Henry Inman

“ For a portion of the year there is no hunting, and then idleness is the order of the day. At such times the mountaineer visits the lodges of his dark neighbours for amusement, and in the spirited dance many a heart is lost to the squaws. The young trapper, like other enamoured ones of his sex in civilization, lingers around the house of his fair sweetheart while she transforms the soft skin of the doe into moccasins, ornamenting them richly with glittering beads or the coloured quills of the porcupine, all the time lightening the long hours with the plain-songs of their tribe. ”

“ He saw vast herds of buffalo, and as it was the rutting season, the bulls were making a wonderful ado; the prairie resounded with their low, deep grunting or bellowing, as they tore up the earth with their feet and horns, whisking their tails, and defying their rivals to battle. Large gangs of wild horses could be seen grazing on the plains and hillsides, and the neighing and squealing of stallions might be heard at all times of the night.
Captain Williams never used his rifle to procure meat, except when it was absolutely necessary, or could be done with perfect safety. ”

“ In approaching the Arkansas, a landscape of the most imposing and picturesque nature makes its appearance. While the green, glossy undulations of the prairie to the right seem to spread out in infinite succession, like waves subsiding after a storm, and covered with herds of gambolling buffalo, on the left, towering to the height of seventy-five to a hundred feet, rise the sun-gilt summits of the sand hills, along the base of which winds the broad, majestic river, bespeckled with verdant islets, thickly beset with cottonwood timber, the sand hills resembling heaps of driven snow. ”

“ A terrific yell from the rear at this moment caused both Booth and Hallowell to look around, and the latter to inquire: "What's the matter now, Booth?" "They are coming down on us like lightning," said he; and, sure enough, those who had been prancing around their dead comrade were tearing along the Trail toward the wagon with a more hideous noise than when they began.
Hallowell yelled louder than ever and lashed the mules more furiously still, but the Indians gained upon them as easily as a blooded racer on a common farm plug. ”

“ From Santa Fe to Fort Union, where the arsenal was located, the road runs through the deep, rocky gorge known as Apache Canyon. It is one of the wildest spots in the mountains, the walls on each side rising from one to two thousand feet above the Trail, which is within the range of ordinary cannon from every point, and in many places of point-blank rifle-shot. Granite rocks and sands abound, and the hills are covered with long-leafed pine. It is a gateway which, in the hands of a skilful engineer and one hundred resolute men, can be made perfectly impregnable. ”

“ Sometimes, following his trail for weeks, the Indian watched him set his traps on some timbered stream, and crawling up the bed of it, so that he left no tracks, he lay in the bushes until his victim came to examine his traps. Then, when he approached within a few feet of the ambush, whiz! flew the home-drawn arrow, which never failed at such close quarters to bring the unsuspecting hunter to the ground. But for one white scalp that dangled in the smoke of an Indian's lodge, a dozen black ones, at the end of the season, ornamented the camp-fires of the rendezvous where the furs were sold. ”

“ In the Rocky Mountains and on the great plains along the line of the Old Trail are many rude and widely separated graves. The sequestered little valleys, the lonely gulches, and the broad prairies through which the highway to New Mexico wound its course, hide the bones of hundreds of whom the world will never have any more knowledge. ”

“ Far below this magnificent vantage-ground lies the valley of the Rio Las Animas Perdidas. On the other verge of the great depression rise the peerless, everlastingly snow-wreathed Spanish Peaks,75 whose giant summits are grim sentinels that for untold ages have witnessed hundreds of sanguinary conflicts between the wily nomads of the vast plains watered by the silent Arkansas.
All around you snow-clad mountains lift their serrated crowns above the horizon, dim, white, and indistinct, like icebergs seen at sea by moonlight ”

“ There was always something exciting in those journeys from the Missouri to the mountains in the lumbering Concord coach. There was the constant fear of meeting the wily red man, who persistently hankered after the white man's hair. Then there was the playfulness of the sometimes drunken driver, who loved to upset his tenderfoot travellers in some arroya, long after the moon had sunk below the horizon.
It required about two weeks to make the trip from the Missouri River to Santa Fe, unless high water or a fight with the Indians made it several days longer. ”

“ As the night comes on apace in the distant valley beneath, the evening shadows drop down, pencilled with broad bands of rosy light as they creep slowly across the beautiful landscape, while the rugged vista below is enveloped in a diffused haze like that which marks the season of the Indian summer in the lower great plains. Above, the sky curves toward the relatively restricted horizon, with not a cloud to dim its intense blue, nowhere so beautiful as in these lofty altitudes. ”

“ The tourist will no longer find a drowsy old town, and the Plaza is no longer unfenced and uncared for. A beautiful park of trees is surrounded by low palings, and inside the shady enclosure, under a group of large cottonwoods, is a cenotaph erected to the memory of the Territory's gallant soldiers who fell in the shock of battle to save New Mexico to the Union in 1862, and conspicuous among the names carved on the enduring native rock is that of Kit Carson—prince of frontiersmen, and one of Nature's noblemen. ”

“ Pawnee Rock was a spot well calculated by nature to form, as it has done, an important rendezvous and ambuscade for the prowling savages of the prairies, and often afforded them, especially the once powerful and murderous Pawnees whose name it perpetuates, a pleasant little retreat or eyrie from which to watch the passing Santa Fe traders, and dash down upon them like hawks, to carry off their plunder and their scalps. ”

“ In the event of a stampede, every animal of the separate, yet consolidated, herds rushed off together, as if they had all gone mad at once; for the buffalo, like the Texas steer, mule, or domestic horse, stampedes on the slightest provocation; frequently without any assignable cause. The simplest affair, sometimes, will start the whole herd; a prairie-dog barking at the entrance to his burrow, a shadow of one of themselves or that of a passing cloud, is sufficient to make them run for miles as if a real and dangerous enemy were at their heels. ”

“ The trapper's visits to the Mexican settlements, or to the lodges of a tribe of Indians, for the purpose of trading, often resulted in his returning to his quiet camp with a woman to grace his solitary home, the loving and lonely couple as devoted to each other in the midst of blood-thirsty enemies, howling wolves, and panthers, as if they were in some quiet country village. ”

“ The old stage-coach days were times of Western romance and adventure, and the stories told of that era of the border have a singular fascination in this age of annihilation of distance.
Very few, if any, of the famous men who handled the "ribbons" in those dangerous days of the slow journey across the great plains are among the living; like the clumsy and forgotten coaches they drove, they have themselves been mouldering into dust these many years. ”

“ Sometimes the traveller over the Old Trail will suddenly, in the most unexpected places, come across a little mound, perhaps covered with stones, under which lie the mouldering bones of some unfortunate adventurer. Above, now on a rude board, then on a detached rock, or maybe on the wall of a beetling canyon, he may frequently read, in crude pencilling or rougher carving, the legend of the dead man's ending. ”

“ Many hundreds of winters ago, when the cottonwoods on the big river were no higher than arrows, and the prairies were crowded with game, the red men who hunted the deer in the forests and the buffalo on the plains all spoke the same language, and the pipe of peace breathed its soothing cloud whenever two parties of hunters met on the boundless prairie. ”

“ Some old bulls forming the outer picket guard slowly raised their heads and gazed long and dubiously at the strange objects, when, discovering that the intruders were not wolves, but two hunters, they gave a significant grunt, turned about as though on pivots, and in less than no time the whole herd—bulls, cows, and calves—were making the gravel fly over the prairie in fine style, leaving the hunters to their discomfiture. ”

“ In the days when the Santa Fe trade was at its height, the Pawnees were the most formidable tribe on the eastern central plains, and the freighters and trappers rarely escaped a skirmish with them either at the crossing of the Walnut, Pawnee Rock, the Fork of the Pawnee, or at Little and Big Coon creeks. To-day what is left of the historic hill looks down only upon peaceful homes and fruitful fields, whereas for hundreds of years it witnessed nothing but battle and death, and almost every yard of brown sod at its base covered a skeleton. ”

“ Their primitive lodges contrasted strangely with the peaceful little sod-houses, dugouts, and white cottages of the incoming settlers on the public lands, with the villages struggling into existence, and above all with the rapidly moving cars; unmistakable evidences that the new civilization was soon to sweep the red men before it like chaff before the wind.
Farther to the west, a caravan of white-covered wagons loaded with supplies for some remote military post, the last that would ever travel the Old Trail, was slowly crawling toward the setting sun. ”

“ Every eye was strained for something out of the ordinary. Even the horses of the officers and the mules of the supply-train were infected by something that seemed impending; they grew restless, stamped the earth, and vainly essayed to stampede, but were prevented by their hobbles and picket-pins.
Presently one of the scouts returned from over the divide, and reported to the general that an immense herd of buffalo was tearing down toward the Trail, and from the great clouds of dust they raised, which obscured the horizon, there must have been ten thousand of them. ”

“ They always pretended friendship for the whites, when any of them were inside of its sacred precincts, but their whole manner changed when they by some stroke of fortune caught a trapper or hunter alone on the prairie or in the foot-hills; he was a dead man sure, and his scalp was soon dangling at the belt of his cowardly assassins. Hardly a day passed without witnessing some poor fellow running for the fort with a band of the red devils after him; frequently he escaped the keen edge of their scalping-knife, but every once in a while a man was killed. ”

“ Happening to cast his eyes back on the Trail, Booth saw to his dismay twelve or fifteen of the savages coming up on the run with fresh energy, their spears poised ready for action, and he felt that something must be done very speedily to divert them; for if these added their number to those already surrounding the wagon, the chances were they would succeed in forcing the mules into the sunflowers, and his scalp and Hallowell's would dangle at the belt of the leader. ”

“ Without a moment's notice or the slightest warning, Hatcher reached with his left hand and grabbed Old Wolf by his scalp-lock, and with his right drew his butcher-knife from its scabbard and thrust it at the throat of the chief. All this was done in an instant, as quick as lightning; no one had time to move. ”

“ It is sometimes amusing to observe the athletic wagoner hurrying an animal to its post—to see him heave upon the halter of a stubborn mule, while the brute as obstinately sets back, determined not to move a peg till his own good pleasure thinks it proper to do so—his whole manner seeming to say, "Wait till your hurry's over." I have more than once seen a driver hitch a harnessed animal to the halter, and by that process haul his mulishness forward, while each of his four projected feet would leave a furrow behind. ”

“ On either side of the track of the two lines of railroads running through Kansas and Nebraska, within a relatively short distance and for nearly their whole length, the most conspicuous objects in those days were the desiccated carcasses of the noble beasts that had been ruthlessly slaughtered by the thoughtless and excited passengers on their way across the continent. On the open prairie, too, miles away from the course of legitimate travel, in some places one could walk all day on the dead bodies of the buffaloes killed by the hide-hunters, without stepping off them to the ground. ”

“ No young man, though his father were the greatest chief in the nation, can range himself among the warriors, be entitled to enter the marriage state, or enjoy any other rights of savage citizenship until he shall have performed some act of personal bravery and daring, or be sprinkled with the blood of his enemies. In the early springtime, therefore, all the young men who are of the proper age band themselves together and take to the forest in search—like the knight-errant of old—of adventure and danger. ”

“ Never was there such a paradise for hunters as this lone and solitary spot in the days when the region was known only to them and the trappers of the great fur companies. The shelving prairie, at the bottom of which the springs are situated, is entirely surrounded by rugged mountains and contained two or three acres of excellent grass, affording a safe pasture for their animals, which hardly cared to wander from such feeding and the salt they loved to lick. ”

“ Perhaps there is no animal in which maternal love is so wonderfully developed as the buffalo cow; she is as dangerous with a calf by her side as a she-grizzly with cubs, as all old mountaineers know.
The buffalo bull that has outlived his usefulness is one of the most pitiable objects in the whole range of natural history. Old age has probably been decided in the economy of buffalo life as the unpardonable sin. ”

“ Every squaw, child, and man had their faces blackened—a manifestation of joy.44 Pell-mell they went—men, squaws, and dogs—into the icy river. Some hastily jerked off their leggings, and held moccasins and dresses high out of the water. Others, too impatient, dashed the stream from beneath their impetuous feet, scarce taking time to draw more closely the always worn robe. Wondering what caused all this commotion, and looking over the river, whither the yelling, half-frantic savages were so speedily hurrying, we saw a band of Indians advancing toward us. ”