Hunting in the Yellowstone

Contents

PAGE

CHAPTER

I. Wonderland 23

Introduction

AMONG narratives of sport and travel in our western country during Indian and buffalo days, some of the liveliest and most entertaining were written by men not "native here and to the manner born," but by foreigners whose lust for new scenes and strange ventures had urged them from afar. Such a one was the Earl of Dunraven, who, in company with an ardent fellow-sportsman, Dr. George Kingsley, spent a good part of the years 1870 to 1876 hunting and fishing in Canada and the western States.

While on a visit to Chicago, Lord Dunraven was shown by General Phil Sheridan the mounted head of a superb elk (wapiti), a present from the commandant of a frontier army post. "My enthusiasm," says Dunraven, "rising to a fever heat on a closer inspection of the antlers, nothing would satisfy me but I must be off at once to the fort." And off went the impulsive Irishman, with his English friend, carrying a letter of introduction from Sheridan which was open sesame to every post on the border.

Of this first taste of hunting on the plains, Doctor Kingsley wrote to his wife: "The officers of the fort have given us regular western outfits, which are very necessary; and we cannot hunt without a guard of soldiers for fear of the Indians, who are inclined to be nasty. Our first hunt lasted for fifteen days, out by the wildest part of the Platte River, north of the station. We killed elk, white-tail and black-tail deer, antelope, swans, immense geese, ducks, and small game without count. This elk running is perfectly magnificent. We ride among the wild sand-hills till we find a herd, and then gallop after them like maniacs, cutting them off, till we get in the midst of them, when we shoot all that we can. Our chief hunter is a very famous man out West, one Buffalo Bill. To see his face flush, and his eyes 'shoot out courage' — as his friend and admirer Texas Jack says — is a sight to see, and he cheers us on till he makes us as mad as himself. One day he and I had seven elk on the ground at once, of which number he credited me with three, not bad for a beginner. These elk are really the great wapiti which you and the children have seen so often at the Zoo. The herd out of which we got our greatest number contained quite a hundred and thirty, a most splendid sight. A few days later we saw another herd of at least twice that number. It is absolutely impossible to describe the grandeur of their rush as they go thundering along. Despite the great hardships and the very rough work the sport has quite repaid me. We four, Lord Dunraven, Buffalo Bill, Texas Jack, and I, killed fifteen elk on this trip. We also saw wild horses, but, of course, did not hunt them. Soon after our return we fitted out again and went south for buffalo. We only found two, both of which we killed, Lord Dunraven one, I the other. Unfortunately, the men who were sent out to bring in the meat, instead of doing so, found more buffalo, which they went after in vain. They then lost themselves in a most frightful storm, got separated, and one is gone altogether; we hope, however, that he may yet turn up. This buffalo running is very good fun in its way, but I don't think I shall care about much more of it — the elk running is far finer." 1

There were vast herds of buffalo about one hundred and fifty miles to the southward, and the hunters expected to go after them, relying upon the intense cold to keep the Indians quiet, but the weather became so changeable that they had to give up the idea. The Indians were only waiting until spring to make war upon the whites, being much incensed by a new railroad line which ran right through their hunting ground and afforded ready markets for such men as Buffalo Bill, who slaughtered the bison by thousands for their meat, or often only for the tongues and hides.

These border scouts and hunters were a new type to our adventurers, both of whom have left glowing tributes to their qualities. Doctor Kingsley wrote :

"The conversation turns, of course, on Indians, how they come down in the spring, and lie in wait in the willow beds ready to snap up any straying horse or carelessly protected scalp, and then off and away with them far into the desert, long before the troopers are half-way through their preparations for a pursuit. These troopers — most of them Germans and Irish, but with a few deserters from our own army — have, indeed, no earthly chance with the nimble, quickwitted Indian. The only men who can cope with him are men like our friends Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack, who know every double and turn of his subtle,

1 Kingsley, George Henry. Notes on Sport and Travel. London, 1900.

twisty and twiny mind, and hunt him as a nobler species of game, in whose killing there is infinite credit. By-the-bye, I have not yet introduced you to these two perfect specimens of the western professional hunter, a race which I had been led to think of as existing only in Fenimore Cooper's novels. Not that they are of the leather-stocking type — if you want to meet him you must go to the wooded parts of Colorado or California, where you will find him, silent and apparently slow, with his ponderous Kentucky rifle, that mighty bar of iron, invariably bearing the honored name of Hawkins on its lock-plate, which no ordinary mortal can 'heft,' spending his life in that delicious, observant lounging under the green-wood trees called 'still hunting' — the style of hunting pursued by Robin Hood, Adam Bell, Clym of the Clough, and William of Cloudeslee — which is, in its way, to a man who loves studying Nature, the most perfect of all sports. No, our man is a different being altogether, a man of the mustang and the high-peaked Mexican saddle, of the lasso and the spurs, a man whose whole soul is so full of energy and excitement that it bursts forth, ever and anon, into wild singing, and yellings, and gallopings, and firings of rifles, from mere speed of circulation in the dry-champagne-like air of the prairies. His work is done with a rush and a dash, to the poundings of hard horse hoofs, and the thunderings of hundreds of wapiti and bison. His sport is on a gigantic scale, and his returns often enormous, but they soon go; everything on the plains is frightfully dear, and his very clothing — and he is sure to be a dandy if he is worth anything — cuts a most monstrous cantle out of the greenbacks which he receives from the States — western men always talk of 'the States' as a far distant and foreign country — for elk and buffalo, black-tail and white-tail, and, best of all venison, prong-horn.

"Buffalo Bill, as to face and feature, is a noble Vandyke stepped from its frame. Oh! that I had the pen of a lady-novelist to describe his manly charms! Half hidden by their long black fringes, his large, lustrous eyes so full of slumbering fire, which flashes into flame in moments of excitement — Jack says that you can 'see the courage shooting out of 'em/ when he's charging Indians — his firm, sensitive mouth, his delicately molded chin, covered, yet not concealed by a pointed beard of silky brown untouched by scissors, his pale morbidezza complexion, and glory of glories, his magnificent hair, sweeping in natural curves over his strong, square shoulders, on which the marble column of his neck is poised with the grace of an Antinous — aha! that's the man I think! 'Todgers could do it when she chose!' Really, joking apart, one of the handsomest and the best built men I have ever seen. As for his manners, they are as perfect as those of the Vandyke would have been. I have never met with a more thorough gentleman, quiet, calm, and self-possessed, full of memories of strange adventures, yet never thrusting them too prominently forward, but telling them with a quiet earnestness which gives to them a far greater reality than any highly-wrought description could possibly give. No wonder he has become a western hero. Sudden he is, I fear, and quick in quarrel, and when aroused he shoots straight, as the nearest town can testify, but what then? His life or theirs! I heard a legend down in Colorado to the effect that the limits of his range were becoming rather restricted owing to his little difficulties, and that, like Dick Swiveller, he would soon have to go out of town to get across the street. Moreover, that there was a gentleman traveling with his portrait in his possession, so that he might recognize him, and 'shoot at sight/ to avenge some relative who had been fired through; but these are the mere awe-struck whisperings of his delighted admirers. One hears a deal about shooting in the States, but unless you go to a low bar, a gambling saloon, or a state lottery, purporting to 'get

up a / you will see precious little of it.

"Buffalo Bill has two styles of dress: the first, which is the one which he usually wears in the settlements, is of beautifully dressed buckskin, decorated with fringes and lappets innumerable, and gorgeous beyond description, but, as he well knows, worse than useless in the plains; then he, being a member of the House of Representatives of his State, thinks fit to assume, at times, a civilian and civilized garb — short black jacket, black pants, and thin kid side-spring boots, which makes him look like the aforesaid Vandyke nobleman trying to disguise himself as a steamboat steward. For some inscrutable reason he delighteth to hunt in this peculiar rig, adding thereto, however, a white Texan sombrero, which, when the leaves thereof are tied tightly down by a handkerchief knotted under his chin, assumes a prudish and poke-bonnet-like appearance which entirely unprepares you for the noble face and flashing eyes which suddenly appear at the end of its tunnel when he turns the apparatus end on towards you. By the way, the first time that I met

Bill and Texas Jack — they had just been burnt off the prairies and were thirsty — they were both attired in fringed buckskin trousers and black velveteen shooting jackets of the real old keeper cut — I often wondered what became of those said jackets, I never saw them again. Were they taken off in a little difficulty and 'smushed' by the gentlemanly barman, or how? Do tell! — Of the many marvelous deeds done by Buffalo Bill, it is not for me to write ; are they not all related, more or less badly, in the dime novels beloved by western men ? I have only to say that he got his title when killing buffalo for the Kansas Pacific Railroad, when it was his custom to bring in a buffalo's tongue for every cartridge which he took out with him.

"Come forth! O Texas Jack, known in the South before the war as J. Omohondro, Esq.; and would that a better hand than mine were here to paint your portrait! If Buffalo Bill belongs to the school of Charles L, pale, large eyed, and dreamy, Jack, all life, and blood, and fire, blazing with suppressed poetry, is Elizabethan to the back-bone ! He too is an eminently handsome man, and the sight of him in his fringed hunting buckskins, short hunting shirt decorated with patches of red and blue stained leather, pair of delicate white moccasins embroidered by the hand of some aesthetic and loving squaw, with his short, bright brown curls covered by a velvet cap with a broad gold band around it, would play the very mischief with many an eastern girl's heart. He, however, has his love and his longings out here, the pale maiden who lives down on the Median River, who rides like a chipney, writes poetry by the yard, shoots pistols as well as Jack himself — and he is the best shot in the territory — and is altogether the proudest, tenderest, coldest, lovingest, most inscrutable darling to be found on 'God A'mighty's footstool/ I thought also that this wild huntress of the plains lived only in the romances of Mayne Reid and the dime novels, but here she is, warm flesh and blood, as wild and as strange and as full of contradictions as the most Bourbon-inspired novelist ever dreamt of. I have long had a fancy that one could find everything that one can imagine somewhere in the world, if one could only search long enough, and the more I travel the more do I find myself becoming convinced of the truth of my own theory, which is not the case with all theorists, I think.

"Jack raves poetically as we canter along side by side, and on one of us remarking what a deal of beauty there is in the most plain prairie, he bursts out, 'Ah! you should see it in the spring-time, with the antelopes feeding in one direction, the buffaloes in another, and the little birdies boo-hooing around, building their nesties, and raising hell generally !'

"Jack, being a southern man, thinks it necessary to suppose that he has Indian blood in his veins, a very popular idea in those parts. 1 If he has, he is rather rough on his relatives, for he is deadly on Indians. Indian hunting is, in fact, the real profession of both Jack and Bill, they being retained as trackers, aye, and as fighters too, in the case of horses being run from the neighborhood of the fort; though, from time to time, they are put in charge of a band to see that it does not exceed the limits of its

1 Referring, no doubt, to real or alleged descendants of Pocahontas. — Ed.

reservation, and to lead it out to the hunt as a shepherd leadeth his flock to the pasture. They have the strangest feelings about Indians, these two. Though, when on the war path, they would no more hesitate to shoot down an Indian off his reservation, than they would hesitate to throw a stone at a felonious chipmunk, they have a sympathy and a tenderness toward them infinitely greater than you will find among the greedy, pushing settlers, who regard them as mere vermin who must be destroyed for the sake of the ground on which depends their very existence. But these men know the Indian and his almost incredible wrongs, and the causes which have turned him into the ruthless savage that he is, and often have I heard men of their class say that, before God, the Indian was in the right, and was only doing what any American citizen would do in his place. It is not so much that the intentions of the U. S. Government are not good, as it is that the manner in which they are carried out is extremely evil. The men who are told off as Indian agents are notorious for their wholesale peculations, and for the riches which they amass; and the wretched native, driven to desperation, and knowing that death is certain, chooses to meet it his own way, and makes it as sweet as he can with revenge. Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack have the same feeling for Indians that the true sportsman has for game, 'they love them, and they slay them.' They admit that in many respects they resemble human beings, but hold that they are badly finished, their faces looking as if they had been chopped out of red-wood blocks with a hatchet, and say that they must never be trusted, friendly or unfriendly, and that they must be shot if they will steal horses. I remember once shooting a swan, the leader of a party of five, two old and three young ones, and sending one of the men to recover it. He came back to me in quite a melancholy state, and told me that the cry of its mate had made him feel so sad, 'the poor thing was a-mourning so.' Yet this good fellow would describe his shootings of Indians as coolly as if he were describing a shot at a rabbit, and would have heard the death shrieks of squaw and warrior with equanimity, if not with pleasurable excitement.

"We can see, even now, the long, low black line of smoke with, here and there, a red flicker at its base, which shows that the mischief is still in progress. O! the unutterable misery and dreariness of a burnt prairie; and still worse of the water-courses, with the bunches of charred reeds and the scorched cotton-trees — the unburnt parts of their bark shining a ghastly gray against the black charcoal — and the river, all bare and naked, bereft of all the mysterious charm which it used to derive from its disappearing and reappearing like the bright glance of an eye through the shroudings of a mantilla. These fires cause Buffalo Bill to sing a kind of war chant in a queer sotto voce. This war chant of Bill's is a curious affair. You hear begun, with a pale but calm and smiling face, a little ditty which never gets beyond the first line, 'On the beach at Long Branch/ What happened or did not happen on the beach at Long Branch you are never told; the light humming goes on, but if you approach close enough you find that the libretto is composed of some of the hardest and tallest swearing that it has ever been your good luck to hear. The effect is mighty old ; and a stranger hearing this light-hearted humming might imagine that its performer was exactly in the right state of mind to welcome with effusion the proposition that he should make a little loan of a ten dollar bill — but when Mr. Cody is singing his little cusses, look out for squalls!"

On this and on other hunting trips that the Earl and the Doctor made together, it was more by good luck than from any scruples about taking chances that they avoided scrapes with the Indians. Miss Mary Kingsley, in a memoir of her father, tells how "in the course of these wanderings they shot not only moose in the forests of Acadia, but also every other kind of living thing that is regarded on the Western Continent as being legitimately shootable, with the solitary exception of their fellow-men." She tells how her mother, for months at a time, was kept in an unbroken state of nervous anxiety about the Doctor. "Letters from him were necessarily scarce, and newspaper paragraphs not a bit more reassuring in tone, for they took the form of statements that the Sioux or some other redskin tribe were on the war-path. Indeed the worst shock she ever had was when he was away in North America. The last letter she had had from him informed her that Lord Dunraven and himself were going to join General Custer on an expedition, when there came news of the complete massacre of General Custer and his force. A fearful period of anxiety followed, and then came a letter saying that providentially they had been prevented by bad weather from joining General Custer at all."

The present book by Lord Dunraven describes the country of the Upper Yellowstone and narrates the adventures of his party in that region during the summer of 1874. The hot springs, geysers, and other extraordinary phenomena of this "Wonderland" were discovered in 1807 by John Colter, a hunter attached to the Lewis and Clark expedition, who, after more than two years' service with the explorers, had left them when they approached civilization on the homeward journey, and struck back into the wilderness on his own hook. The hunter's description of the amazing things he had found was received with incredulity, and "Colter's Heir' became a synonym for preposterous invention. Sometime before 1840 the region was visited by Jim Bridger, a trapper afterwards famous as scout and Indian fighter; but he, too, was laughed at, and his story was scouted as "another of Bridger's lies." Twenty or thirty years later, some wandering gold seekers confirmed the early reports; but it was not until 1870 that a scientific expedition set at rest all doubts as to the existence of this marvelous country and made it known to the world. The following year a government exploring party under Dr. Ferdinand V. Hayden made a large collection of specimens and photographs, mapped the region, and then issued an elaborate report which induced Congress, in 1872, to reserve the area from settlement, and create of it a National Park or pleasure ground dedicated to the benefit and enjoyment of the people.

Of his own trip Lord Dunraven says: "Being in the United States during the summer of 1874, and having two or three months of spare time,

I determined to pay a visit in the autumn to the farfamed region of the Upper Yellowstone, and to judge for myself whether the thermal springs and geysers there situated were deserving of the superiority claimed for them over similar phenomena in New Zealand and Iceland. For two or three years — in fact, ever since the first vague accounts of the marvels to be seen upon its shores had filtered out into the world — I had longed to visit the Yellowstone. Its lakes had for me a magnetic attraction which drew me towards them with an irresistible impulse; and there was an atmosphere of mystery enveloping its upper waters like a mist, which I eagerly sought to dispel.

"I did not undertake the expedition in the cause of science. I do not pretend to anything but a very slight acquaintance with natural history, geology, and mineralogy. I had no instruments for taking measurements, nor the time, knowledge, and skill necessary to make an advantageous use of them. . . •

"I had, moreover, heard the district spoken of as an excellent game-producing country; and the pursuit of large game is to me a great delight: but it was less for any special design of hunting than for the satisfaction of my curiosity and the gratification of my sight-seeing instincts that I really decided to attempt the trip.

"I had intended making a somewhat prolonged tour, and proposed starting for the Yellowstone Lake from Rawlings Springs or some other convenient point on the Union Pacific Railway, not far west of Cheyenne. Had I done so I might have had something of greater interest to narrate. But I was prevented from carrying out my original intentions by the fact that hostilities broke out between certain of the Indian tribes and the Government, and I was therefore compelled to abandon all idea of penetrating to Geyserland from the east through mountain passes hitherto untrodden by the white man's foot, and to take a more ordinary and prosaic route.

"I must apologize for the fact that nothing happened to me or to any of my party. But, so far as I am personally concerned, it is useless to pretend that anything ever does happen to me. I never have an adventure worth a cent; nobody ever scalps me; I don't get 'jumped' by highwaymen. It never occurs to a bear to hug me, and my very appearance inspires feelings of dismay or disgust in the breast of the puma or mountain lion. I am not drowned or overwhelmed by sudden floods. I don't slide down precipices and catch by the seat of my breeches on a spike just as I am falling over a cliff 40,000 feet high. I don't ride for my life, the whirling lasso of a wild Comanche just grazing my shoulder; so I have no opportunity of describing my mettlesome steed, 'swift son of the desert and the simoom.' My dog has never caught me by the coat collar just as I was sinking for the last time ; so I have no excuse for making poetry if I could, and shedding a few tears over the faithful companion of my wanderings, lately deceased. Savages never throw tomahawks at me or stick my best hat full of arrows. It is true that I have often been horribly frightened, but generally without any adequate cause; and I have suffered fearfully from a too liberal admixture of saleratus in my bread, and terrible things happened to me in consequence, but only in my dreams. I don't get lost for weeks, and half starved; neither buff aloes gore me, nor wapiti spike me with their antlers. If I drew upon my imagination, the draft would probably be returned with 'no effects' written across the face of it: or, if there was any value to be found, some officious person would surely disclose that the notes were forgeries or the coin counterfeit. So the reader must reconcile him or herself to find in the following pages nothing more than a simple, but truthful, description of an ordinary humdrum trip.

"If I have been guilty of technical errors in nomenclature, I pray to be excused; my meaning will, I think, in any case be clear. I have not -attempted to force into my narrative the typical Western Man, or to introduce much of his peculiar phraseology. I have also refrained from venturing upon second-hand imitations of American humorists, and from attempting to portray characters already drawn by skilful delineators of frontier life. Neither have I filled the mouths of my transatlantic characters with expressions which are erroneously supposed to thickly interlard the conversation of all Americans."

From the original edition of The Great Divide 1 (London, 1876) the present editor has excised a mass of scientific data quoted from Hayden and other sources, as this is no longer up-to-date or interesting to the general reader. Sundry political digressions also have been omitted, as well as a long account of a meeting between U. S. Commissioners and the Crow

1 This was the title under which the book was published. It has been changed in the present instance in order to avoid confusion with the well known play of that name by the late William Vaughn Moody.

Indians. Such condensation is to the reader's advantage, as it permits the narrative to flow smoothly and without interruption.

The charm of Lord Dunraven's story is in good part due to its frank camaraderie, to the jolly way he had of adapting himself to any company and to any circumstance, and to his hearty sense of humor, which, as often as not, turned the joke against himself. Though squatting over a mud-puddle through a windy, rainy night, he could chuckle over the situation and laugh at the torrent of blankety-blanks from Texas Jack. He boasts not of the really good shots he made, but tells with gusto of firing from prone position at an antelope lying broadside on and missing it clean at twenty-five yards! But Dunraven was more than a sportsman. He observed Nature with the eye of an artist and the soul of a lover. The sublime and beautiful in western scenery has seldom been portrayed so eloquently, so gracefully as in the pages of The Great Divide.

Horace Kephart.

CHAPTER I "wonderland"

NORTH AMERICA has frequently been compared disadvantageously, as regards scenery, with Europe and the other quarters of the globe; and not without reason. Of the western continent, the better known and more civilized portions are very uninteresting. If I except the Hudson, which is lovely, the soft beauty of Lake George, the mountainous districts of New England, of Virginia, and other spurs and offshoots of the Alleghanies, the general character of the country, more especially between the Alleghanies and the Rockies, is flat, drearjr, and uninviting. Exceedingly graceful is the maize plant when its silken tassels droop in the hot sunshine amid the dark green curving leaves, yet the eye wearies of interminable cornfields bounded by untidy and tortuous snake fences. Nothing is more vulgar-looking and unkempt than recently cleared land. The face of Nature, shorn of the beauty of its natural covering, looks mean and dirty ; and, as compared with its appearance when clothed with forest, resembles the contrast between a man's countenance when disfigured by a coarse stubbly growth of a week old and the same when adorned with the soft flowings of a patriarchal beard. Blackened stumps stand thickly in the foreground amid rocks and weeds, and the forest seems to huddle itself back out of reach of the fatal ax. The beauty of nature is destroyed, and is not succeeded by the artificial beauty of civilization.

The great plains, though fascinating from their vastness, and blessed with most glorious sunsets and clothed with an exquisitely delicate coloring — so delicate that it is not appreciated until a long apprenticeship to the prairie has been served, — are, nevertheless, inexpressibly sad and mournful. The mountains, grand as they are, cannot for a moment compare in shape, form, and general beauty with the Alps. No glaciers fill the upper portions of the valleys; the thunder of the avalanche is seldom heard. No peaks like the Matterhorn astonish with their ruggedness the traveler's eye. But the one attribute peculiar to the continent is that of vastness. Everything is huge and stupendous. Nature is formed in a larger mold than in other lands. She is robust and strong, all her actions full of vigor and young life. Storms are fearful and violent, floods rise and sweep the country like seas. Mighty rivers, with fierce ungovernable tide, in a night scoop out fresh beds for themselves and laugh at man's shackles and restraints, or, in their struggles to break the chains that winter has bound around them, burst free and carry off, like cobwebs, the toilsome results of engineering skill. Lakes are seas. There are great deserts almost unknown and unmarked on any map. Through thousands and thousands of square miles of primeval forest, dark, impenetrable to the sun's rays, the north wind wails and whispers; while for days you may travel on the plains without seeing a tree, the horizon forming an unbroken circle around you. The so-called Rocky Mountains extend the entire length of the continent, and in places are five or six hundred miles in width, comprising many ranges w T hich contain important valleys, and divide great and fertile plains. Through these mountain-walls the rivers have burst or sawn their way, forming chasms (canons as they are called) for which no parallel can elsewhere be found.