Part 10

A great herd of buffaloes on the Plains in the early days, when one could approach near enough without disturbing it to quietly watch its organization, and the apparent discipline which its leaders seemed to exact, was a very curious sight. Among the striking features of the spectacle was the apparently uniform manner in which the immense mass of shaggy animals moved; there was constancy of action indicating a degree of intelligence to be found only in the most intelligent of the brute creation. Frequently the larger herd was broken up into many smaller ones, that traveled relatively close together, each led by an independent master. Perhaps only a few rods marked the dividing-line between them, but it was always unmistakably plain, and each moved synchronously in the direction in which all were going.

The leadership of the herd was attained only by hard struggles for the place; once reached, however, the victor was immediately recognized, and kept his authority until some new aspirant overcame him, or he became superannuated and was driven out of the herd to meet his inevitable fate, a prey to those ghouls of the desert, the gray wolves.

In the event of a stampede, every animal of the separate yet consolidated herds rushed off together, as if all had 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. Sometimes the simplest affair will start the whole herd: a prairie-dog barking at the entrance of 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.

Stampedes were a great source of profit to the Indians of the Plains. The Comanches were particularly expert and daring in this kind of robbery. They even trained their horses to run from one point to another, in expectation of the coming of the wagon trains on the trail. When a camp was made that was nearly in range, they turned their trained animals loose, which at once flew across the prairie, passing through the herd and penetrating the very corrals of their victims. All of the picketed horses and mules would endeavor to follow these decoys, and were invariably led right into the haunts of the Indians, who easily secured them. Young horses and mules were easily frightened; and in the confusion which generally ensued, great injury was frequently done to the runaways themselves.

At times when the herd was very large, the horses scattered over the prairie and were irrevocably lost; and such as did not become wild fell a prey to the wolves. That fate was very frequently the lot of stampeded horses bred in the States, they not having been trained by a prairie life to care for themselves. Instead of stopping and bravely fighting off the bloodthirsty beasts, they would run. Then the whole pack were sure to leave the bolder animals and make for the runaways, which they seldom failed to overtake and dispatch.

Like an army, a herd of buffaloes put out vedettes to give the alarm in case anything beyond the ordinary occurred. These sentinels were always to be seen in groups of four, five, or even six, at some distance from the main body. When they saw something approaching that the herd should beware of or get away from, they started on the run directly for the center of the great mass of their peacefully grazing congeners. Meanwhile, the young bulls were on duty as sentinels on the edge of the main herd, watching the vedettes; the moment the latter made for the center, the former raised their heads, and in the peculiar manner of their species gazed all around and sniffed the air as if they could smell both the danger and its direction. Should there be something which their instinct told them to guard against, the leader took his position in front, the cows and calves crowded in the center, while the rest of the males gathered on the flanks and in the rear, indicating a gallantry that might be imitated at times by the _genus homo_.

Generally, buffalo went to their drinking-place but once a day, and that late in the afternoon. Then they ambled along, following each other in single file, which accounts for the many trails on the Plains, always ending at some stream or lake. They frequently traveled twenty or thirty miles for water; so the trails leading to it were often worn to the depth of a foot or more.

That curious depression so frequently seen on the Great Plains, called a "buffalo wallow," is caused in this wise: The huge animals paw and lick the salty, alkaline earth, and when once the sod is broken the loose soil drifts away under the constant action of the wind. Then, year after year, through more pawing, licking, rolling and wallowing by the animals, the wind wafts more of the soil away, and soon there is a considerable hole in the prairie.

Many an old trapper and hunter's life has been saved by following a buffalo trail when he was suffering from thirst. The buffalo wallows usually retain a great quantity of water, and they have often saved the lives of whole companies of cavalry, both men and horses.

There was, however, a stranger and more wonderful spectacle to be seen every recurring spring during the reign of the buffalo, soon after the grass had started. There were circles trodden bare on the Plains, thousands--yes, millions--of them, which the early travelers, who did not divine their cause, called "fairy rings." From the first of April until the middle of May was the wet season; you could depend upon its recurrence almost as certainly as on the sun and moon rising at the proper time. This was also the calving period of the buffalo, as they, unlike our domestic animals, only rutted during a single month; consequently the cows all calved during a certain time; this was the wet month, and as there were a great many gray wolves that roamed singly or in immense packs over the whole prairie region, the bulls, in their regular beats, kept guard over the cows while in the act of parturition, and drove the wolves away, walking in a ring around the females at a short distance, and thus forming the curious circles.

In every herd at each recurring season there were always ambitious young bulls that came to their majority, so to speak, and these were ever ready to test their claims for the leadership; so that it may be safely stated that a month rarely passed without a bloody battle between them for the supremacy--though, strangely enough, the struggle seldom resulted in the death of either combatant.

Perhaps there is no animal in which maternal love is more strongly developed than in the buffalo cow; she is as dangerous with a calf by her side as a she-grizzly with cubs.

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. Abandoned to his fate, he may be discovered in his dreary isolation, near some stream or lake, where it does not tax him too severely to find good grass; for he is now feeble, and exertion an impossibility. In this new stage of his existence he seems to have completely lost his courage. Frightened at his own shadow, or the rustling of a leaf, he is the very incarnation of nervousness and suspicion. Gregarious in his habits from birth, solitude, foreign to his whole nature, has changed him into a new creature; and his inherent terror of the most trivial things is intensified to such a degree that if a man were compelled to undergo such constant alarm, it would probably drive him insane in less than a week. Nobody ever saw one of these miserable and forlorn creatures dying a natural death, or even heard of such an occurrence. The cowardly coyote and the gray wolf had already marked him for their own; and they rarely missed their calculations.

Rising suddenly to the top of a divide with a party of friends in 1866, we saw standing below us in the valley an old buffalo bull, the very picture of despair. Surrounding him were seven gray wolves in the act of challenging him to mortal combat. The poor beast, undoubtedly realizing the hopelessness of his situation, had determined to die game. His great shaggy head, filled with burrs, was lowered to the ground as he confronted his would-be executioners; his tongue, black and parched, lolled out of his mouth, and he gave utterance at intervals to a suppressed roar.

The wolves were sitting on their haunches in a semicircle immediately in front of the tortured beast, and every time that the fear-stricken buffalo gave vent to his hoarsely modulated groan, the wolves howled in concert in most mournful cadence.

After contemplating his antagonists for a few moments, the bull made a dash at the nearest wolf, tumbling him howling over the silent prairie; but while this diversion was going on in front, the remainder of the pack started for his hind legs to hamstring him. Upon this the poor beast turned to the point of attack, only to receive a repetition of it in the same vulnerable place by the wolves, who had as quickly turned also and fastened themselves on his heels again. His hind quarters now streamed with blood, and he began to show signs of great physical weakness. He did not dare to lie down; that would have been instantly fatal. By this time he had killed three of the wolves, or so maimed them that they were entirely out of the fight.

At this juncture the suffering animal was mercifully shot, and the wolves allowed to batten on his thin and tough carcass.

JUDGE LYNCH'S COURT AT WHOOPING HOLLOW.

Whooping Hollow is the uneuphonious name of a mining camp in the very heart of the Taos Range--or rather, _was_, for it has been expunged from the map these twenty-five years, and but few of the present generation in New Mexico are aware that such a place ever existed. It was almost inaccessible, so awfully abrupt and broken were the bare granite ridges surrounding it, out of which the circumscribed valley in which the town lay seemed to have been literally scooped when the rocks were plastic--Titanic hands holding the scraper, and the lightning the propelling power. How the place received its strange appellation was a mystery even to the majority of the miners who worked there for nearly five years with picks, shovels, long-toms, sluices, and other appliances for extracting the ore from the refractory rock. The quantity of the precious metals shipped during that period made the camp famous, and resulted in building up a town of rude shanties and dugouts which at the height of its prosperity numbered over twelve hundred souls. But you cannot find Whooping Hollow on any modern map, for it played out in less than six years from the date of the discovery of gold there; though several fortunes were mined in that time, and made by traffic the specialty of which was bad whisky.

There was a legend current in the early days of the valley's occupancy, that was honestly believed in, which affirmed that the first party of prospectors, consisting of four or five men, all Tennesseeans, who entered the great cañon in their search, were rewarded well for their pains, finding plenty of water, game, fuel, together with other necessaries in the prosecution of their vocation--a beautiful place for their camp, lots of silver, and gold in paying quantities--were scared out of the gulch (to which they never returned) by an unearthly screeching, seemingly emanating from a human throat. Its ghostly owner, they declared, visited their camp every night about 11 o'clock, and on the top of a timbered knoll, where they could plainly see it as the moonlight sifted through the scattered piñons and dwarfed cedars, took its stand, setting up its blood-curdling cries, which it continued with short intervals of cessation, until daybreak. Those men, it was alleged, were a very ignorant and superstitious set, who, after three nights of their weird experience, could bear it no longer, and were absolutely driven away through fright.

Of course they told others of their rich strike, not forgetting to mention the "hant" of the place, as they called it; but these others, old mountaineers, not fearing any disturbance from the moonlight specter, went there, established their camp--to which hundreds soon flocked--calling it Whooping Hollow, in derision of the tale told by the alarmed Tennesseeans; which name it retained during its whole existence, and was known and recognized by that as a postoffice on the mail records in Washington.

In all probability what the men really heard was the mottled or American screech-owl, which makes a plaintive noise, and a peculiar sound during part of its mournful notes, like the chattering of teeth, keeping up its alternating whooping and moaning all night. It loves to perch on some blasted tree in the moonlight, and the disembodied form seen by the superstitious miners must have been a shattered and denuded piñon, on which the nocturnal bird sat, that, escaping their vision in the daytime, was exaggerated by their frightened eyes at night into the "hant" of the place!--But this is not a ghost story, and the reader will pardon the digression.

The region in which Whooping Hollow was situated is the roughest, and, to employ a mining phrase, the "lumpiest" portion of the whole Taos range. It is a deep gulch in the strictest interpretation of the word, formed by two lofty divides, whose crests tower skyward from their bases more than 3,000 feet, which themselves are over 5,000 feet above the Atlantic's level, and the distance across the narrow valley at its widest part scarcely three-quarters of a mile. The angle of the slope of the two opposing mountains is a little less than 35 degrees, making their sides, as maybe inferred, very precipitous.

The town's era of prosperity was long before the days of railroads in that portion of the continent, and such feats of engineering as have been accomplished since in the way of "hog-backs," loops and tunnels were not dreamed of as among the possibilities of mountain travel. Nor was there even a wagon-road to Whooping Hollow. Such a thing would have been regarded equally as difficult and expensive as the wonderful achievement of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fé in climbing the Raton Range a dozen years later. Everything was "packed" into the place on muleback, at a minimum cost of twenty-five cents a pound, whether the simplest necessaries of life or a sawmill, and the zig-zag trail the sure-footed beasts were compelled to travel up and down the fearful slopes of the great divides to get in and out of the rocky streets of the narrow town, made one dizzy to look at.

The rude collection of shanties, through courtesy called the town of Whooping Hollow, was built on one side of a little creek which ran at a fearful rate in the bottom of the gulch, whose waters, boiling and foaming, like all mountain streams, rushed over and around the immense bowlders with which its narrow bed was choked; while on the opposite side, immediately facing the principal street, extending for miles both ways, on the hill, the mining claims were located. The houses were in most instances mere shells, constructed of rough slabs; while a few were of hewn logs, presenting a relatively neat appearance. The roofs of all, however, were flat, and covered with earth; they rose one above the other like a flight of stairs, so that one could easily step out of his door upon the top of his neighbor's dwelling below, so precipitous was the side of the mountain on which the place was of necessity laid out. The town consisted of four streets--one devoted entirely to business, the other three to residences only. There were five stores, whose stock was of that character known throughout the West and in the mountains as "general." That is, their proprietors almost literally kept everything, from a toothpick to a steam engine, or from a shoestring to a silk dress. The place boasted also of twelve banks--of deposit only--faro and monte; for the unfortunate individual who once laid his money on the green-cloth tables of these institutions rarely saw any of it again: it was permanently invested! Of saloons, too, Whooping Hollow had its full complement--I think there were thirty at one time; and their owners were not obliged to contribute anything to the support of the town, for as to municipal expenses, there were none. Yet the discipline of the place was fair, to say the least: the ratio of violent deaths to the number of inhabitants was not nearly as great as in any of the Eastern cities; and as to thieving or burglary, such crimes were as rare as a church service--which Whooping Hollow never had during the whole period of its existence. Of course such a unique condition of morality is easily accounted for. "Judge Lynch's" court was the only tribunal for the trial of offenses against the peace and dignity of the town, and from its decisions there was no appeal. Besides, society there was so constituted that it could condone a murder if there existed the slightest shadow of extenuating circumstances, but it would never forgive the unlawful appropriation of another's goods, particularly of horses; horse-stealing being the unpardonable sin, as it is generally on the frontier, the prompt remedy for which was "a short shrift and a long rope."

Notwithstanding the fact that perhaps there were hundreds of men in Whooping Hollow to whose ears the shrill whistle of a bullet would sound sweeter than the soft notes of a flute, still their general good-nature, when sober, and principle of "honor among thieves," kept them within bounds. Occasionally--very naturally, too--there were desperate fights over the gambling-tables in the hells which abounded in Whooping Hollow, and frequently an outrageously obstreperous individual, full of "bug-juice," as the vile whisky dispensed in the saloons was called, would get a hole drilled into him by a No. 44 revolver-ball, or his vitals carved with an eleven-inch bowie. But arrests were rarely made in quarrels of that character, because extenuating circumstances generally existed. Often, under the excellent care of the skillful doctor--a former army surgeon, who had established himself there--the belligerents would recover from their fearful encounter, but oftener took up their last "claim" of six-feet-by-two in "The Bone Orchard," as the cemetery on the timbered knoll (where it was alleged the "hant" was originally seen) had been dubbed by the citizens of Whooping Hollow.

The average miner (and the miners' claims radiated from the place in all directions at varying distances, some as far as thirty miles) would come into town once a week at least, generally Sunday, and if he had been fortunate in his diggings would make a break for the first gaming-table in his way. If he by any chance won he would "make the rounds," which in local parlance meant stopping at every saloon to treat the crowd of thirsty bummers always present on such occasions, and sometimes provoking a quarrel with the first man who got in his way. But if losing, the rule generally, he went drunk and sulky back to his claim, consoling himself with the hope of better luck next time. And so the lives of the majority were passed. Not a few died "with their boots on" in some drunken row with their friends, to whom they had offered a real or fancied insult.

As in all mining-camps at the period of Whooping Hollow's boom, a most heterogeneous crowd composed its residents and transient occupiers. In its rough but busy streets you met all shades and nationalities. The tall, plodding Yankee, fresh from the hills of New England, green as a gourd, but with sufficient gall to extricate himself from any little difficulty he might stumble into; the active, restless Texan; the jauntily dressed commercial traveler, with his samples of bad whisky and worse cigars; the swarthy Mexican, with his broad sombrero, scarlet sash, and irrepressible _cigarito_; that darker specimen of the _genus homo_, the negro; and, last of all, the "heathen Chinee." Nearly every State had its dozens of representatives in the motley group of individuals who had come to seek their fortunes in this new El Dorado. It was a grand place to study character; to learn how all the finer attributes of man may be completely crushed out of his nature by years of adversity, and how, under the same circumstances in others, all that is noble and pure predominates, no matter how hellish or pestilential, morally, may have been their surroundings.

The principal store of the town was owned and conducted by Jemuel Knaggs, a man of reputable character, an old plainsman and mountaineer, full of enterprise and grit, the acknowledged "leading citizen" of Whooping Hollow. In every community, whether the most enlightened or barbarous, there is always to be found some individual who, by his force of character and other inherent attributes, becomes foremost in all that concerns the welfare and prosperity of the people who compose it, and this was the rôle that Jemuel Knaggs played in the rough mining-camp of Whooping Hollow. He was a veteran miner, too, of California in '49; Fraser river, in British Columbia, in '58; and Pike's Peak in '59. But having amassed several thousand dollars during his erratic wanderings, in 1859 he abandoned the pick and shovel for the more pleasant occupation of keeping a general miners' store, whose necessities none knew better than he. So he opened up in Whooping Hollow in the days of its incipiency. He was a man about fifty years old, rather slender than otherwise, but there was something in his air and features which distinguished him from common men. The expression of his countenance was keen and daring; his forehead was high, and his lips thin and compressed, indicating great determination of will. One would not have hesitated to confide in his honor or courage, but would have been extremely reluctant to provoke his hostility. He always wore a dark-blue navy shirt, to the collar of which was attached a curious button. Around his waist was tightly buckled a broad leather belt, in which a formidable looking bowie-knife was stuck; to be used, as is usual with all frontiersmen, for various purposes indifferently--to kill a man, cut food, pick his teeth, or for whittling when he had nothing else to do.

Matters progressed very smoothly in Whooping Hollow for two or three years, under the watchful care of Knaggs and a few others of like sterling character, who will be hurriedly described as they appear in this sketch. But at the end of that period a pall suddenly fell on the place. Men would leave for a visit to some neighboring camp or on a hunting expedition, and never be heard of again. Sometimes it would be one of the best citizens who would disappear all at once; the number of instances of this character in one year aggregating twenty. At last the whole town became aroused, and suspicions of foul play in the matter entered their heretofore apparently too lethargic brains. No one felt safe, and when, to "cap the climax" as it were, Jemuel Knaggs was declared "missing," an investigation was immediately but secretly instituted.