others handsomely inlaid with lead. They were made of a dense, fine grained but soft working stone of a beautiful red color. To obtain this stone they made long and weary journeys to the Pipe Mountain, which was somewhere in the northern part of Minnesota Territory. There, it is said, they prayed to the Great Spirit before removing any of the stone which they esteemed so highly. The pipes were carefully bored and finished with a high polish, which took many hours of patient labor. The long pipe stems were made of some tough, flexible wood, the same that they made their bows of. They were round or flat in shape, sometimes twisted, and the wood polished and ornamented. The hole through the stem was made slowly and carefully with a piece of wire heated red hot. The mouth piece was neatly tapered and rounded. These pipes were a valuable article of trade. A fine pipe was worth a pony in trade with the Indians in remote parts of the country. I bought one and paid a good price for it. I had great difficulty to persuade an Indian to sell me a piece of the stone to make a pipe for myself.

I have at times witnessed the entire performance of an Indian feast. A squaw selected a fat-looking dog, and tied him fast in some secluded place for several days, giving him nothing to eat, and only water to drink. She then fed him with a mixture of pemican and dried fruits made into a moist soft paste, and let him eat all he could of it. This, I suppose, was to serve as a stuffing or forcemeat, for she killed him by knocking him on the head with a tomahawk, before digestion commenced. His hind legs were then tied together, and he was hung by a cord head down from a pole supported on two forked sticks over a low fire. With a firebrand the squaw burnt off every hair on his body close to the skin, and rubbed him with buffalo fat. The squaw would sit for many hours turning and basting the carcass with melted fat. The dog was thus roasted whole, for he had not been disemboweled. In the evening the family were joined by relatives and friends whom they had invited. The teepee was well crowded when the feast commenced. The dog was cut up, and all gorged themselves to their full capacity. The most desired morsels seemed to be the bowels and other soft parts. When the eating was over, the squaws beat the drums, chanted songs, and all made merry until long after we soldiers were in bed. I looked in at some of these feasts and was invited to partake. Although it was considered an honor, I declined. A few of the soldiers did eat some roasted dog, and declared it tasted good. The Indians preferred it to the finest venison.

There was a young soldier in my company, who became so infatuated with the Indian life that he spent every spare minute in their camp. He made great progress in learning their language, and never missed a dog feast. He was a black haired, dark-complexioned man, who tried to make himself look as much like an Indian as possible by plucking out all the hair that grew on his face. In the spring, when the Indians broke camp and departed, he was missed a day or two later. We learned that he had joined the tribe, but no effort was then made to recapture him.

During the long, cold winter we got a mail from the "States" about once in three weeks. It went to Fort Pierre and was sent to us from there.

There was no sutler at Cantonment Miller. When we wanted anything from the store, we had to go five miles to Fort Pierre for it or have it brought by a comrade who made the trip.

One calm sunny morning--we had a few such days--when the thermometer was but a few degrees below zero, another boy and I got a pass to go to the fort. Not anticipating any change in the weather, we did not dress ourselves quite so warmly as we should have done, for zero was considered a comfortable temperature if the wind was not blowing, and we discarded some of our heaviest furs when the temperature was at that point or higher. We two boys crossed the Missouri on the ice and walked down to the fort on the opposite side, which was less hilly than the east bank. We made a few purchases at the sutler's store, visited our friends and had dinner with them. It became much colder early in the afternoon, and the wind began to blow. We were admonished to return early, which we did; but by the time we had come about half way the wind was blowing a gale and the cold was increasing. We tried to cross the river and gain the woods on the other side, but the bare ice was as slippery as glass. The fierce wind knocked us over, and blew us like corks along on the ice. With great exertion we crawled on shore and got into a ravine where we were partly sheltered from the wind. Here we kept in motion. There was no wood to make a fire and to sit down meant freezing to death. We had our mittens and our fur caps protected our ears, but our noses and cheeks turned white with frost, and we rubbed them with snow several times. I think we both feared that we would perish in that ravine, when suddenly, as daylight began to fade, the wind died down and we were able to proceed. We arrived at our quarters half frozen, and it took some days to recover.

There was an officer at Cantonment Miller named James Curtis who was the First Lieutenant of Company B. He singled me out from among the boys and was most kind to me.

While stationed at Fort Pierre I had bought a flute from a member of the band, and took lessons from him. As I understood something about music and played on the fife, I made rapid progress on the flute and had become a fair player when Lieutenant Curtis asked me to come to his lonely cabin and play duets with him. He was an excellent player, and had a lot of music books, also works on history, science, etc. In fact, he owned quite a little library, for he was a great student and did not spend his time drinking whiskey and playing cards like some of the other officers did. He loaned me books to read and gave me lessons to study, which I recited to him and he corrected my exercises. After these lessons we played music until tattoo. This went on for three or four nights a week, while we were at the cantonment. I learned more during that time than during all my previous schooling.

Lieutenant Curtis was a graduate of West Point. Very much to my regret he resigned his commission in the spring to enter civil life. He rejoined the army in 1861, and served in the West during the Civil War. I never met him again, and do not know whether he is still living, but I remember him as a man who befriended me when I was a boy, and I shall always entertain the most profound feeling of gratitude toward him.

A contrast to Lieut. Curtis was the officer who commanded the company which wintered on the island below Fort Pierre. He was always more or less under the influence of liquor and abused the men in his command. In one of his drunken fits he shot a private of his company, wounding him so severely the man died a few days after. A pretense of an investigation was made. It was called an accident and hushed up, though the man was deliberately shot while lying in his tent after he had had some words with the officer. Two years later his slayer died wretchedly of delirium tremens at another military post.

In the early part of April we were startled one night by loud reports like the firing of a heavy cannon. This was caused by the cracking of the thick ice, which began to break up and move in a day or two and afforded an interesting spectacle. Some time later the river began to rise until it overflowed its banks, and was miles wide in the low lands. Then there came drift wood in enormous quantities. For several days at a time the river would be covered with it from shore to shore at the narrower places. It seemed as though a man could walk across on the floating logs. The high water continued for a long time. It fell very slowly and some time in May it seemed stationary for a while as the snows melted much further north. We were cut off from all communication with Fort Pierre for a time, until boats could cross the river after the flood subsided.

The Indians began to make preparations for departure. The squaws were busy dressing such skins as they had not tanned before cold weather. This they did by stretching them on an upright framework made of poles lashed together. Then they scraped them thin with a steel scraper and treated them with a preparation that made them soft and pliable.

About the first week in May, when their ponies had attained a fair condition, they struck their tents one day and disappeared over the hills.

We received orders to abandon Cantonment Miller and return to Fort Pierre, where all of General Harney's troops were to be assembled for a great treaty that was soon to be made there with the Indians. We crossed the river in a Mackinaw boat belonging to the American Fur Company. These were large, flat-bottomed boats with tapering prows and square sterns. They were used by the company to carry furs from its more northern posts on the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers.

We went into camp after we crossed the river as it was too late to march to Fort Pierre that day, and had just finished putting up our tents, when a tremendous wind storm struck us. It blew down the tents and scattered them as well as every other movable article over the prairie. It was all over in a short time, but we slept without tents that night. Next day after picking up all of the articles we could find, and loading them on wagons, we marched to Fort Pierre and went into permanent camp close to the stockade. Within a few days all of the troops had assembled, and encamped there.

In March General Harney had sent messages to all the tribes of the Dakotas, to assemble at Fort Pierre on May twentieth for a council treaty.

The Indians had some way of noting the date, probably by tally on a stick of wood. I think that representatives from all the Dakotas were present on that day, except the Brules and the Ogallalas, who had been so severely punished the previous September.

The Indians began to arrive about ten days before the appointed time, and soon the great plain about Fort Pierre was dotted with nearly a thousand teepees.

Each of the tribes had a large representation of men, women and some children. It was estimated that seven thousand were present, of whom one-third were warriors. It was a grand spectacle, such an assemblage of Indians had not been seen for many years. Among them were proud and magnificent savages who had traveled long distances to be present.

As soon as the arriving Indians became numerous, we were forbidden to visit their camp. Neither were the Indians allowed within the sentinel lines of ours. At night the sentry posts were doubled and extra ammunition was issued. We practically slept on our arms while the council lasted, for their warriors out-numbered us at least three to one. Our garrison and camp were open to an attack from all sides, and the temper of so great a body of Indians was very uncertain.

On the appointed day the council commenced. At first only a few hundred of the chiefs and other head men of the tribes were present. The council was held outside of the stockade, the Indians sitting on the grass in a semi-circle facing the General. With the commandant were some other officers, clerks and interpreters, a few orderlies and a small guard of soldiers. These were all on a slightly raised platform, the officers being seated in front. The dignified, white-haired general was in the center and his imposing figure towered above all the others.

We could only view the council from a distance, as sentinels kept us beyond a certain boundary. But we could observe the dramatic gestures of the Indian orators and hear the grunts of approval. What the great talk was all about we did not know.

The council went on in this way for three to four days. On the fourth or fifth day the meeting commenced earlier, and nearly all the warriors, to the number of several thousand, were present. They were painted, and their lustrous dark skins glistened in the bright sunlight when they had cast off their robes and blankets. It was a sight long to be remembered, and the like of it was probably never seen in after years. On this day a treaty of peace was concluded. The Indians buried the hatchet, as it was customary to say. The Sioux War was over, and during our stay in their country we had no more serious trouble with them. It was only after the withdrawal of the regular soldiers to take part in the Civil War that they became unruly again, and committed atrocities among the settlers of Minnesota in 1862.

On the night of the day when the treaty had been concluded there seemed to be a great "pow-wow" in the Indian camp. We could hear the tom-toms, and the voices of the bucks and squaws until early morning. On the following afternoon we were treated to a remarkable sight. Two thousand Indians marched to the stockade, where General Harney had his headquarters, and saluted his appearance by blowing on reed musical instruments made from willows which grew abundantly along the river. At the same time a large number of squaws beat on drums. The curious noise could be heard for miles around.

While the council was on, the first steamboat of the season or "wa-ta-pe-ta-choo-choo," as the Indians called it, arrived. It was the _Genoa_, which had brought my company up the river the previous summer. With her arrived a paymaster and Lieutenant Gouverneur K. Warren, who later commanded the Fifth Army Corps in the Civil War. He was to make surveys in the Dakota country and was accompanied by some scientists. My regiment furnished him with an escort, who traveled with him until fall. He returned the following season and continued his surveys.

Many of the Indians present had never seen a steamboat. Hundreds of them and their squaws lined the river bank, when the _Genoa_ was sighted. They noted the puffs of steam ejected by her engines, and declared that the wa-ta-pe-ta was puffing, out of breath, and tired out after her long journey.

The Indians had brought great quantities of furs with them, and trading with the American Fur Company and the sutler was brisk. The _Genoa_ on her return trip could carry only a part of the vast quantity of furs the company had accumulated. Some of the Indians departed a few days after the treaty was made. Others lingered for a while, but in about two weeks nearly all had disappeared. When their numbers had materially diminished, restrictions against visiting their camps were withdrawn, and I had interesting experiences in observing the customs and manners of some far away tribes, whom I was not likely ever to see again.

About the first of June orders were issued to abandon Fort Pierre, as it was most unsuitable for a military post. The troops who had come from Fort Laramie in the fall returned there, and of my regiment four companies and the band took up their march to a point on the Missouri, a few hundred miles below Fort Pierre, where they built a post called Fort Randall. The other two companies, B and D, marched to a place on the Missouri, midway between Forts Pierre and Randall, to establish Fort Lookout.

The remaining portable houses at Fort Pierre were taken down and with other materials were put on rafts and floated down the river to be re-used in building quarters at the two new posts.

Our experience since we arrived at Fort Pierre had been very trying through the incompetency or carelessness of someone in authority. We were ill prepared for the rigors of so severe a climate as to clothing, food, quarters and medical stores. Men died from exposure and from scurvy, and many animals succumbed to starvation. Officers and soldiers suffered alike. The miserable huts in which we lived during the winter were unfit for stables. We almost froze in them, and when the spring came, the mud roofs leaked like sieves.

I look back upon the winter passed at Fort Pierre as one of great suffering and hardship, by far the worst that I went through during my service.