Part 10
In these regions of darkness you are led by the guide until the Hall of Beauty is lit up to your astonished gaze. Crystal flowers of the most delicate design and exquisite workmanship hang in festoons from every nook and corner. Sparkling incrustations that rival the beauty of Arctic frosts and glitter in the bright light are sparkling on every side. Most wondrous of all there are a million stalactite figures in miniature that appear to be in a pandemonium of outlandish contortions. Maybe, who knows, but what the goblin spirits once lived here and worked out curious things in translucent stone, further down the black passages of earth and caught a glimpse of our ancestors in some of the great halls of torture way down below, and so reproduced the scene as Jack Frost has been wont to paint the leaves of summer on our frosted window panes.
The Magi of this dark abode, the guide in wide sombrero, black eyed and wearing a mustache fierce as a bandit of the Corsican isle, though harmless as a Kansas Populist, beckons on and leads the way. Here the Bridal Chamber, and there writhing reptiles, dancing devils, monkeys, beasts, birds in every form and riotous posture. Then as the weird wilderness is shut out in semi-darkness, one is inclined to ask of him with lamp and sombrero, “Mister, have I got ’em, or have you?”
The light flashes on Crystal Palace, where gems and jewels bedeck the walls, where huge chrysanthemums or chestnut burrs stand out in bold relief in fadeless crystal flowers moulded from tinted rock, and all seem to mutely plead for recognition as we pass. These silent beauties hidden away under the mountain slopes, where the rays of sun can never reach, speak with the beauty of their creation, to the soul with as great a love and power as the violet in the sequestered glens.
It is mysterious. It is strange. It is one of those unaccountable things in nature which no man can explain that here in the very bowels of the earth, human scenes have been reproduced and human passions portrayed.
Here perhaps centuries before man’s eyes gazed upon the scene, we find in moulded stone, the head of a buffalo, the skeleton of a mastodon, the drapery of a palace, the bride at the altar, the face of sorrow, the Nymphs of Love, War and Poetry are depicted upon these stones.
Once more the light of day, the great chasm beneath, the turquoise skies above, and mighty plains beyond, brings one to the realm of the outer world.
The spectral figure of an hour ago is a pleasant faced young man, who bids you follow the winding path that leads around the mountain side some three hundred yards and which ends at the entrance to the Grand Caverns.
Desiring to see all, you meekly follow another guide through a dark labyrinth and find yourself in the mighty Rotunda of the Caverns. Here loyal hands have raised monuments to Lee, Grant and McKinley. They are built of fragments of stone cast by visitors to the memory of these heroes. The Imp, the guide, motions on; you are next within a mighty auditorium and as there comes upon you the awful silence and stillness of the hour, you hear musical notes, swelling and cadencing louder and louder until they break in thunderous tones within the cavernous depths, “Nearer, Nearer, My God to Thee.” High above, mid the domes of the cavern, the light shows the organist to be playing upon the stalactites which Nature has attuned to the same chords as instruments made by human hands. These stalactites are of crystal, and have the same resonant sound as though they were of finely tempered glass. Up and down the corridors of the cave, through winding passages and circling galleries above, come echoes of “Nearer, My God to Thee,” in waves and billows of sound, such as is only heard by artificial means in the Notre Dame of Paris.
Round about somewhere, in one of the chambers, near the entrance, the visitor is shown a human skeleton, as it was found at the time of the discovery of the cave. It belonged perhaps to that race of men known as the Cliff Dwellers, who once upon a time, when the world was new, lived, loved and reared a race of men in this fair region of the west whom Saxby, a western poet, touches with his magic pen, and beautifies the tradition of them when he says,
“Dismantled towers and turrets broken, Like grim war-worn braves who keep A silent guard with grief unspoken Watch o’er the graves, by the canon weep, The nameless graves of a race forgotten Whose deeds, whose words, whose fate are one With the mist, long ages past, begotten of the sun.”
The sun is now casting his shadows toward the east. From this point of sight we see the Midland trains creeping from tunnels like monster creatures of the Azotic period crawling from their lair. There are green valleys below, and there is also a long serpentine road leading to this side of the mountain by which visitors again reach the pleasant shades of Manitou. Silence, and even sadness, abound in the green-clad mountains beyond. They speak in whispers to themselves and you can understand them if you will. They tell you in sweet, soft voices of the song of birds, the lullaby of mountain brooks, and by gentle winds that sing a song of peace through cedar, fir and pine, that the love of nature, is the love of nature’s God.
XXVI.
WHEN THE WEST WAS NEW.
Thirty years have passed since I first crossed the plains. The buffalo and antelope have disappeared and in their stead herds of cattle and sheep graze in countless thousands. Farms are tilled where raging fires swept the mighty plains in ungoverned fury; cities and towns rear their spires where once stood Indian tepees. The westward march of civilization has stretched across the continent and redeemed the desert. The soil has been made to yield its harvest and the eternal hills to give up their buried treasure. For the men who made the trails by which these things were done, life’s shadows are falling toward the east. They braved the vicissitudes of the western wilderness as heroic as any soldier faced the battlefield; and the trails over which the pioneers slowly made their way across the desert wastes, were blazed with blood and fire. Women, too, on the frontier, volumes might be written of her sacrifices--Indians, poverty, years of patient toil, far from former home and friends, the luxuries of organized society denied, all for the purpose of earning a home and a competence for declining years.
It was my good fortune to become personally acquainted with many early pioneers of the west and number them among my warmest friends, and as I recall to mind some of their heroic deeds I feel that these chapters would be incomplete without a personal mention of a few of them.
* * * * *
Captain Jack Crawford, the poet scout, is one of those noble characters whose memory will live so long as records exist of the pioneers who braved the vicissitudes of the frontier and made possible our Western civilization of today. A man of broad mind, daring and brave and yet with all the sweet tenderness of a child of nature, he became great by achievements alone. Others have gained a temporary fame by dime novel writers. Captain Jack, in comparison with others, stands out as a diamond of the first water. He has helped to make more trails than any scout unless it was Kit Carson. That was before the war. During that struggle he was wounded three times in the service of his country. When the war closed he was for many years chief of scouts under General Custer. He laid out Leedville in the Black Hills in 1876, and was of great service to the government in the settlement of the Indian troubles which succeeded the Custer massacre.
Captain Jack is one of the very few thrown together with the wild, rough element of the frontier who maintained a strictly moral character. I knew him in the “Hills” in 1876 and have known him ever since, and have always found him to be the same genial, whole-souled, brave Captain Jack.
* * * * *
John McCoach, a pioneer of the sixties, was a among a party near the headwaters of Wind River, Wyoming, in August, 1866, who defeated a thousand warriors with the first Henri rifles used on the plains. The story is best told in Mr. McCoach’s own language.
“Our mule trains consisting of thirty-eight wagons and forty-two men, left Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in April, 1866, for Virginia City, Montana. We were all old soldiers and most of us had seen four years of war and, inured as we were to dangers, we cared but little for the hostile Indians of the plains.
“When we reached Fort Laramie, a big council of Indians was in progress, Chiefs Red Cloud, Spotted Tail, American Horse and others of lesser note were there to demand guns and ammunition from the government, saying they needed them with which to hunt game. Officials of high rank from Washington were there to listen to them and among the newspaper correspondents was Henry M. Stanley, who had been sent out by the New York Herald.
“After days of deliberation the Indians were refused the arms and they broke camp in bad humor.
“Before allowing our party to proceed the commander of the fort had us lined up for an inspection of our arms which were a miscellaneous collection all the way from an old muzzle-loading rifle to a modern musket. He told us we were too poorly armed to proceed, when the wagon boss took him to some of the wagons and showed him 200 Henri rifles and abundant ammunition which we were freighting to gun dealers in Virginia City. He then allowed us to go.
“I was herding the mules one afternoon near the headwaters of Wind River, when a party of Sioux Indians, led by Little Thunder, made a dash, intending to stampede the animals. One of them carried a rawhide bag containing some pebbles, which made a hideous noise. Despite their efforts, the mules broke for our camp of circled wagons. I tried to shoot the Indian with the rattle bag but missed. Then I dismounted and the next shot I cut the quiver of arrows from his back when he gave a long yell and throwing himself on the side of his pony, got away.
“When I reached camp the rifles had been distributed. We were called from our slumbers the next morning at four o’clock and told to keep quiet and hold our fire.
“With the first gray streak of dawn about one thousand warriors began to encircle us, riding at full speed and like a great serpent, drawing the coil closer about us with each revolution of the circle. Then the order came and forty-two blazing rifles with eighteen shots to each one dealt out death. Four years of war had taught the men the value of a steady nerve and deliberate aim and before the astonished Indians could retreat the plain was strewn with their dead and wounded.
“These Indians had been at the Fort Laramie council and had seen us drawn up in line with our old assortment of guns for inspection and had counted on us being easy prey. They were the first Henri rifles used on the plains and caused the Indians to speak of us in whispers, as the white men who could load a gun once and then shoot all day. That morning we built our fires with arrows and cooked our breakfast. After that the Indians avoided us as though we were devouring monsters.”
* * * * *
The experience of John McCoach’s party in surprising Little Thunder’s braves with their Henri rifles, calls to mind a story often told in Fort Laramie of how General W. S. Harney fooled these same Sioux Indians under Little Thunder a few years previous to their attack on the McCoach outfit. Jake Smith, a soldier with General Harney in the 60’s thus relates the story:
“General Harney established his headquarters in Leavenworth, Kansas. Little Thunder was at the head of the Sioux and sent word that he was willing either to fight or shake hands with the white soldier. Harney replied that if the Indian was without choice in the matter it might as well be fight; besides, as he remembered his orders, he was to whip some one. So Harney met Little Thunder and about a thousand war men on the North Platte in Nebraska. He whipped them good and some of the Indians’ friends back East tried to make trouble for Harney because he had not had a long preliminary confab with Little Thunder. That Sioux band was a mild-mannered set long after Harney went back to Leavenworth.
“It was after this fight that Harney threw the Society for the Protection of Western Savages into a particular frenzy. The wagon trail for Oregon and California led from Fort Leavenworth to Fort Kearney, Neb., then to Julesburg, in Colorado, from there to Fort Laramie, through old South Pass to Badger and then to Salt Lake. The trip by ox train took about one hundred days with good luck. I know of a party that was on the road 300 days, delayed by Indians and then snowbound. That wasn’t a pleasant winter for a boy of 16.
“Every now and then a band of Sioux would ride up to an ox train, kill if they felt like it and always drive away the stock. Soldiers would be sent out and have the pleasure of following the Indians’ trail until the weather would make winter quarters necessary. Harney started from Leavenworth after one band, taking about 400 cavalrymen, or dragoons. The Indians loafed along ahead of him till they reached the mountains, and then Harney turned back. It was the old story, the Sioux said, and their scouts followed the soldiers until they were well into Kansas. Then the Sioux knew the country was clear for new operations.
“Harney stopped on the Blue River in Northern Kansas near where Marysville now stands. A wagon train reached there from Leavenworth and Harney had all the freight unloaded--simply seized the train--then he put 400 soldiers into those wagons and in two were mountain guns. The great covers were pulled close and leaving a guard over the abandoned freight and horses, Harney started on his journey as a bull-whacker. Not a soldier or officer was permitted to put his head from under a cover in the day time, and only at night a few got leave to stretch their legs. All day they sat in those wagon beds, hot and dusty, playing cards, fighting and chewing tobacco for pastime.
“There were twenty-six of those wagons and they trailed along as if they were carrying dead freight; no faster nor slower than the ordinary freighters, and making camp at the usual places, forming the usual corral of wagons and herding stock at night. The train reached Fort Kearny and slowly went across the South Platte to Julesburg. Occasional Indian signs made Harney have hope.
“The outfit was seventy miles on the way to Laramie when the big day came, and it came quick. Behind them on the trail the men on the outside saw a war party--some say there were five hundred Indians in it. Even if they hadn’t been painted the fact that they were without women or children would have told the story. The train made the usual preparations for an Indian attack, throwing the wagons into a circle, or more of an ellipse, and unhooking the five lead yokes to each wagon. A front wheel of each wagon touched a hind wheel of the one in front and the tongues were turned to the outside. At the front end of the corral an opening about fifteen feet wide was left, but at the rear the opening into the corral was about fifty feet wide. That, also, was according to the freighters’ methods; after a night camp the cattle would be driven into the corral through the big end to be yoked for the day.
“Harney didn’t have time to drive his oxen into the corral, or else he didn’t want to. Only the five yoke of leaders were unhooked and they were then chained to the front wheel of their wagon. The space in the corral was all clear for the Indians, whose method of attacking a wagon train was to rush into the corral and do their shooting. They were a happy lot of braves this day; the war band started for the train when the corral was forming; they spread out like a fan and then came together again and started for the big opening as hard as their war ponies could carry them. A whooping, variegated mob with no more clothes than the paint gave it fell into the corral and then real fun began.
“Those soldiers, who had been sweating under canvas for a few weeks wanted excitement and revenge. The tarpaulins went up and they shot down into that mess of braves as fast as they could load. The two mountain guns completed the surprise and the bucks hardly fired a shot before their ponies were climbing over one another to get out the way they came. It was the only real Indian panic. When the last Sioux brave able to ride disappeared across the prairie there was a big mess to clean up. In those days the Indians needed school all the year around. However, one old buck, a little chief, seemed to be impressed. He was near a mountain gun when the fire opened. ‘Harney is the man who shot wagons at us,’ is the way he told about it years later.
* * * * *
Charles S. Stroble, “Mountain Charley,” known as the cowboy painter, was adopted by the Ute Indians at the age of nineteen. I have often heard him tell the following experience:
“It was the most marvelous instance of daredevil bravery I ever witnessed. It happened in 1866 when I was living with the Utes west of the range in Middle Park, Colorado. They had adopted me a year or so before when I was twenty years of age. My name in Ute was Paghaghet, which means ‘long-haired.’
“It was at this time that the old feud between the Utes and Arapahoes was at its height. Our scouts found the Arapahoes coming in from North Park in the endeavor to surprise some of the Utes’ hunting parties. Our runners having come in and informed us, we soon collected a war party and started north to intercept our enemies.
“I was with the scouting party which went in advance, and I was the only white man in the entire tribe. We found the sign left by their scouts, and then concealed ourselves until our war party could come up. As soon as reinforcements arrived we deployed on either side of a gulch or canon, with our horses hidden away among the rocks and timber in charge of horse-holders.
“We had not waited long when we sighted the advance of the Arapahoes down below us in the gulch. We were unnoticed, because we left no tracks in the gulch and had deployed some distance below.
“When the main body of the enemy had passed our place of concealment we opened fire on them from each side of the gulch, and they, not knowing our numbers, were panic-stricken. They wheeled and came tumbling back up the gulch in great confusion, and all the time subjected to our fire. To be sure, they were returning the fire wherever they caught sight of us, but we had by far the best of them and peppered them hotly.
“The Utes got about eight scalps, as the Arapahoes, although they carried their wounded with them in their flight, were in too big a hurry to look after the dead.
“My Indian brother, Paah, or ‘Black Tailed Deer,” and Wangbich, the ‘Antelope,’ were with me behind some sheltering rocks, and on each side of me. As the Arapahoes were scurrying away through the canon below we noticed particularly one fine-looking young buck, wearing a splendid war bonnet, which flaunted bravely in the breeze. This fellow was singled out by Paah. At the crack of his rifle the Arapahoe threw out his arms and fell backward from his pony and the pony galloped away.
“Paah, elated at the success of his shot, dropped his rifle and plunged down the steep side of the canon, which ran up here at an angle of about forty-five degrees, the other Indians passing all the time and letting loose at him a fusillade of rifle shots and flights of arrows. At length Paah got to his dead Arapahoe, planted his foot on the back of the man’s neck, grasped both scalplock and side braids, gave them a turn on his wrist and with the aid of his knife secured the full scalp.
“Then seizing the war bonnet, he came tearing up the side of the gulch, his trophies in one hand and his knife held dagger wise in the other, to assist him in making the steep ascent.
“The arrows and bullets flew thickly about him, but, marvelous to tell, he arrived on the little flat space back of us without a scratch. Waving his bloody spoils above his head he essayed to give the Ute yell of victory, but he was so exhausted that he was only able to let out a funny squeak as he fell prostrate to avoid the shots that were now pouring in our direction. Wangbich and I covered him the best we could by emptying our six-shooters at the Arapahoes, and he finally succeeded in crawling to shelter.
“On the return of our war expedition to the principal village we celebrated our victory in royal style. The Utes from other villages kept pouring in, and there was dancing afternoon and night for many days. This chief village was located under some high rocks on the Grand river, near a hot spring. The principal feature of the celebration was a scalp parade, a gorgeous affair in which all kinds of silvered ornaments, feathered and beaded costumes were worn. I afterward painted this splendid scene as it appeared to me and the picture is now hanging in the Iroquois club in Chicago.”
* * * * *
“Possibly my experience in the bullwhacking days across the plains,” says George P. Marvin, “does not materially differ from that of other men who piloted six yoke of cattle hitched to eighty hundred of freight across the desert. Yet there were many incidents connected with life upon the plains that have never been written.
“There was scarcely a day passed but something occurred that would furnish material upon which the writer of romance could build an interesting book of adventures.
“In the freighting days of the early ’60’s, the overland trail up the Platte River was a broad road 200 or more feet in width. This was reached from various Missouri River points, as a great trunk line of railroad is now supplied by feeders. From Leavenworth, Atchison and St. Joe, those freighters who went the northern route crossed the Blue River at Marysville, Kansas, Oketo and other points, and traveled up the Little Blue, crossing over the divide and striking the big road at Dogtown, ten miles east of Fort Kearney. From Nebraska City, which was the principal freighting point upon the river from ’64 until the construction of the Union Pacific railroad. What was known as the Steam Wagon road was the great trail. This feeder struck the Platte at a point about forty miles east of Kearney. It derived its name from an attempt to draw freight wagons over it by the use of steam, after the manner of the traction engine of today.
“My first trip across the plains was over this route, which crossed the Big Blue a few miles above the present town of Crete, Nebraska. At the Blue crossing we were ‘organized,’ a detachment of soldiers being there for that purpose, and no party of less than thirty men was permitted to pass. Under this organization, which was military in its character, we were required to remain together, to obey the orders of our ‘captain,’ and to use all possible precaution against the loss of our scalps and the freight and cattle in our care.
“The daily routine of the freighter’s life was to get up at the first peep of dawn, yoke up and if possible get ‘strung out’ ahead of other trains, for there was a continuous stretch of white covered wagons as far as the eye could reach.
“With the first approach of day, the night herder would come to camp and call the wagon boss. He would get up, pound upon each wagon and call the men to ‘turn out,’ and would then mount his saddle mule and go out and assist in driving in the cattle.