mm COLLECTION OF BEITISH AUTHORS. VOL. 928. NEW AMERICA BY W. H. DIXON. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I. NEW AMERICA. WILLIAM HEPWOETH DIXON, > AUTHOR OF "THE HOLY LAND," ETC. COPYRIGHT EDITION. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I. L E I P Z I BERNHARD TAUCHNITZ 1867. The Eight of Translation is reserved. Bancroft Library TO CHARLES WENTWORTH DILKE, ESQ. OF TRINITY HALL, CAMBRIDGE, MY FELLOW-TRAVELLER IN THE GREAT WEST, THESE VOLUMES ARE AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED. PREFACE. SOME STUDIES of past times, which have long occupied my pen, led me last summer to the James Eiver and to Plymouth Rock. I went out in search of an old world, and found a new one., East, west, north, and south, I met with new ideas, new pur- poses, new methods; in short, with a New America. The men who planted these Free States doing the noblest work that England has achieved in his- tory were spurred into their course by two great passions; a large love of Liberty; a deep sense of Religion; and, in our Great Plantation, liberty and religion exercise a power over the forms of social and domestic life unknown at home. In the heart of solid societies and conservative churches, we find the most singular doctrines, the most audacious ex- periments; and it is only after seeing what kind of forces are at work within them, that we can adequately admire the strength of these societies and churches. VIII PREFACE. What I saw of the changes now being wrought in the actual life of Man and Woman on the Ameri- can soil, under the power of these master passions, is pictured in these pages. 6 ST. JAMBS' TERRACE, Neio Year's Day, 1867. CONTENTS OF VOLUME I. Page CHAPTER I. The Western Country 11 II. Bleeding Kansas , 22 in. Overland Mail 32 - IV. The Prairies 43 V. Prairie Indians 53 VI. The Red Man 60 VII. Indian Life . 70 VIII. Carrying the Mail 81 IX. Red Communities 91 X. The Indian Question 98 *. XI. City of the Plains 107 XH. Prairie Justice 110 XHI. Sierra Madre 124 XIV. Bitter Creek 136 XV. Descent of the Mountains 147 XVI. The New Jerusalem 156 XVII. The Mormon Theatre 165 XVIII. The Temple 174, XIX. The Two Seers 182 XX. Flight from Bondage 190 X CONTENTS OF VOLUME I. Page CHAPTER XXI. Settlement in Utah 196 XXII. Work and Faith 204 XXIII. Missionary Labour 210 XXIV. Mormon Light 217 XXV. Secular Notes 223 XXVI. High Politics 230 XXVII. Marriage in Utah 237 XXVIII. Polygamous Society 244 XXIX. The Doctrine of Pluralities .... 251 XXX. The Great Schism 260 XXXI. Sealing 267 XXXII. Woman at Salt Lake 275 XXXIII. The Republican Platform .... 286 NEW AMERICA. CHAPTER I. The Western Country. u GUESS these Yanks must look alive on this side the Kiver, unless they should happen to enjoy having their eye-teeth drawn eh, Judge?" The man to whom this appeal is made as judge lifts up his chin from a dish of hominy and corned beef, glances first at myself, then at my fellow- traveller, and after winking an eye to the right and left, says slowly, "Guess you are right there, Sheriff." Spoken, as it is, across the table of a tiny hotel in the city of Atchison the only wonder about which hotel is, how a place so diminutive can hold so much dirt and feed so much vermin this passage of legal wit may need a few words of ex- planation. The Yanks now warned by the Sheriff that they must look alive, under penalty of having their eye- teeth drawn, are my friend Charles W. Dilke and myself; two men of undeniable English birth and blood. English faces are not seen every day in the 12 NEW AMERICA. State of Kansas; and these Western boys (every man living beyond the Missouri is a Boy, just as every woman is a Lady in her own right), these Western boys, having dim notions of ethnology and accent, set down every man who crosses the Kiver with a white face and without a bowie-knife, as a Yankee a traveller from the New England States in quest of gold-dust, reservations, and corner-lots. "The Kiver" means the Missouri; here flowing be- tween the settled State of that name and the wild unpeopled region, known in maps as Kansas, in poetry and fiction as Bleeding Kansas. To a Western boy, the Missouri is the Thames, the Rhine, and the Seine, his stream of commerce, beauty, luxury, and art; and every man and woman, that is to say, every boy and lady, living in the western uplands, beyond this margin of bluff and forest, talks to you about going down to the River just as a Picardie peasant boasts of going up to Paris, as a Marylebone grocer speaks of running down to Brighton and the Isle of Wight. The River divides him, as he says, from the East, from the States; and the current jest, everywhere to be heard from Atchi- son to Salt Lake, runs, that a man who means to cross the Missouri is going on a trip to America. Dressed in his high boots, his 1 slouch hat, his belt, his buffalo-skin, his bowie-knife, and his six-shooter, a Western boy feels for the unarmed, sober, unad- venturous men dwelling on the opposite bank of the River, the sort of proud contempt which an Arab beyond Jordan cherishes for the settlers in Galilee, spiced with the fierce hatred which a Spanish hidalgo THE WESTERN COUNTRY. 13 dwelling east of the Duero, feels for the Portuguese pedlars crawling on the western bank. Now, that question of drawing the eye-teeth is one about which I hold to an extreme opinion. Five or six years ago, when calling on my old friend Landor in his Florentine house, and expressing my joy at finding him so hale and bright (he was then eighty-four), I heard in reply to my congratulations, these noticeable words: "My dear fellow, say no more about it, I have lost four of my teeth.' 7 When I smiled, the veteran added, "Do not laugh at me; I would rather have lost all my intellect than one of my teeth." On the whole I should hardly go Landor's length, though the threat of having your "eye-teeth" drawn for you, willy nilly, is certainly one to disturb a saint. But we have crossed our Jordan, and on this side the Kiver we must take our chance. Early yesterday, a sultry August morning, we left St. Louis; a bright and busy city, full of a fierce and tameless life, half Saxon, half Latin; a city which has been smitten to the heart by panic, such a will sometimes fall upon Cairo and Aleppo in a time of plague. For a month of burning heat the heat of a great plain, lying low down in the drain of a great continent three hundred miles from the nearest hills, eight hundred miles from a moun- tain range cholera has been sweeping off her countless victims from those quays on which the poor Irish labour, from those slums in which the im- provident negroes lodge. No Howard Society sprang up this year to as- 14 NEW AMERICA. sist the poor as on a former visitation of the pest, when fifteen hundred of the young, rich, able men of the city had put their hearts into the helping work. Nothing had been done to meet a calamity which is always threatening such a city as St. Louis, built on one of the deepest sewers in the world. With a lack of wisdom hardly to be matched beyond the walls of Gotham, the council had ceased to make daily returns of the dead, the number of which could only be guessed from the march of funerals through the streets, and from the register of interments in the ten or twelve busiest graveyards. The rate of deaths ran high, and it was grossly extended by the arithmetic of fear. Fires were burning in every street; lime was being forced into every gutter; no one dared to enter a public conveyance; horrible tales, the offspring of a Southern brain, were whispered in your ears at table, where you heard that every officer had flown from the cemeteries, even the felons and murderers who had been pro- mised their pardon on condition of interring the victims of cholera; that the unburied corpses were heaped together in the island; that coffins and sear- cloths had been set on fire by the runaways; that a thousand nameless horrors had been committed in the dead-houses and in the graveyards. The death- bells were tolling day and night. We left the city early. Noon saw us at Macon, picking grapes and sucking melons; midnight brought us to St. Joseph (affectionately called St. Joe), on the Missouri River, some dozen miles above Atchison, and of course on the eastern bank. THE WESTERN COUNTRY. 15 At two o'clock, in the night, we came to the end of our iron-track, when the car in which we rode emptied itself into a field, at no place in particular, but in a patch of waste land overgrown by Stink- weed, and in a situation generally supposed to be occupied by a ferry-boat. When we came alongside the last plank of the railway, the night being bleak and chilly, it was sweet to hear the cry of the hotel- runner (a tout is here called a runner), "Any one for Planter's House?" Yes: we were all for Planter's House; and away we huddled, with our sacks and sticks, our wraps and overcoats, into an omnibus, which stood ready by the plank to swallow us up. ,Ugh! what monster is lying among our feet? Something like a huge black dog was sleeping on the floor; which, the moment we pushed into the doorway, began to snort and kick. It seemed too big for a dog: per- haps it was a bull, that finding the omnibus open, had crept in from the Missouri chills. Presently, it began to swear; such oaths as Uncle Toby heard in Flanders; and on waking into consciousness, the strange beast proved to be the driver, coiled up, concealed, and snoring in a buffalo's hide. Getting into our seats, with a dozen sleepless wretches like ourselves, we cried, "All right," and bade the driver "Go a-head." "Guess you'll wait for the ferry," said he, with a volley of adjectives and objurgations, such as ladies and clergymen would consider high in flavour. "When will the ferry-boat come over?" some one asked. 16 NEW AMERICA. "Well, I guess about seven o'clock.' 7 It was now two; the night raw and cold; the omnibus choked with passengers; and we were lying out in an open field. Shaking the hotel-runner from a doze both he and the driver had again tumbled off into sleep, in the cosiest corner of our coach we learned that the river might be crossed, at that point, even in the night, if we liked to venture upon it in a small rowing-boat. Venture upon it! Away we trudged, through the stink-weed, lugging our traps, which no one could be got to carry for us to the river side; feeling our feet down the bank, listen- ing to the lap of the stream, and crying for help to the opposite bluffs. The bank was steep and soft, the black loam slipping beneath our shoes, while a dense yellow fog lay heavily on the swift and whirl- ing flood. On the opposite heights we could trace the outlines of a little town ; a few white houses scattered here and there; below which loomed the dark outline of the river bank. But where was the rowing-boat? Not on our side of the river; for Bill, the waterman, lodged in his wifeless cabin on the Kansas side; and a yep, yep a war-whoop raised by the runner, which ought to have roused the seven sleepers from their trance came back to us only in echoes from the Kansas bluffs. No boat came over with it; and after hanging by the waterside for an hour, seeing the fog grow thicker, and fancying the stream grow wider, we turned away from the muddy bank, not wholly displeased at our war-cry having failed to disturb the boatman's rest. Going back to the omnibus, we found the driver THE WESTERN COUNTRY. 17 snorting in his nook. We shall never forget the volleys of oaths and growls which he fired off du- ring the next four hours; neither shall we forget the rude and ready kindness with which he thrust upon us one of his blankets and his buffalo hide. My friend lay down and slept; sleep comes to you easily in youth; for myself, I walked on the plank; made a second trip to the river; watched the stars pale out; railed against the stink-weed; smoked a cigar. At seven the ferry-boat came steaming over; at eight we are seated at table in the Planter's House, in the midst of these rough aristocrats of Kansas; a jolly set of dogs, each dog with a bowie-knife in his pocket, a six-shooter in his belt. "Can you tell me, sir, at what hour the Over- land Mail leaves Atchison for Salt Lake?" is the simple inquiry to which the Sheriff answers, as above, with that suggestion about our eye-teeth being hardly safe in Kansas. Not taking the reply so quickly as might be, I look the man steadily in the face, and repeat my question; this time with extreme deliberation; on which the company break into a pleasant burst of Satanic laughter. Then we hear from the judge that the Overland Mail (to travel by which, on our way to Denver and Salt Lake, we have come from St. Louis to Atchison, its starting-point) has ceased to run by the Platte route, and that the officers and stages have been sent down the river to Leaven worth, whence the mail is in future to be sent across the Plains by an easier and shorter line. New America. 1. 2 18 NEW AMERICA. Mail, mail- agent, stock, mules, waggons, all have been sent down the river to Leavenworth, and we have no choice left us but to take up our traps and follow in their wake. These folks make merry at our expense, with a brutal kind of good nature-, for a transfer of the Overland Mail from Atchison to Leavenworth is a big blow to their town, such as people who have put their money in it, and who are bound either to stand by it or fall with it, may be forgiven for not seeing in the light of a joke. Being regarded as companions in their misery, it is expected in the town that we shall consider ourselves generally as victims of a plot, and as having had one at least of our eye-teeth drawn. In a hundred phrases we are told that the mail is leaving the best route through the Prairies for the worst. The Platte route, we hear, is safe and easy; a good road, well stocked and stationed; the mili- tary posts on which are strong, the Indians all through which are friendly to white men. In a word, it is the route. The new route is called the Smoky Hill route, from a rolling mist which runs along it for a hundred miles. "Well, gentlemen," says the Sheriff, "you will see it, and then you will judge. Perhaps you like having your remaining eye-teeth drawn?" One of these citizens takes from his pocket a gazette of the current date, in which there is news from the Smoky Hill country; showing that Black Kettle, Koman Nose, Spotted Dog, and some other worthies of the red race, are out on the war-path; telling how this and that lonely ranch has been THE WESTERN COUNTRY. 19 plundered and fired by the Cheyennes; and giving lists of white men who have been killed by these savages. By the same gazette we learn that in the North the state of affairs is rather worse than better. A party of white men, coming down the Missouri, has been attacked by Blackfeet Indians, who ex- changed shots with them, and swam after them, but were distanced by the rapidity with which the white men plied their boats. The party thus escaping from the tomahawk report that seven white men, coming in a boat down the same river, have been captured and killed by Crows, an Indian tribe who have recently made a treaty of peace with the gov- ernment; but in consequence of some slight, as they allege, have burned their treaty, put on ochre and vermilion, and gone out, like their brethren the Cheyennes and Sioux, on the war-path. A tall, swashing fellow, bickering with rifle, bowie-knife, and six-shooter, lounges into the room, and is introduced to us as Captain Walker; "the famous Captain Jem Walker, sir; who has crossed the Plains seven- and- twenty times; after whom Walker's Creek is named" a creek of which we blush to think that we know nothing, not even the famous name. Captain Walker is of opinion that we shall be fools if we trust our scalps along the Smoky Hill route. The Platte road is the only safe one. When we object that as the mail no longer runs along that safer path, we can hardly travel by it, he opines that we shall do well to stay a few days in Atchison, during which he will put us up to the ropes, and fix us generally in Prairie politics. If 2* 20 NEW AMERICA. we don't know what is best for ourselves, he has no objection to our being damned, as we certainly shall be after making unpleasant acquaintance with a Cheyenne knife. It is clear that these men of Atchison have but a poor opinion of the Leavenworth route when com- pared against their own. Hearing that a small steamer is going down the river to Leavenworth in the afternoon, we send for our bills, and have our boxes put on board. It is now nine in the morning, and as we have nothing to do, our new friends think proper to stay and help us ; a courtesy on their side to which we should offer no objection if it were not for their frequent and sardonic allusions to the fact of our having been taken in. About noon an accident raises us in their good opinion to a height yet higher than that from which we had evidently fallen; enabling us to quit the town, morally speaking, sword in hand and with flying colours. Sauntering down the street, enjoying our gossip and cigar, we note the word Post-office on a shop- front, and on going inside we find there is one letter with my name on the cover, written in an unknown hand, on which three cents are due. Paying the money, and breaking the seal, I find the letter is not for me; on which I fold and restore it to the postmaster, saying it is not mine,- and should be kept for the owner, to whom it is perhaps of mo- ment. Eyeing me in a queer way, the postmaster takes the letter, and gives me back my change of three cents. "Do you see?" says the Sheriff to his THE WESTERN COUNTRY. 21 nearest friend; " damned smart that read his letter and got his money back ! Hang me if I think they are Yanks after all." One touch of roguery, it would seem, is enough to make the whole world kin! 22 NEW AME1UCA. CHAPTER II. Bleeding Kansas. "WELL, Sam," say I to a blithe young negro of thirty- five years, a boy with quick eye and deli- cate razor-hand, as he powders my face and dabs the rosewater on my hair, in the shaving-room of Planter's House, Leavenworth, "where were you raised?" "Me riz in Missouri, sar." "You were born a slave, then?" "Yes, sar, me slave in Weston; very bad boss: always drunk and kicking poor nigger boy." "And how did you get your freedom, Sam - did you go and fight?" "No, sar; me no fight; tink fighting big sin; me swim." "Swim! Oh, yes; you mean you swam across the Missouri into Kansas, from a slave state into a free state?" "Dat true, sar. One bery dark night, me slip away from Weston; run through the wood along river bank, down stream; get into de water by dem trees, and push over to de mud bank" (pointing to the great ridge of slime which festers in front of Leavenworth when the water runs low); "there wait till morning, looking at the stars ob heaven and de lights in dese houses all about; and when daylight BLEEDING KANSAS. 23 come, creep out of de rushes and wade ober to the leve"e." "Then you were free?" Sam answers this ques- tion only by a grin. "Had you any help in your escape from men on this side the river the slaves had always good friends in Kansas?" "No, sar; me got no help to 'scape; for me neber tell no one, 'cause me neber know afore the moment when me slip away. The Lord put it in my head. Me Methodist, sar; most nigger-boy in Missouri, Methodist; me just come home from chapel, tinking of de wonderful ways of de Lord, when some one say, close in my ear, 'Kise up, Sam; run away and be a man.' It was de voice of de Lord; I know it well. At first, I not see what to do; me tink it quite wrong to run away and steal myself from boss, twelve hundred dollars. Den me tink, it must be right to obeyde voice of de Lord, for me belong more to de Lord than to boss, and den I slip away into de woods." "Of course, you were followed?" "Yes, sar," says Sam, putting the last of his fine flourishes upon my face; "boss come ober into Leaven worth, where he find me in de street. 'Come here, you damned nigger,' he say, pulling out his revolver, and catching me by de neck. He got a boat all ready: den some people come up, 'You let dat nigger go alone,' say one; 'Put a knife into de damned nigger,' say another. Den come a big row; dey fight for me all day; and my side win." The date of this little history was six short years 24 NEW AMERICA. ago. Missouri, the fertile state beyond the river, the forests of which I have before me as I write, was then a slave state, with a sparse but fiery popu- lation of slave-breeders and slave-dealers. Nine years before that time that is to say, so late as 1851, when the world was gathering for its jubilee of progress in Hyde Park all this wide region, lying westward of the Missouri, from this river bank to the Rocky Mountains, was without a name. A host of wild Indian tribes, Kansas, Cheyennes, Arappahoes, hunted over the great plains; following the elk, the buffalo, the antelope, to their secret haunts. Two great lines of travel had been cut through the Prairies; one leading southward to Santa F^ in New Mexico, the other running westward, by the Platte river, towards Salt Lake and San Fran- cisco; but the country was still an Indian hunting- ground, in which the white man could not lawfully reside. Half-a-dozen forts had been thrown up by the Government in this Indian country Fort Bent, Fort Laramie, Fort Leaven worth, Fort Calhoun, Old Fort but rather with a view to guarding the red man's rights than to helping the white traveller and trader in their need. But while the people of all nations were assembling in Hyde Park, and wondering at the magnificent country which had even then to be represented by an empty space, a swarm of settlers crossed the Missouri on rafts and in canoes, seized upon the bluffs between Fort Cal- houn and Fort Leavenworth, threw up camps of log-huts, staked out the finest patches of land, espe- cially those on the banks of creeks and pools, and BLEEDING KANSAS. 25 so laid the foundation of what are now the populous and flourishing towns of Omaha, Nebraska, Atchison, and Leavenworth cities of the free Territory of Nebraska, of the free State of Kansas. Then commenced along the whole line of the Missouri river, that fitful, sanguinary strife, which earned for this region the mourning epithet of Bleeding Kansas. It lasted six years, and was a prelude to the civil war. Lawrence and Leavenworth were the results of this b'attle, of which Sam's little story may be taken as a sample. Every one is aware that in the great feud be- tween the free-soilers and the slaveholders -of America, a truce had been made in 1820, which is known in history as the Missouri Compromise; by which act it was arranged between the parties that slavery should never be introduced into any western region lying beyond 36 30' of north latitude, excepting into such portion of Missouri as happened to stand above that line. For thirty years that truce held good, and even when the war of freedom raged against slavery on other fields, the Missouri Com- promise was respected in the west. As the final con- flict neared, the two parties in the struggle showed an equal discontent with that act of truce. The slave-owners in Missouri, having an exceptional ad- vantage in their state of settling with their slaves above the prohibited line, desired to carry their domestic institution straight backward through the country in their rear to the foot of the Eocky Moun- tains, even if they should not be able to carry it 26 NEW AMERICA. thence to the Pacific Ocean. All the South went with them in their plans; though their action was in open conflict with the law. Secret societies sprang up in many states Blue Lodges, Social Bands, Sons of the South, and many more all pledged to aid these planters in carrying slavery westward of the Missouri river, in the teeth of their own Com- promise, in violation of their own truce. The slave-holders of Missouri won one victory without a shot; in quietly, by a local act, which attracted no attention either in Boston or in New York, extending their own frontier westward, from the line drawn north and south through Kansas City, up to that of the river bank; adding six large and now populous counties to their state, and consequently to the area of the slave empire. This act was ab- solutely illegal; but no one in the eastern cities noted it until the bills effecting the change had be- come law, and the district had been peopled with masters and their slaves. The game appeared to be wholly in their hands. From this new slave soil, which lies on the opposite bank, in front of my window, Blue Lodges, Social Bands, and Sons of the South streamed over into these Delaware reserves, into these Kansas hunting-grounds; each boss, accom- panied by his sons and his negroes, proceeding to help himself to the choicest lots. From St. Louis to New Orleans their courage was applauded, their success predicted. In Washington the slave-dealing senators, instead of calling these Missourian planters to account, and carrying out the law against them, sustained them in this outrage on the free states. BLEEDING KANSAS. 27 By a course of partisan agitations they procured a fresh compromise, in which it was agreed that the question of slavery should be referred back, generally, to the people of any unorganised country claiming to come within the Union either as a Territory or as a State. Such an act was supposed by the planters of Missouri and Kentucky to be an open declaration that Kansas and Nebraska were to be organised as slave territories. But now New England came into the field. The conversion of Nebraska from free soil into slave soil would have carried the line of slavery, in the western country, as high north as Boston! A Northern Emigrant Aid Society was founded in Massachusetts, sturdy farmers, fervent professors, youthful poets, yoked horses to their waggons, and pushed across the continent towards the Missouri, sworn to settle on the new Indian lands, to accept the compromise of Congress, and, in their quality of free citizens, to vote a free constitution for Kansas. The Blue Lodges were already hutted at Leaven worth and Atchison; and when the first New Englander crossed the stream, being unable to answer these sentinels that he owned any niggers, they placed him in an open boat, without food, without oars, and sent him floating down the river amidst derisive shouts and threats. A meeting of Sons of the South was called in Westport, on the Kansas border, but within the limits of Missouri, at which, after fiery eloquence, the following resolution was unanimously carried: "That this association will, whenever called upon, by any of the citizens of Kansas Territory, hold 28 NEW AMERICA. itself in readiness together to assist and remove any and all immigrants who go there under the auspices of the Northern Emigrant Aid Society." The " Squatter Sovereign," a news sheet, published in the town of Atchison (founded and named by David Atchison, Senator of Missouri), put forth in an early number this declaration of the planters : "We will continue to lynch and hang, tar and feather, and drown, any white-livered abolitionist who dares to pollute our soil." In July, 1854, thirty New England free-soilers crossed the river in open boats; they were well armed, and brought with them tents and provisions. Pushing up the Kansas river, they rested at the foot of a fine bluff, in the midst of a rolling prairie, covered with flowers. Pitching their tents, and be- ginning to fell wood for shanties, they called the place at which they camped the city of Lawrence, from the name of their popular purse-holder. In August they were joined by seventy more: men like themselves, well armed and resolute, prepared to found that city, and to free that soil. Now had arrived the time for the Missouri men to show their spirit; a hundred Yankees, separated from their friends by six great States, had come into their midst ; daring them to carry out their threat of either hanging, lynching, or drowning every one who should cross into Kansas without a negro slave in his train. Three hundred and fifty Sons of the South took horse, dashed over the shallow stream, and, having early in the morning formed a camp and thrown out piquets, sent word into Lawrence BLEEDING KANSAS. 29 that these new settlers must quit the Territory, pro- mising never to return. Three hours were given the free-soilers in which to pack their things and get ready to march. A Yankee bugle summoned the immigrants to arms; a civil but decisive answer was returned to the Missouri camp; and when the Sons of the South perceived that the Yankees were ready for the fray, and would be likely to fight it out so long as a man could hold his piece, they began to suspect each other, to doubt the goodness of their carbines, and to steal away. Dusk found their camp much thinned, dawn found it broken up and gone. From that day Lawrence has grown and pros- pered. More than once it has fallen into Missourian hands, and the marks of grape and canister are seen upon some of its buildings; but its free-soil people have never been driven out, and it is now a charming little city, with the brightness of a New England town. It is the capital of a free State. In these streets of Leavenworth many a fierce battle has been fought; the Sons of the South living close at hand, in a score of villages on yon wooded banks. Blood has been shed in almost every lane, especially at the voting times, when thousands of the Missourians used to come across in boats, take possession of the polling-booths , and return an over- whelming but fictitious majority in favour of a slave constitution. One good citizen, William Phillips, an advocate, was seized by Sons of the South for having signed a protest, as a lawyer, against the frauds which had disgraced the election; was forced 30 NEW AMEEICA. into a boat, and pulled up the river to Weston, on the Missouri side; where he was first tarred and feathered, then ridden on a rail, afterwards put up to auction as a slave, and finally knocked down, amidst frantic yells and menaces, to a negro. On his escape from Weston, Phillips returned to Leaven- worth, resolute in his free-soil faith, and ready for the post of danger in every fray. In another week from this date, it will be just ten years since a gang of Blue Lodges started from the opposite bank, landed on this levde, took pos- session of the town, which lay completely at their mercy for many hours, and under pretence of searching for arms an utterly illegal search on their part plundered and insulted the free-soilers in every house. Phillips refused to allow these fellows to come inside his door; on which the house was attacked and its owner killed. Before he fell, Phillips had shot two of his assailants dead. His house was burned to the ground, along with many other dwellings; and every free-soiler who could be found in Leavenworth was put on board a steamer and sent down the river. Yet the New En glanders rallied to their flag, with growing numbers and glowing passions; becom- ing genuine settlers on the land, which the Missouri men were not. Here, and elsewhere, it has been shown that slavery, as a social system, lacked the solid fibre of a colonising power. Slaves could not work the prairie land to profit; negroes, toiling under a master's eye and whip, require the rich soils of Mississippi and Alabama. With a pistol in one hand, BLEEDING KANSAS. 31 a hoe in the other, these stout New Hampshire and Massachusetts lads fought on, toiled on, not only until they had gained a fair majority in the ballot- boxes, but won a full ascendancy in the open field. One of the comic incidents of this war was the Battle of Black Jack, when Captain Clay Pate, (ominous name!) a Virginian, who gave himself airs as a professional soldier, put himself at the head of fifty-six Sons of the South, and threatened to eat up old John Brown, of Osawatomie (afterwards, un- happily, of Harper's Ferry) and his band of twenty- seven free-soilers. Pate had organised his force like a little army, with its horse and foot, its camp equi- page, and its luggage train; and having just then been plundering Palmyra, a free-soil city, his bag- gage mules were heavily laden with the spoils of war. Brown made a fair fight, by going out into the open plains. After a lusty tug, Clay Pate sur- rendered to the tough old fellow himself, with his sword, his luggage train, all the spoils of Pal- myra, .twenty-one hale men, the whole of his dead and wounded, and his gorgeous tent. In 1861, a few months after these citizens of Leavenworth had fought the battle for my friend Sam on this leve'e under my windows, the wounds of Bleeding Kansas were staunched and healed by her admission into the Union as a free state. 32 NEW AMERICA, CHAPTER III. Overland Mail. THE Overland Mail is one of the many great facts of the Great Republic. The postal returns tell you how many , you can imagine how important, are the letters going westward from the Atlantic cities to the Pacific cities. This mail is an Imperial institution. While we were yet in London, dreaming of the details of our trip to the Rocky Mountains, it was always comforting to know that in going out among the wild Cheyennes and Sioux, we should find our- selves travelling in company with the Imperial Mail. Glancing at maps, scanning the vast spaces over which Cheyenne, Sioux, Comanche and Arappahoe roam, one is apt to think there may lurk some spice of danger in such a journey, but then comes in the assuring thought that all along this route across the Prairies, across the Mountains, the American mails are being daily sent under powerful escorts of mounted men. Magic lies in this word 4 daily.' That which is daily done must be safely done. Would he not be considered a sorry fellow who should fear to travel, even along a road infested by Sioux and rattlesnakes, under escort of United States troops in company with the Imperial Mail? When Speaker Colfax drove across the Plains last fall, to study the OVERLAHt> MAIL. 33 Indian question, the Mining question, and the Mor- mon question, among living Indians, Miners, and Mormons, instead of reading about them in govern- ment reports, he had only one general officer, one colonel, and twenty-four sahres galloping round his tfoach; yet he has publicly confessed that al- though the red-skins frightened him a little, and delayed his journey much, by plundering the stations in his front, and threatening every moment to have his scalp he got safely through to Denver and Salt Lake. Colfax, it is true, was a state official, and besides having his escort, he had also with him a considerable party of well-armed men. We are strangers, only two in number (so far as we can see); we are but slightly armed with Colts since we have all along been dreaming, that if any fight- ing is to be done, it will be the work of our gallant escort, riding by our sides in defence of the Imperial Mail. At Leaven worth we find the mail-agents, to whom we have letters from their chief in New York as we have to every one employed by the Over- land Mail Company along these tracks. Nothing can be more polite, more teasing, than their answers to our questions. Everything shall be done for us that can be, under the circumstances. We have come at an unlucky time. If we had only started a month sooner if we had only stayed a month later all would have been right. As it is, they will do their best; we may find things a little rough New America. L 3 34 NEW AMERICA. in the Plains , but the agents have hardly any doubt that we shall get through to our journey's end. Such words rather pique our fancies; since our health, our comfort, nay our lives, depend on the state of these Plains. The fact is, the old road by way of the Platte Kiver has been changed , by order of Congress, for a shorter cut through the vast In- dian region of the Smoky Hill Fork ; a shorter course, perhaps a better one, if the road had only first been made , bridged, and levelled ; and if the Indian tribes who hunt buffalo and antelope across it had been either driven away or negotiated into peace. None of these things have yet been done. Two great lines of travel have been driven by the white men through these Plains: (1) the Platte road from Omaha and Atchison, by way of Kearney, Denver, and Salt Lake City, to San Francisco; (2) the Arkansas route, starting from Kansas City, and running by Fort Atkinson and Fort Wise to Puebla, the gold regions of Colorado, and thence to San Francisco. To the existence of these two roads the Indians seem to have submitted in despair. To the Platte road, they have ceased to show any strong opposition; having fought for it and lost it; first to the Mormon pilgrims, afterwards to the gold-seekers, men who came into their country, driving before them trains of waggons, in bands of eighty or a hundred, and being armed with rifles and revolvers. To the Arkansas road they nurse a sharper antipathy; since it is mainly a trial road, the right to travel over which has been purchased from their chiefs. Still, though it may be with a bad grace, and with many OVERLAND MAIL. 35 murmurs and protests, they have shown, and they still show, themselves ready to respect the white man as he passes through their lands by either of these two routes. But in the vast prairies between these tracks lie the great buffalo runs, with the pastures feeding nearly all that remains in the Indian Territories of the elk, the antelope, and the black- tailed deer. The buffalo-runs are also theirs, say the Cheyennes and the Arappahoes, and they must either keep them free from whites or else die like dogs. They say they will not die before the pale- faces; therefore, they must keep the buffalo-runs of Kansas and Colorado (as the white men have begun to call the plains on paper) 'free from intrusion of mail and train. Now the new route chosen by Congress for the Overland Mail, beyond all question a shorter line from St. Louis to San Francisco, cuts these buffalo- runs, these elk and antelope pastures, into two halves , and , as the Cheyennes and their allies, the Comanches, Arappahoes, Kiowas, Sioux and Appaches, know very well, a railway is being built in the rear of this new mail; a railway which has al- ready reached Wamego, near Fort Riley. Now the red men, knowing that the Mail is only a herald of much worse, and that the railway bell will quickly follow the crack of a driver's whip, have called a council of their tribes, and some say have concluded to try a war against the whites for the possession of these buffalo-runs. When a railway engine, say the braves, shall have whistled away buffalo and ante- lope, it will be idle to raise the hatchet and draw 3* 36 NEW AMERICA. the bow. Now is the time for them to strike; now or never; and, even if a few of the old men, grey with years and sad with sorrow, should recommend peace with their white neighbours , resignation to the will of their Great Spirit , the young braves , proud of their own strength, ignorant of the white men's numbers and resources, are said to be all for war. If the pale-face will not come into the buffalo-runs, they will keep the peace; if he will build his ranch, dig his well, and crop his grass, in these runs, the Cheyennes and the Arappahoes, aided by their brethren of the Prairie and the hill country, will burn his shanty and take his scalp. Such are the rumours that we hear from every mouth in Kansas. A small party, it is true, affects to regard the alarm of Leavenworth, Lawrence, and Wamego, as a panic having little or no foundation; partisans of the new route by way of Smoky Hill Fork, who \wish to see it opened and kept open. They are few in number; and I do not hear that any of these heroes propose to settle, as yet, along the line of road through the Cheyenne country. Now, as we gather from the mail-agents in Leaven- worth, this is the line along which we are to go a journey of thirteen hundred miles; through a country, the greater part of which has never been surveyed, through which there is no road, in which there are many streams and gullies, but not a single bridge; a country in which the hills, the creeks, the rivers, have as yet received no names, and in which the small military posts of the United States, themselves OVERLAND MAIL. 37 only corrals of logs and planks, lie two hundred miles apart. Still, a line along which a mail so magnificent as that sent off from New York to San Francisco, not to speak of the thousand inferior cities which help to feed it, has heen running its daily course, must be at least as safe as the line from Damascus to Banias. But on our saying this, or something like this, to a friend in Leavenworth, we learn, to our surprise, that there has never been a daily mail running along that line ; that no such thing has ever yet been attempted-, that there are neither men nor mules along the road to carry a daily mail; that, in point of fact, only one waggon, an empty waggon, has gone out in advance of us; that no one knows where that empty waggon is, or whether it will arrive in safety beyond the Plains. We look at our pistols, and feel the hair on our polls; the aspect of affairs is at once tragic and comic; and the kindly jokes of our friends in Pall Mall, as to the best way of enjoying a scalping- knife, are coming rather near and hot. We find, too, that we are the only passengers booked for the trip; so that the number of revolvers coming into play, in case of a scrimmage with the Cheyennes and Comanches, in aid of the military escort, seems to be reduced to two. All oar acquaintance in this city urge us to get more and better arms; a sug- gestion in which the mail-agents cordially agree. The new arm of the west , called a Smith-and- Wesson, is a pretty tool; as neat a machine for throwing slugs into a man's flesh as an artist in 38 NEW AMERICA. murder could desire to see. Bowie-knives, and such- like, being useless to a Britisher who may have seen, but never practised, the art of ripping up an ad- versary's side, like a Livornese and a Valentian, we buy a couple of these Smith-and- Wessons , and then pay our fare of five hundred dollars to Salt Lake. An escort of veterans from the Potomac, aided by these six-shooters, will surely scare away all the Cheyennes , Arappahoes , and Sioux , who may be found clamouring about the rights of man, especially about the rights of red men, in the buffalo- runs. The rail has been laid down so far west as Wamego the Clear Springs so called from the fact of there being no water in the village-, and there we are to join the stage for our long ride; the stage being an old and much- worn Concord coach ; a vehicle of a kind unknown in Europe, though its shapelessness and inconvenience might be hinted by cutting off the coupe of a French diligence, and belly- ing out the rotundo, until it could be supposed by its proprietor big enough to hold nine persons. This coach, when we come to it, is jammed full of mail- bags forty- two hundredweight in all state despatches , love-letters , orders , bills of ex- change, invoices of account, all sorts of lively and deadly missiles , the value of which to governor, maid, clerk, banker, emigrant, and dealer, must be far beyond price; and here are five passengers on the books to take their chances of the road (three of them being a young woman and two babies), who , having duly paid their fares and got their OVERLAND MAIL. 39 t tickets, have a right to be taken on. But this going on is a thing impossible; as a glance at the coach and the mail-bags tells the experienced eye of the Wamego agent. What shall be done? The mail must go, even though the passengers should have to wait in Wamego for a month; and as the driver is already cracking his whip , and belching out volleys of oaths, which the lady and her two babies are obliged to hear (poor things!), the agent quickly makes up his mind, bids us get aboard men and revolvers says one sharp word to the driver, when away we plunge into the dust, leaving our female fellow-traveller, astonished, protesting, in the cloud of mud and sand. We look at each other wonderingly; for in this Paradise of Women, a petti- coat is accustomed to carry all things before it the best room at an hotel, the highest place at table, the first seat in a coach, in spite of your prior right. Ha! the revolvers have done it. As we are dashing off, we look out of window for the troops who are to be our companions in the Cheyenne coun- try. None are in sight! "The escort," says the agent, "will join you at Junction City, if there should seem to be any need ; you must consider the mail as starting from Junction City," and as he courteously waves his hand, we roll away into the dust. In a couple of hours we pass Fort Kiley; in two or three more we are at Junction City; a city of six wooden shanties, where we alight to sup off hot cake, tea, and tomatoes; and about an hour later, in the midst of a pleasant chat with the land- lord of our hostelry, we hear the driver's cry, "On 40 NEW AMERICA. board!" Kushing out into the night, our belts swung round us, our pistols loaded for the fray, we find that our big Concord coach has been exchanged for a light prairie waggon, smaller in size, frailer in Jmild, without a door, with very bad springs, and with canvas blinds for windows. Into this waggon, the letter-bags have been forced by an ingenious violence, the art of which is only known in the western country, with so neat a finish that it would seem impossible to insert two human beings between the mail-bags and the wall. But, in time, by doub- ling our legs across each other, by craning our necks, by slinging our elbows into straps, the feat is accom- plished; the two human beings afore-named having been persuaded, much against the grain, to wriggle themselves between the bags, under a promise that the said bags will shake down in a few minutes so as to give plenty of room. This is not easy, we suggest to each other, since we have our own small litter of pistols, books, maps, brandy-flasks, shawls, night-caps, potted meats, cigar-cases, sticks, umbrellas, and the like, about our feet. We begin to fear, that unless the load shall happen to shake down consider- ably, we may chance to have a bad week of it. But see, this fellow is about to start, though the escort is not in sight! Whew! We speak to the agent: "Well," says he, in effect, "the officer in charge will not lend us any troops , his command is very low just now; the country is disturbed by Indians in his front and flank; he has enough to do to hold his own in the post. But," the good-natured agent adds, for our OVERLAND MAIL. 41 comfort, "you will find the road all right; some troops went up the Plains yesterday; you will pass them a-head; good-bye!" And we are off. The truth now flashes on our minds like a re- velation: We are the escort! Not a soul goes out with the mail, either now or through the journey, except the boy who drives the mules (changed every forty or fifty miles on the road); no escort, no mail agent, nobody save our- selves. I cannot say that in my travels, I have ever seen the fellow of this prairie, mail. In the most dan- gerous district crossed by traveller and trader west of Chinese Tartary, the New York and St. Louis people trust the most important mail leaving any city in the world, excepting that from London, without a guard. No one doubts that the Cheyennes and Sioux are now holding council on these Plains, even if they have not as yet gone out upon the war-path ; nay, that they have given notice, after their Indian manner, of an intention to stop the road; yet, the mail is going into their buffalo-runs, in spite of all warnings, without a single guard, even such an old fogie as used to blow his horn and shoulder his blunderbuss on Hounslow Heath. Perhaps I am forgetting the confidence which they place in their English guard. They know that we are armed; they feel a reasonable certainty that we know how to use our toolst "The road is a little rough," says one of the stock-keepers as we roll from his station into the black midnight and the unknown prairie; "but the government will do no- 4:2 NEW AMERICA. thing for us, until it has been roused by a great dis- aster; they care nothing for a few lives, especially for the lives of poor teamsters and drivers." One passing friend rather hopes that we may be scalped, as he thinks that such an event might create a plea- sant and profitable sensation in New York. We have paid five hundred dollars for escorting the United States mail to Salt Lake. It is a high price, but the privilege might be worth the cost, if we had a mind to use the facilities which fall about our feet and court us to see them. This mail is wholly at our mercy. Six nights and days we are shut up with our pistols and the United States cor- respondence; our sole companion being the boy out- side, who cannot see into the waggon when the flaps are down. In one place a bag falls out of the waggon, and would certainly be left behind on the plain, but that we call the driver to stop and pick it up. In another place one of the bags bursts open, when a stream of letters comes flowing about our feet. We have only to help ourselves; read what we like, pocket what we like. Might not the secrets of a single letter be worth, in some hands, more than the five hundred dollars we have paid to guard them? THE PRAIRIES. 43 CHAPTER IV. The Prairies. OF all the States and Territories which still exist on paper, Kansas may be described as the Prairie State. Nebraska, Colorado, and the Indian territory, are covered by prairies ; great grassy plains, not level, as many persons think, but rolling up- lands, rising from the river to the mountains in a series of ascending billows, always of ge,ntle grade, often of enormous sweep. But Kansas is beyond dispute the region in which these plains display themselves on the largest scale, and with their points most perfect. On the old maps, which show the natural history of each section of the Great Republic, the district now called Kansas will be found figured by a buf- falo, as Nebraska is marked by an antelope, Iowa by a beaver, Utah by a bear. Across these Plains, up from the Indian territory on the south, come the wild and multitudinous herds on which the Cheyen- nes, the Arappahoes, the Comanches, and the Kiowas feed. For two hundred miles westward from the Mis- souri, the plains are green with trees, most of all so along the lines of the Kansas river and its many creeks and inlets. The wood is hickory, walnut, oak, and water-elm. Maple and chestnut are not 44 NEW AMERICA. found in the plains. The land is alive with shrubs and flowers; among which flourish wild marigolds, shamrock, water-lily (in the pools), rosin-weed, stink- weed, and sun-flowers. These sun-flowers of the West are not the tawny gauds of our cottage gar- dens*, big and brazen bachelors, flourishing on a single stalk; but little golden flowers, clustering in bunches, and, like our buttercups, numberless as the stars of heaven. In many parts, the prairie is alive with their golden light. A white frame house on this side of the river called a ranch peeps out here and there from beneath the foliage, having its green blinds, its bit of garden, its sheep-fold. Herds of horses can be seen on the rolling plateau. Here you have a drove of cattle, there a long wag- gon train. Anon we pass an Indian village, where some families of Delawares, sent out from those Atlantic forests now occupied by the quays and palaces of Dover, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, have taken a fitful and precarious root in the soil. These Delawares have long since buried the hatchet, put on pantaloons, forgotten the use of war-paint. Some of them make farmers; living on friendly terms with their pale neighbours; even marrying their sons into the families of whites. We pass a Shawnee village, of which the same things may be said. White men's ranches stand among them; dangerous neighbours to these natives; for the Pale-face, finding his way through the cracks and crannies of Indian character, making himself first useful, then formidable, to the tribe, commonly ends the connexion with them by becoming lord and owner of their lands. THE PRAIRIES. 45 The air is warm and sweet; a perfume of prairie flowers mingling with the distant snows of the sierras. The sky is intensely blue, with none of that golden haze which frets the eye in our own southern land- scapes. A patch of cloud, intense and vivid in its whiteness, dots and relieves the grand monotony of azure, so as to combine in one field of view the distinctive beauties of a Sicilian and an English sky. As we draw away from the river, the woodland scenery disappears; the country opens to the right and left; the plains swell languidly into greater breadths of upland. About the creeks and pools, for the most part dry on the surface, there are still some shrubs; the wild convolvulus is common; also the Virginian creeper; more than all others a plant called the rosin-weed. This rosin-weed appears to be Nature's choice in the way of verdure and adorn- ment. When the ground is either cleared by fire, or cut by the prairie breaker, the rosin-weed dis- appears; the fire- weed springs up in its place, and dies in its turn after two or three crops, in some places after one crop; when this second weed is suc- ceeded by the tickle-grass. (P. S. Don't let the tickle-grass get up your legs for it seems to be alive to know you don't like it, and to creep up your pantaloons the faster you fret and worry.) After this grass come three or four species of wild grasses; and after these fertilizers sown by nature have dropped their decaying blades into the ground, the farmer may come with his rake and his seed to a soil made ready for his use. 46 NEW AMERICA. Driving on night and day (as men must drive who have charge of an imperial mail), we begin to leave all trace of man and his arts, save one, behind. A prairie hen clucks in the wild sage; a rattlesnake coils among the sun-flowers; a wolf steals noiselessly along the road; dead mules, dead horses, dead oxen, strew the path, on which the carrion crow, the raven, and the wolf, find food; these white horns and skele- tons of man's servants being often the only traces of his ever having found his way across the Plains. By daring, ingenuity and patience, the Western trader has pushed a way for himself across this dif- ficult tract of land; making an opening for trade and travel between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. He has done this feat as a private man, without help from the State, without cheers from any learned body, at a cost of blood and money which can never be counted upon earth; and for this reason: the Western man thinks nothing of blood, not much of treasure, when he regards them as being invested in a business that will pay. Holding his life in his hand, this reckless, jovial fellow, swearing overmuch, brimming with help when help is of use, is careless of blood, either his own or yours, far beyond an Arab, almost beyond a Chinese. This path through the prairie has been paved by him, again and again, with bones: but the trace of his passage, of his suf- fering, dies away out of sight with the autumnal flowers. Nature is here too strong for man to do more than throw a trail upon her landscape, which may show itself for a day in the bunch- grass, among the grey sand, and then vanish from sight like the THE PRAIRIES. 47 track of a ship at sea. The prairie is not man's home. Even if he had time to plant and reap it, he could hardly grow a blade of grass, a stalk of Indian corn, on these open flats, where myriads of locusts clatter through the air, devouring in their hunger every green leaf and twig. We ride past a lonely ranch, near which the daring and hopeful tenant had planted a field with corn, for his winter food. Look at the poor man's harvest! Legions of locusts are upon his crop; and every ear that should have made him bread has been picked away. In these uplands, Nature is lord and king. Snipes and plovers abound; blackbirds, carrion crows, ravens, and vultures are also seen. Flowers are still common; most of all, the dwarf sun-flower, which is sown so thickly through the landscape as to give it a shimmer of burning gold. The dwarf sun-flower is, in fact, the prairie flower; lighting up the face of Nature everywhere in our route, from the Missouri river to the Great Salt Lake; in some parts growing low and stunted, the stalk not a foot long, the flower not higher than a common marigold, in others rising ten or twelve feet high, with clusters of flowers, each flower as big as a peony. Ants are toiling in the ground; the little prairie dogs comedians of the waste sit crowing on their mounds of earth, until we drive close up to them, when they utter a quick laugh, and with a shout of mockery, plunge into their holes, head downwards, disappearing from our sight with a last merry wag of their tails. Owls, prairie-dogs, and rattle-snakes, live on the most friendly terms with each other; the 48 NEW AMEKICA. , owls and snakes dwelling in the prairie-dogs' holes, and sometimes, I fancy, eating the dogs when they happen to be short of food. It may only be a super- stition; but the teamsters and drivers across the Plains have a fixed belief that flesh of the prairie- dog is poisonous in a peculiar way, and that men who eat of it become insane. Once, in a stress of hunger, I was obliged to kill one. "Lord!" cries the boy at the ranch, "you will never eat that, sir." "Why not? I am hungry enough to eat a Cheyenne." "Well, sir," says the lad, "we prairie folks con- sider the owl, the rattle-snake, and the prairie-dog to be all of a kith and kin, the Devil's own spawn, and that anybody who eats them will go mad." "Put him in the pan; I must take my chance." The flesh proved to be delicious, with something like the taste of squirrel; and on seeing me suck the savoury bone, the prairie-boy instantly seized and devoured a leg. I hope the teamsters and drivers will continue in their want of faith as to the wholesomeness of prairie-dogs ; for the antics of these little animals should make them dear to every man who has to cross these Plains, in which the supply of comedy is extremely scant. After passing Fort Ellsworth a collection of wooden shanties, in which lie a hundred men, not very well armed (we hear), arid careful to keep their feet within bounds, leaving the Cheyennes and Arap- pahoes alone we have before us a stretch of two hundred and twenty miles of dangerous country, THE PRAIRIES. 49 without a single post for its protection; a country in which there is no town, no camp, no ranch, except the log-stables, now being built for the overland mules. We are alone with Nature and the imperial mail. Around us, we have many signs that the Cheyennes and Arappahoes are hovering nigh; at times we catch visible evidence of a scout on some distant ridge of the Smoky Hill, and see the curl of blue smoke from some neighbouring creek. We are now, between Big Creek and Big Timber station, in the very heart of the wild game country; a country of long, low, rolling hills, covered with a short sweet grass bunch-grass on which the buffalo loves to feed. We have ceased firing at rattle- snakes and prairie chickens; reserving our cartridges for the nobler uses of self-defence; though we are tempted, now and then, to try a shot at some elk, or antelope, or black-tailed deer. The great game being buffaloes, against the tough hides of which our small six-shooters are of no avail, we sit quietly in our waggon watching the herds troop by; in lines, in companies, in droves, in armies, the black and shaggy beasts go thundering in our front; sometimes from north to south, sometimes from south to north; but always scudding in our front, and always across our line of march. The plains are teeming with life; most of all with buffalo bulls and cows. For forty hours we have now had them always in our sight; thousands on thousands, tens of thousands after tens of thousands; a countless host of untamed animals; all of them fit for human food; enough, we should think, to stock Arappahoe, Comanche, and Cheyenne wig- New America. I. 4 50 HEW AMERICA. warns to the end of time. Once or twice the driver tries a shot; but fear of the red-skins commonly checks his wish to fire. This buffalo, which is the white man's sport, is also the red man's food; and a Cheyenne warrior cannot be made to see why a Pale-face should come into his country and destroy the buffalo for the sake of a little amusement. A white man who has to kill buffalo to live, the Indian can comprehend, though he may have to suffer in estate by that white man's rifle; but a man who shoots buffalo for sport, having no wish to eat it, is a mystery to which any redskin would gladly put an end by tomahawk and scalping-knife. As we ascend the Plains, a series of rolling steppes, in no part level for a dozen miles, the sun grows fiercer overhead, the sands hotter beneath our feet. Snakes, lizards, locusts, swarm on the ground and in the air; the heat is terrible; sometimes, in the breathless noon, reminding me of the Jordan valley. Water is scarce and bad, and the dry, hot fever of external nature creeps into and corrupts your blood. The fourth day of our journey on the plains is one of tropical warmth. That short, sweet grass on which the buffalo loves to feed, is now behind us in the lower plains, where moisture, though it may be scant, is not unknown, as it seems to be here for many a league on league. Our path is strewn with skeletons of oxen, mules, and horses; waste of the life that helps to keep up an overland trade from the river to the sea. Ravens and wolves are seen fattening on these remains of mule and ox; tame enough to be hardly scared from their meal by the crashing of our THE PRAIRIES. 51 waggon-wheels through the burning sand. A golden haze, the effect of heat, envelopes the earth, and the mirage tantalizes our parching throats with a promise of water, never to be reached. A stillness as of death is round about us. In the west we see a little cloud, not bigger, when we see it first, than a prairie- dog; anon it is the size of a fox, of a buffalo, of a mountain; in a few minutes it has covered the sky with one black and sulphurous pall, out of which the lightnings begin to leap and dance. A flash comes through the still and silent air, like a gun-shot, suddenly, with a sharp surprise. It is followed by a wail of wind and rain, which lifts the sand from the ground into the air, and drives it into the canvas flaps of our mountain waggon, splash- ing us with mud and mire. No care can keep the deluge out; and in a few minutes we are drenched and smothered. Four or five hours that storm of sand and rain drives heavily against us. Two or three times the mules stand still in fear; turn their backs to the heavenly fire, refusing to go forward under any encouragement of either voice or whip. Were they not fastened to the coach, they would fly before the tempest; bolting for their lives until the hurricane should have drooped and died. Being chained to the waggon, they can only stand and moan. When the storm is spent, the stars come peeping out; the air is chill and sweet; and we drag our way along the wet and smoking plain. Want of sleep, want of food, want of exercise for we are jolted over the unmade tracks all night, all day, stopping at the creeks for a little water, at 4* 52 NEW AMERICA. the log-stables for a change of mules, but a few moments only have made us ill. We obtain no proper supplies of food and drink, and we are cooped up in a waggon designed (one might suppose) by some infernal genius as a place of torture; a machine in which you can neither sit, nor stand, nor lie down. My friend is suffering from bilious sickness; I am tormented by eruptions on the skin; yet, even with these quick monitors of evil in us, we are every day astonished by the sudden gush of life, which comes with the morning light. We crawl from our miser- able den a den without a door, without a window, without a step with nothing save a coarse canvas cover for a roof, coarse canvas flaps for sides, into the dust and filth of a stable; banged and beaten and jolted, until our heads are swollen, our faces bruised, our hands lacerated; sleepless, hungry; our temples racked by pain, our nostrils choked with sand, our limbs stiffened and bent with cramps; but after rinsing our mouths and dipping our heads in some little creek, the water of which we dare not drink, and pushing on three or four miles ahead of the stage, winding up the long prairie swells, and breathing the morning air, we pause in our brisk step, look at each other, and smile. The effect is magical; all pain, all cramp, all languor, have disappeared; the blood flows freely, the lungs act softly, the nostrils seem to open from within, and the eyes appear to cast out sand and dust by some internal force. If we could only now get food, we feel strength enough to defy all other forms of pain. But food is a thing we cannot get. PRAIRIE INDIANS. 53 CHAPTER V. Prairie Indians. red-men of these Prairies have been taking counsel together in a field near Fort Ellsworth, as to the policy of allowing the white men, headed by their Big Father in Washington, to open a new road through their country by way of this Smoky Hill Fork; and the warlike tribes of this region, the Cheyennes and Arappahoes, aided and supported by allies from the south and from the north, the power- ful Sioux, the savage Kiowas, the clever Comanches, and the swift Appaches, are said to have resolved on war. These Indians say they have been deceived by the white men; this they always say when going out on the war-path; for a red man's pride will not suffer him to acknowledge, even to himself, that he has done any wrong that he has broken any pledge. In these frontier quarrels, the Indian, by his own confession, is always right. So far as we can learn from these Cheyennes and their allies, it would seem that early in the spring of this present year (1866) Major Wyncoop, an officer of government, employed in the task of making treaties a brisk and profit- able branch of the public service had been among these prairie hunters, giving them arms and blankets, flour and whisky, in exchange for a promise of good 54 NEW AMERICA. behaviour on the roads in respect to emigrant waggons and merchants' trains. Wyncoop, they say, had told them, by word of mouth, to have no fears about the safety of their buffalo-runs, since the Big Father in Washington had no intention of opening any new road by way of the Smoky Hill. After Wyncoop left them, they began to fear that he had been a bearer of lies; for they heard that, even while he was sleeping in their lodge, eating elk with Roman Nose, Black Hawk, and Spotted Dog, Cheyenne chiefs and warriors, the white men had been laying their plans for cutting a road straight towards the heart of these buffalo lands. Of course they have heard from the Pale-faces that all roads should be free and open. They have been told that the road from St. Louis to New York is just as free to a red man as to a white man; and they have been also told, as though this second thing followed from the first, that the path from St. Louis to Salt Lake should be as free to the white man as it is to the red; but Eoman Nose, Black Hawk, and Spotted Dog, are men too subtle to be taken in by what they call baby-talk. They answer, that in their sense of the word yon road from St. Louis to New York is not open. Would Black Hawk be allowed to hunt through the fields of Ohio? Would Spotted Dog be suffered to pitch his lodge in the streets of Indianopolis? Could Roman Nose, on that road from St. Louis to New York, kill and eat sheep and cow, animals which have replaced his own buffalo and elk? If not, how, they ask, can the track be called open to them, dwellers in wigwams, hunters of wild PRAIRIE INDIANS. 55 game? These Cheyennes, these Arappahoes and Sioux, are as well aware as any pale- face in Wash- ington, that their laws are not our laws, their liberties not our liberties. If it were one of their Indian fashions to have a party-cry, they would probably raise the shout of "The hunting-ground for the hunter!" Koman Nose and Spotted Dog tell us that the very best hunting-grounds now left to the red man, are these prairie lands, lying along and around the Smoky Hill Fork; a dry and sandy ravine, more than a hundred miles in length, stretching at the foot of this high ridge or bluff, called Smoky Hill from the cap of mist which commonly. floats above its crest. Here grow the sweet bunch-grasses which the buffalo loves to chew, and hither come those herds of game on which the Indian lodge depends for its winter store. Disturb these herds in their present quarters, and whither can they flee? South- ward lies the Arkansas road from St. Louis to Santa Fe; northward lies the Platte road from Omaha to Salt Lake. No game will linger on the white man's track; and to make a path for the mail by way of Smoky Hill Fork is simply to drive away the red man's food. Elk and antelope may wander into close vicinity to a trader's and an emigrant's trail; buffalo , a bolder and fiercer , but more cautious animal, never. "White man come, buffalo go," says Black Hawk, with his sharp logic; "when buffalo gone, squaw and papoose die." From Black Hawk's point of view, the policy of 56 NEW AMERICA. resisting our encroachments on their hunting-fields is beyond dispute. A second cause has helped to create the trouble which besets us on these Plains. One of the great feuds which divide Eastern America from Western America the states lying east of the Mississippi from the states and territories lying west of the Big Drink has its birth in the question What line of policy should be followed by the government in dealing with the red men? The Eastern cities are all for rose-water and baby- talk; the Western cities are all for revolvers and bowie-knives. Each section has its sentiment and its passion. In Boston no one believes that a red Indian can do wrong; in Denver no one believes that a red Indian can do right. Each party accuses the other of ignorance and petulance; Massachusetts looking on the red-skin solely in his romantic lights, as a representative of tribes and nations, dear to art and poetry, which are rapidly passing into the land of dreams; Colorado looking upon him solely in his prosaic aspects of a thief, a beggar, an assassin, who may have stolen white women and scalped white men. In Massachusetts, in Ehode Island, in New Hampshire, almost everybody has either made a sketch, composed a song, or read a romance, about the Indian; while in Colorado, in New Mexico and California, almost everybody has had a kinsman butchered or a kinswoman carried off by that ro- mantic personage: a difference which may very well account for the radical opposition of ideas as to a true Indian policy in the East and in the West. PRAIRIE INDIANS. 57 Being strong in Washington, Massachusetts has com- monly had her own way in Kansas, and wherever else a judge's writ will run; being near to the Plains, Colorado has sometimes had her own way in the lonely grass land and the nameless creek. One sudden blow Colorado dealt last year at her savage enemy, when a body of volunteer horse under Colonel Shevington broke into a Cheyenne camp at Sand Creek, a little way in our front, where a thousand Indians had encamped, under the command of White Antelope, an aged and renowned Cheyenne warrior. The Colorado volunteers, raised by orders from Washington, rode in upon these Indians, shooting down brave, and squaw, and papoose, in undistinguishing hate and wrath. White Antelope fell like the hero in a poet's tale; for, seeing that defence was idle, that escape was impos- sible, he sprang up a mound of sand, and throwing open his embroidered jacket, bade the Pale-faces fire. With twenty slugs in his body, he rolled upon the earth. Most of his followers fell around his corpse; old and young, men and women, wrinkled warriors and puling infants. Sixteen of the volun- teers were slain; and their comrades rode back into Denver covered, as they imagined, with the glory of their deed. In New England, this raid upon the Cheyenne camp is everywhere denounced as the Indian Mas- sacre; in the ranches of these prairies, in the cities near in the mines, it is everywhere celebrated as the Big Fight. Your opinion on the point is held to be a test of your good sense. In Boston, any approval 58 NEW AMERICA. of the big fight would subject you to a social ban; in Denver, any denunciation of the Indian massacre would bring a bowie-knife into your side. After saying so much, I need scarcely add, that westward of the Missouri I have never met a man who does not say that the Sand Creek affair, though terrible enough in some of its details, was a good and whole- some act of severity, an act that* ought to be re- peated twice a-year, until every Indian tribe has been swept away from these Plains. Eastern men assert, that when Shevington at- tacked the Indian camp, the Cheyennes were at peace with the whites, and that the American flag was floating above White Antelope's tent. Shev- ington denies these facts; asserting that the Chey- enne camp had been the refuge of Dog soldiers, a band of red-skin outlaws and assassins, who had been plundering settlements, and murdering teamsters and emigrants for many months; a fact which he and his Colorado friends assert was proved: in the first place, by the Indians having had a white girl, of sixteen, and three young white children in that very camp, whom they sold, after much palaver, to the citizens: in the second place, by their boast of having two other white women in their lodges, whom they would neither give away nor sell: in the third place, by the white men finding, when the In- dian camp was taken, a heap of rings, ribbons, photographs, and human scalps. One act of atrocity, committed by these Indians, is said to have roused, in a peculiar manner, the in- dignation of Denver. In a ranch, on Kunning Creek, PRAIRIE INDIANS. 59 near that city, lived, with his wife and two children, a man named Hungate; an honest man, a good farmer, who stood well with his neighbours. The red men had swept down upon his lonely farm, had driven off his cattle, had burnt his ranch, had vio- lated his wife, had massacred his children, and shot himself. The heads of all the Hungate family were scalped, the bodies hacked and pounded. When they were found in this mutilated state, they had been borne into Denver city, and made a public show, like the wounded men of Paris in '48; rousing the hot blood of Colorado into madness. White Antelope was made to answer for the blood of Hungate. Two of the scalps which the volunteers under Shevington found at Sand Creek, after the fight, are said to have been fresh; one, a white man's scalp, was hardly cold; a second, a white woman's scalp, was declared by the army surgeon to have been drawn within ten days. Feud begets feud, and the strife of last year can only be answered by strife in the coming fall. A son of White Antelope is now going about the Plains calling on the tribes and nations to rise and avenge his father's death; which Roman Nose, Black Hawk, Tall Buffalo, Lance, and Little Blanket, all powerful chiefs, are said to be willing enough to do, since they may gain a rare opportunity of grati- fying their passion for blood while clearing these favourite buffalo-runs of all white disturbers of the Indian game. 60 NEW AMERICA. CHAPTER VI. The Red Man. A LONG line of poems and novels leads an Eng- lish reader into habits of looking on the red man as a picturesque figure of the prairie and the lake, rather than as a living force in the midst of Ame- rican cities. We have lodged the Indians in our minds, as we have the men who exist for us only in tales and plays. When we recall either an Iroquois, or a Mohican, he presents himself to our vision in his war-paint, in his hunting gear; he is sitting in council under the Treaty tree, seeing Grod in clouds, and hearing Him in the wind. We note him steal- ing forth with Hawk-eye on the war-path, watching over Minnehaha in the wigwam, tearing himself from his old hunting-grounds on the Ohio, starting for his new home in the unknown West. We connect him with aged hemlocks , running waters , and silent valleys. But whether he comes before us in his hunt- ing gear or in his paint and feathers, with a pipe of peace in his mouth or a scalping-knife raised in his hand, he is ever the same for us; a being of the mind, a picture, a poem, a romance; not a man of flesh and blood, endowed with senses, rich in pas- sions, fruitful in ideas, one strong to resist, one swift to impress, all men who may come into contact with him. THE RED MAN. 61 In the United States people know him better. The red man lives amongst them like the black man; less ductile in genius, more prolific in ideas; having his own policy, his own arts, his own tradi- tions; with a power, which the black man has not, of giving back, no less than taking, in the way of thought. They have to deal with him from day to day as with a man having rights in the soil which no Yankee can deny, which no honest Yankee feels the wish to dispute. No race of men ever yet drove out another race of men from any country, taking their lands and cities from them, without finding on the spot which they came to own a local genius, which affected their polity, their usages and their arts. Man is a living power, acting and re-acting on his fellow, through a natural law. All force is relative. If the strong act upon the weak, the weak re-act upon the strong. Numbers are strength; and if the higher race should have the disadvantage of being few in number, they will fall in some measure to the level of their slaves, in spite of their first superiority in physical gifts and in moral power. Thus, the Eoman masters of Greece adopted the art, the language, the religion, and at length the country, they had won by the sword. The Norman hero be- came an English gentleman, helping to make that name the proudest title borne on earth. After three generations, the settlers under Strongbow proved themselves more Irish in feeling than the Celts. Duke Kollo's soldiers softened into Sicilians. The Mantchoo Tartars have become Chinese. Even in 62 NEW AMERICA. cases where fire and sword have been used to thin off the original people, the effect has been pretty much the same. The Israelites were told to cut down the Hittites and Amorites, the Canaanites, Perizzites and Jebusites ; and they slew the men of these nations with- out mercy, as they had been commanded from God. Yet the customs and ideas of these heathens clung to the soil, and generation after generation of the chosen people fell into sin by running after the native gods. Dagon, Moloch, Ashtaroth, drew men away from Jehovah; and the arts of Tyre and Sidon acted upon those whom the sword of Jabin could not drive from the land. In like fashion, those red men whom our fore-comers found on the Atlantic sea-board, and whom they have been pushing back, at first towards the Alleghanies, then to the Ohio and the Wabash, afterwards to the Mississippi, and at length beyond the great river as far west as the Kansas and the Arkansas, have left the traces of their former pre- sence in the national mind; in the popular politics, in the popular science, in the popular life. They have done so in places from which they have wholly disappeared, as well perhaps as in districts where they still exist; among the Spiritualists of New Eng- land, among the Mormons of Salt Lake valley. Man is what he eats; and a nation grows into the like- ness of that which it absorbs. Where the Indian has been destroyed by assimilation, the pale- face must have undergone a change, to be measured by the amount of resisting power; a quality in which some tribes of these red-skins are pre-eminently rich. "When the Indian has survived the shock of con- TITS RED MAN. 63 flict with the pale-face, as at Oneida Creek, at Wyandotte, at St. Mary's Mission, and in many other places, the power of acting and re- acting on the whites is still in force, affecting the national character in a way which no man could have foreseen, and no one will now deny. The Anglo-Saxon power of assimilation is very great; but the Cheyenne and the Dakota present to it, perhaps, the very hardest meal it has ever been called upon to digest. The Anglo-Saxon has not gone far in the process of eating up the red man; yet he shows by a hundred signs the effect of that indigestible meal upon his health. The Indian fibre is exceedingly tough. Can any one say whether, up to this moment, though the white men have an easy mastery, the action of the white men on the red has been stronger than that of the red men on the white? Let those who think so come into these western plains, into the lands where red and white men live together, in anything bat harmony. They will find that each has acquired the other's vices; that while the Indian has learned how to beat his pale brother in debauchery, the white man has only come to equal his red brother in ferocity and craft. If the Yengee has taught the Indian to drink whisky, the Indian has taught the Yengee to keep squaws. Nearly all the old trappers and teamsters, who have lived among Indians, are polygamists: Jem Baker, of Clear Creek, has two squaws; Mageary, of South Platte, has three; Bent, of Smoky Hill, is said to have married six. As an Indian chief said to Colonel G4 NUW AMERICA. Marcy, "The first thing a Yengee wants in the Plains is plenty wife." If Little Bear drinks and beats his squaw to death, Jem Smithers has learned to make a jest of taking scalps. I hear anecdotes in these plains to make the blood run cold. Jack Dunkier, of Central City, scalped five Sioux in the presence of his white comrade. The same Colorado boy is said to have ridden into Denver with the leg of an Indian warrior slung to his saddle; a leg which he had cut from the trunk, and on which he reported that he had been living for two whole days. No one believed his story; but a boast is in its way a fact, and there is no doubt that in Denver city a white man openly boasted of having boiled and eaten steaks from a human thigh. A Pawnee would glory in such a deed; vaunting it afterwards in the meet- ings of his tribe. The Yengee quickly learns to imitate the red man's crimes. One of the Sand Creek volunteers returned to Denver with a woman's heart on the head of a pole; having shot the squaw, ripped her breast open, and plucked out her heart. No one blamed him, and his trophy was received with shouts by a rabble in the public streets. I am glad to say, that white opinion underwent a change, even in the rough mining districts, with respect to this man's doings; not that any one dreamed of ar- resting him for his crimes, not that his comrades in the ranks thought any worse of him for his lark; but the jokes of the grog-shop, the gaming-house, and the smoking-room, turned rather freely on his deed, and the fellow, being deficient in wit and patience, fled away from the town, and never came THE RED MAN. 65 back. In a Cheyenne brave, such a crime as his would have raised a warrior to the rank of a chief. One offence, though it implied no loss of life, ap- peared to me more revolting than even the murder of a squaw in war time the violation of Indian graves by Yengees. A government train, passing through the Indian territory, came upon a heap of stones and rocks, which the knowing trapper who accompanied the train pointed out as the burial-place of some great chief: when the western boys ripped it open, kicked the bones of the dead warrior, and picked up the bow and arrows, the spoon of buffalo horn (an officer of the United States army gave me that horn as a keepsake!), the beads and ornaments, the remnants of a buffalo robe in which the chief had been wrapped for his final rest. Along with many of their vices, the Yengees have borrowed from the Indians some of their simple virtues a spirit of hospitality, a high respect for the plighted word, a sovereign contempt for pain and death. The red men have taught the whole world how to smoke the Indian weed. Have they received from the Pale-face any one boon to compare with this gift from the savage to the civilised man? It is no figure of speech to say that in White America, a red influence is very widely spread and very strongly felt, alike in the sphere of institutions and in the sphere of thought. The confederacy of the Five Nations was the type adopted by the whites when framing the con- New America. I. 5 66 NEW AMERICA, federacy of the Thirteen Colonies; not only as re- gards the principle of their Union, but also in re- spect to its most original details. The Iroquois had invented the theory of State Eights, which the colonists borrowed from them; an indefinable and dangerous theory, implying a power of separate ac- tion, perhaps of withdrawal, from the Union; leading to a thousand quarrels , and to a civil war, of which the end has not yet been reached. These Iroquois had adopted the theory of extending their power and territory, not by adding to the limits of any existing nation of the confederacy, but by bodily introducing new tribes and nations into union; a novel principle of political growth, which the white men also bor- rowed from them. Under these two principles, the Five Nations had grown into Eight Nations; and the Thirteen Colonies, following in their wake and car- rying on their work, have expanded into Forty-six States and Territories. In the conference of 1774, when commissioners from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, went to consult the Iroquois sachems at Lancaster, the great chief Casannatego addressed them in terms which a Greek member of the Achaian League might have used: "Our wise forefathers established union and amity between the Five Nations. This union has made us formidable. This has given us great strength and authority with our neighbouring nations. By showing the same method, you will acquire fresh strength and power. Therefore, I counsel you, what- ever befalls you, never to fall out with one another." Official reports to Congress from the Indian bureau THE RED MAN. 67 confess that this Iroquois confederation was the true political germ of the United States. The men of the Five Nations had very high notions of liberty, and that on both the public and the domestic side. Every man was considered equal to his fellow. The sachem, even when he came of a ruling stock, was elected to his office. They had no hereditary rank, and no other titles than the names which described their function, such as warrior, coun- cillor, and seer. They said that all men of Iroquois race, together with their allies, were born free and equal with each other; and that no man, thus freely born, could ever be made a slave. Indeed, they set their faces against slavery in any form. No Iroquois could own his fellow. If enemies were taken by him in war, they were either put to death or natural- ised and adopted into his tribe. Nay, the sentiment of freedom was so strong in the Five Nations that they declared the soil itself free, so that no slave could be found within the districts hunted by these red-men, even when negro slaves were everywhere being bought and sold in the streets of Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. In time, however, some of the less noble tribes of Indians Cherokees, Choktaws, and Chickasaws learned from the white men to buy and to steal their negro brother, and to hold him in bondage, like a mule or a dog. Among many of the Indian tribes, though less in these savage western provinces than among the Delawares, Mohicans, and Senecas, the women have a singular degree of power; not only in the wigwam, where they occupy the seats of honour, but in public 5* 68 NEW AMERICA. places and in public life; even the right of holding meetings and discussing questions of peace and war. Among the higher class of Indian tribes, the braves take a pride in paying to their squaws a measure of respect exceeding the mere courtesies of city life; often rising into what, for lack of a better name, might be called chivalry, a fine feeling of the strong towards the weak, as such; a softening of the hard towards the gentle; a bending of the warrior towards the hus-wife. Of course, in a settled society, where rights are guarded by law, not left to the caprice of individual will, there should be little need for this open and avowed protection, on the part of men to- wards women. It is a virtue of the savage and the semi-savage, of the hunter and the herdsman, of the Seneca Indian and the Anezi Arab; which has not failed to touch with moral and poetic beauty the manners of a people of far nobler grade. What man can doubt that Indian ideas on witch- craft, on polygamy, on plurality of gods, on the mi- gration of souls, on the presence of spirits, on future rewards, have entered deeply into the popular mind, and are now affecting for good or ill the course of American religious thought? One of the first things to strike an English eye about these red- skins (after their paint and feathers, perhaps), is their division into tribes; the oldest form in which men were organised into societies. It is an Oriental system ; found in Media and India, in Arabia and Scythia, among all the wandering and pastoral nations. In the first step from savage towards civil life, all races are divided into tribes, of either the THE RED MAN. 69 family or the clan. In Sparta there were three of these original tribes, in Athens four, in Palestine twelve, in Rome three; in each of which states one tribe would appear to have had some sort of regal superiority: the Hyllean at Sparta, the Eupatrid in Athens, the house of Judah in Palestine, the Ramnes in Rome. Among these multitudinous tribes of the red race, no such regal character appears to obtain; the Cheyenne admits no moral superiority in the Sioux, the Mohican in the Seneca; each nation is a separate body ; and the chief policy of the red natives is that of maintaining their tribal independence. From them the white settlers have borrowed the sentiment of State rights. 70 NEW AMERICA. CHAPTER VII. Indian Life. THE story of Minnehaha, Laughing Water, has made known the fact that there exists, among these sons of the lake and prairie, a body of tradition available for art. The life of a Eed Indian as he starts on a trail, as he hunts the bison and the elk, as he courts his mistress with the scalp of an enemy slain in battle, or by stealth, as he leaps in the war- dance, as he buries the hatchet and lays by the knife, as he harangues his fellows in council, as he defies the malice of his captors, as he sits down under his hemlock and smokes the pipe of peace is nothing less than a romance. His presence is a picture, his conduct a poem. The forest in which he dwells, the plain on which he hunts, the river along which he floats, are full to him of a myriad spirits. His canoe is an ark, his wigwam is a tent. On every side he is in contact with the innermost soul of things, and nature speaks to his ear out of every leaf and from every stone. What marvel, then, that his unwritten poetry should be of a wild and daring kind; new in its character, fresh in its colours, like and yet unlike to the Homeric, the Ossianic, and the Gothic primitive romance? A young hunter fell in love with a beautiful girl whom he sought for his wife, and being the pride of INDIAN LIFE. 71 his tribe, both for swiftness in the race and for courage in war, his suit was accepted by her father, and she was given to him in marriage. On her wedding-day she died. Tearing a trench in the soil, the women swathed her limbs in a cloth, and after wailing over her body, laid her down in the bunch- grass. But the young hunter could not leave her. His bow was unstrung in the wigwam, his club lay idle on the ground, for his heart was buried in that forest grave, and his ears were no longer awake to the sounds of war and the chase. One joy was left to him on earth: to sit by himself, near that mound under which his love lay at rest, pondering of his lost bride, and following her in fancy to the spirit-land. Old men of the tribe had toH him, when a child, that souls go after death to the Blessed Isles, lying far off to the south, in a sunny clime, upon the bosom of a placid lake, under a sky of mi- freckled blue; and one day, as he sat on the cold ground, with snow in the trees above him, the thought came into his mind that he would go in search of that Island in which the soul of his mis- tress dwelt. Turning his face to the south, he be- gan his journey, which, for a long while, lay through a country of lakes, hills, valleys, much like his own; but in time there appeared to be less snow in the trees, less frost on the streams, more brightness in the air, more verdure on the earth; then he came upon buds and blossoms, he saw flowers in the field, and heard warblings in the bush. Seeing a path into a thick grove, he followed it through the trees until it led him to a high ridge, on the top of which 72 NEW AMERICA. stood an Indian lodge. At the door of this lodge, an old man, with white hair, a pale face, and fiery eyes , covered with skins of wild beasts , and leaning on a staff, received him with a sad smile. The hunter was beginning to tell his story: "Hush!" said the old man; "I expected you, and have risen to give you welcome. She whom you seek has been here; she rested for awhile, and then went on. Come into my lodge." When the hunter was refreshed with food and sleep, the old man led him forth of the lodge and said: "See you that gulf and the plain beyond? It is the land of souls. You stand upon its confines, and my lodge is the gate of entry. But only souls can pass beyond this gate. Lay down your bundle and your quiver; leave behind your body and your dog; now, pass into the land of spirits." The hunter bounded from the earth, like a bird on its wings. Forest, lake, mountain, were the same, but he saw them with new eyes, and felt them with a strange touch. Nature seemed to have become luminous and vocal. The air was softer, the sky was brighter, the sward was greener, than they seem to our mortal senses. Birds sang to him out of trees, and animals came frisking past him. No creature was afraid of him, for blood is never shed in the spirit-land. He went forward without effort, gliding, rather than walking, along the ground; pas- sing through trees and rocks as a man in the flesh might walk through a wreath of spray and a cloud of smoke. At length he came to a wide and shining lake, from the midst of which sprang a lovely isle. A canoe of white stone lay close in shore, with pad- INDIAN LIFE. 73 dies laid ready to his hand. Stepping into this boat, and pushing from the bank, he became conscious, as in a dream, that another white canoe was at his side, in which, pale and beautiful as he had last seen her, sat his bride. As he put forth from the bank, she put off also ; answering to the motion of his oars like the chords in music. A tranquil joy was in the hunter's heart as they pushed their way towards the Blessed Isle. On looking forward towards the land, he was seized with fear for his beloved; a great white line of surf broke angrily in their front, and in the clear deep waters he could see the bodies of drowning men and the bones of thousands who had perished in that surf. His thews being strong and his courage calm, he had no fears for himself; but he yearned for her, exposed to the surf in that glit- tering shell; but when they pushed boldly into the breakers, they found their canoes go through them as through air. Around them were many boats, each freighted with a soul. Some were in sore distress, some wrecked and lost. The boats which bore young children glided home like birds. Those containing youths and maidens met with gusts and rollers. Older men were beaten by storms and tempests, each according to his deeds; for the calm and storm were not in the spirit-lake, but in the men who sailed upon it. Softly running to the shore, the hunter and his bride leaped lightly from their canoes upon the Golden Isle. What a change from the dull, cold earth on which the hunter lived! They saw no graves. They never heard of war. No gales ever vexed the air, no fogs ever hid the sun. Ice was 74 NEW AMERICA. unknown to that Blessed Isle. No blood was ever shed; no hunger and thirst were felt; for the very air which they breathed was food and drink. Their feet were never tired and their temples never ached. No sorrowing was endured for the dead. Gladly would the hunter have remained for ever with his bride in this spirit-land; but a great presence, called the Master of Life, came near to him, and speaking in a voice like a soft breeze, said to the young man: "Go back to the land from which you came; your day is not yet. Return to your tribe, and to the duty of a good man. When that is done, you will rejoin the spirit which you love. She is accepted; she will be here for ever; as young, as happy as when I called her from the land of snow." When the voice ceased from its speaking, the hunter started in his sleep to find the little mound at his feet, snow in the trees overhead, and a numb sorrow in his heart. Ah me, it was all a dream! The red tnan believes in a god, or rather, he believes in many gods; also in a life after death, to be shared by his horse, his hawk, and his dog. He thinks there is a good spirit and a bad spirit, equal in dignity and strength to each other; that, under them live a multitude of gods; spirits of the rock, the tree, the cloud, the river, and the frost; spirits of the wind, of the sun, and of the stars. No Greek shepherd ever peopled Hymettus and Arcadia, Orion and the Bear, with such swarming multitudes of shapes and radiances as the Cheyenne, the Pawnee, and the Snake, believe to inhabit their plains and INDIAN LIFE. 75 mountains, their creeks and woods, their lakes and skies. But the Indian has never yet learned to erect temples to his deities; being content to find them in tree and flower, in sunshine and in storm, in the hawk> the beaver, and the trout. His only religion is that of nature, his only worship a kind of magic. He believes in witches and in sorcerers; in their power to degrade men into beasts, to elevate beasts into men. Sleep is to him but another side of his life, and dreams are as real as his waking deeds. In his fancy all space is teeming with gods and spirits, which are close to him as he hunts and fights, capable of hearing his call to them, of making known to him their presence and their, wishes by signs and sounds. He is the original source of all our spirit-rapping, all our table-turning; and in the act of invoking demons to his aid, he is still beyond the reach of such puny rivals as the Davenports and Homes. His religious rites are few and cabalistic; thus, he will sing for the sick, and offer meat to the dead; he will put a charm in his ear, in his nose, and around his wrist commonly a shell from the great sea as a defence against evil spirits. He has no priest, as we understand the word, but he submits himself abjectly to his prophet (jossakeed) and seer; and he does so, not only as regards his soul, but his body. In fact, his prophet is his doctor also; disease being in his opinion a spiritual as well as physical defect, only to be conquered by one who has power upon sin and death. Brigham Young has very much the same function to perform at one end of Salt 76 NEW AMERICA. Lake that a Shoshonee seer may have to discharge at the other. The red men have no settled laws. Their govern- ment is patriarchal, the chief power being exercised, as in every savage horde, by the old men of the tribe, except in war time, when the bravest and most cunning take the lead. They know nothing about votes, either free or open, but in electing leaders they declare their preference with a shout. They have no conception of the use and power of work, and it is only with a slow and sullen heart that even the best among them will consent to prac- tise a trade. They have about them a sense of having always been a wild tribe-, a race of hunters and warriors, lords of the arrow and the club; and they are too proud to moil and toil, to do the offices of squaws and cowards. If they were not driven by hunger to the chase, they would do nothing at all, except drink and fight. In these things the Creeks and the Dakotas excel the most accomplished row-' dies of Denver, Leavenworth, and New York. I cannot say that their domestic life is either noble or lovely. A prairie brave, mounted on a strong pony, with a rifle on his saddle, a blanket strapped behind him, dressed in a handsome skin jacket, adorned with beads and tags, with his squaw trudging heavily by his side on foot, carrying her papoose on her back, and a parcel of provisions in her hands, was one of my earliest illustrations of the chivalries of Indian life. A mob of Ute warriors, tearing through the streets of Denver, rushing into shops and painting their faces, while the squaws and INDIAN LIFE. 77 papooses tumbled after them in the mire, laden with cabbages, buffalo-skins, and miscellaneous domestic fry, was another. A listless, insolent crowd of Pawnees, smoking and drinking on the Pacific road, while their squaws were labouring on the railway- line as navvies, hired out by the braves at fifty cents a- day, and a ration of corn and meat uncooked, was a third. As such examples grew in strength upon me, I began to think the noble Indian was not so much of a gentleman as a believing reader of the Last of the Mohicans might suppose. "Why don't these fellows work for themselves, instead of loung- ing in groceries and grog-shops, while their wives are digging earth and carrying wood?" An Omaha friend who stood near me smiled: "Don't you see, they are warriors and gentlemen; they cannot degrade themselves by work." The Sioux, the Pawnee, the Cheyenne squaw, though she may have a certain power in the wigwam, and an uncertain liberty of speech in the council, when her character as a woman happens to be great, is, in many respects, and as a general rule, no better than a slave; such rights as she may exercise be- longing to her rather as a member of the tribe than as a mother and a wife. Her husband has probably bought her for a blanket, for an old carbine, for a keg of whisky; and it depends wholly on the man's humour, on his fondness, whether he shall treat her as a lady or as a dog. He can sell her, he can give her away. The squaw's inferiority to the hunter is like that of the horse to his master. She is one of the man's chattels; one of many like herself; for the 78 NEW AMERICA. Indian is a polygamist, and keeps a harem in the prairie. She has to perform all in-door, all out-door labour; to fix the wigwam in the ground, to fetch water from the stream, to gather billets from the bush, to dig roots and pick up acorns, to dress and cook the food, to make the clothes, to dry the scalps, to mend the wigwam, to carry her children on the march. And while she has a thousand toils to en- dure, she has scarcely any rights as either a woman or a wife. The man 'may put her away for the most trifling fault. Her infant may be taken from her lap. Her modesty is not always spared. While the sins into which her own fancies may have led her are visited with revolting punishment, she may be forced by her husband into acts of immorality which degrade her as a woman, not only in her own eyes, but in those of the companions of her shame. If she commits adultery without her husband's leave, his custom allows him to slit her nose; yet when the whimsy takes him, he may sell her charms to a pas- sing guest. In the freedom of his forest life , it is common for the Shoshonee and the Comanche to offer his squaw to any stranger visiting in his lodge. The theory of the wigwam is, that the female mem- ber of it is a chattel, and that her beauty, her mo- desty, her service, belong to her lord only, and may be given as he lists. For her there is nothing save to hear and to obey. And the Indian squaw is what such rules of life must make her. If her mate is cruel in disposition, she is savage; if he is dirty in person, she is filthy; jf he is lax in conduct, she is shameless. When any- INDIAN LIFE. 79 thing base and monstrous has to be done, it is left to the squaws. If an enemy is to be tortured, the women are set upon him. A brave might club his prisoner to death by a blow, but the sharper and slower agonies caused by peeling off his skin, by tearing out his nails, by breaking his finger-joints, by putting fire under his feet, by gouging out his eyes, are only to be inflicted by the demons who have taken up their dwelling in female forms. All the men who fought against the Indians at Sand Creek, to whom I have spoken, describe the squaws as fighting more furiously than the braves; and all the white women (as I hear) who have had the double misfortune of falling into Indian hands, and surviving to tell the tale of their dishonour, ex- claim against the squaws as deeper in cruelty and iniquity than their lords. The story of a white woman's captivity among the Sioux and Arappahoes is one that ought never to be told. In Colorado there are fifty, perhaps a hundred, females who have undergone the shame of such a passage in their lives; and it is fearful to see the flashing eyes, to hear the emphatic oaths, of either father, son, or lover to one of these wretched creatures, when a Cheyenne is spoken of otherwise than as a dog, whom it is the duty of every honest man to shoot. It would be a dangerous trial for a Yengee to say one word in favour of the Indians either in the streets of Denver and Central City, or along the route through the Eocky Mountains travelled by the waggon trains and the mail. Yet with all their faults, the Indians have somQ 80 NEW AMERICA. virtues and many capacities. They are brave. As a rule they are chaste. In patience they have few equals; in endurance they have none. They are affectionate towards their children*, moderately faith- ful to their squaws. Their reverence for age, for wisdom, and for valour, is akin to religious feeling, and is only a little lower in degree than that which they pay to their Great Spirit. In war time, and against an enemy, they consider everything fair; but the first and worst of all vices in the savage, the habit of lying, is comparatively rare in these red men. CARRYING THE MAIL. 81 CHAPTER VIII. Carrying the Mail. IN bands from fifteen to forty, well armed and well mounted, the Cheyennes and their allies are moving along our line, plundering the stations, threatening the teamsters and drivers with fire and lead. A red-skin war is never sudden in its coming; for, as many tribes and nations must be drawn into it, there is much running to and fro, much smoking of tobacco , and a vast amount of palaver. When a man desires to have war, he must first persuade his chief and his tribe to dare it; next he must ride round the country into other tribes, whispering, haranguing, rousing, till the blood of many of the younger braves boils up. Meetings must be held, counsels compared, and a decision taken by the allies. If the palavering, in which the aged and timid warriors have a principal share, is going on slowly, some of the younger braves steal off into the enemy's land, where they provoke bad blood by plundering a ranch, driving away mules, if possible carrying off women. They know that the white men will turn out and fight, that two or three braves may happen to get killed, and they are pretty sure that the nations which have suffered in the fray will then cry loudly for revenge. As a rule, the white men, being few in number, Neiv America. I. 6 82 NEW AMERICA. unsupported by their government, never resist these Indian attacks, unless life is taken or women are captured; short of these crimes being committed, the pale- face says, it is cheaper to feed the red men than to fight them, since he must always meet them with a halter round his neck. A white man dare not fire on a band of Comanches, though he may be perfectly sure that they are enemies, bent on taking his life. If he killed an Indian, he would be tried for murder. The red man, therefore, has his choice of when and where he will attack; and the grand advantage of being able to deliver his volley when he pleases. It is only after some one has been killed, that the white man feels himself safe in returning shot for shot. So, when parties of Indians come upon lonely ranches and stations on the Plains, the white men have to kill, as it were, the fatted calf, that is to say, they have to bring forth their stores of bacon, dried buffalo tongue, beans, and potted fruit, set the kettle boiling, the pan frying, and feed the rascals who are going to murder them, down to the very last pound of flesh, the very last crust of bread; only too happy if they will then go away into their wilds without taking away women and scalps. Of course, few wowen are to be found in these perilous plains; not a dozen between Wamego and Denver, I should say. Now these small bands of Cheyennes and Arap- pahoes in our front have come from the great camp of the Six Nations, lying near Fort Ellsworth, under the command of Eoman Xose. They are going for- ward as a party of feelers and provokers, a little way in advance of us, insulting the whites, and eat- CARRYING THE MAIL. 83 ing up the road. At every station, after passing Fort Kiley, we hear of their presence and of their depredations. Eed skins, however, will not permit themselves to be seen, unless they are friendly and mean to beg. In going over one of the long, low ridges of Smoky Hill, we observe a small party of Cheyennes moving along the opposite ridge-, they are mounted, and leading spare horses ; and as we catch the gleam of their rifles, we know they are well armed. Unlike the Bedouin, every red-skin has a revolver of his own; some of them have two or three revolvers in their belts; almost every one slings a rifle across his horse. They seem to be crossing our path. "Who are these Indians?" I ask the driver, by whose side I am sitting on the box. "Well," says he, in the deliberate Western fashion, "guess they are some cuss." They seem to have halted; for the moment, as I think, they are trying to prevent our seeing a white horse, which one of them is leading. "Guess I can't make them out," adds the driver, after taking time to consider his want of opinion; "if they were friendly, they would come to us and beg; if they were thieves, they would hide in the creek, so as not to be seen; guess they are out on the war-path." When they draw up, we can count them; they are only five men in number, with four led horses in addition to their own. Five men would not dream of attacking the mail, in which there might be a dozen men and guns; especially not when the blinds are down, and they cannot from their coign of van- tage see into the coach, and count the number of 6* 84 HEW AMERICA. their foes. A sure knowledge of the enemies to be met in fight is a cardinal point in the system of an Indian warrior, who prides himself more on his suc- cess than even on his valour. Rich in stratagem, he is always afraid of ambuscade ; and he rarely ventures to attack an enemy, when, from either want of light or any other cause, he cannot see into every element of his game. This Indian fact is of use to us now. In the presence of our Cheyenne neighbours, we draw the curtains of our waggon pretty close ; so that the red-skins, who can see that we are two outside, the driver and myself, cannot tell how many more may be sitting inside with revolvers. They know in a general way that no one rides outside the stage in the burning heat of these plains, unless the inside seats are filled. The rule is not good for us, our seats being occupied with mail-bags; but the Chey- ennes and Comanches have no notice of our straits. Now, five red-skins, though they might rush upon a single man, or even upon a couple of men, no better armed than themselves, against whom they would enjoy the privilege of firing the first volley, will always pause before pulling a trigger on a foe of invisible and unknown strength. It is, therefore, without surprise, though with much inward satis- faction, that we see them break up their council, fall into line, and move along the creek, in such a way as to increase the distance between us at every stride. At the next log-hut, we find that this party of Cheyennes, with the led horses, stolen from some CARRYING THE MAIL. 85 waggon train, have been here; very insolent and masterly; not mincing words; not concealing threats. They. have eaten up everything in the station; the dried elk, the buffalo-tongue, the fat bacon, the canned fruits; have compelled the boys to boil them coffee, to fetch clean water, to mend their horses 7 shoes; and have left the place with a notice that the mail must be stopped, the stock removed, and the shanties burnt. Having tasted a little putrid water, seasoned with a few drops of cognac, happily carried from New York, we push out of the station, following in the track of these menacing braves. We crash through ravines, in which our driver believes they lurk; and we pass little mounds, under which the scalpless heads of white men, murdered in the recent frays, have scarcely yet grown cold. The long green line of the Smoky Hill is on our left, not half a mile from our course, which lies for two or three days and nights along the bank of Smoky river. As we dash into Low Creek, we find the men in a scare, though they are only a few miles distant from Ells- worth. A party of Cheyennes have been to the sta- tion, have eaten up their food, have taken away what they wanted, and promised to return in fifteen days, to burn down the shanty and murder the men. The boys say these Indians will come back before the end of their fifteen days. They notice many signs of the red man's anger, which are invisible to us. The blacksmith went out in the morning; but he saw enough in an hour to induce him to scamper back. A farmer, living in a ranch close by, has 86 NEW AMERICA. called in his man and horses from the plains. Every one is belted and on guard; in all, five men against as many thousand red-skins. With some satisfaction, we hear of seven United States soldiers, from the fort, having ridden on in front of us, looking after buffalo and red-skins. The mules having been yoked, our revolvers fired off and reloaded, and a can of bad water swallowed, we light our cigars and jump on the waggon. Just as we are sallying from the station, a rider- less horse comes sweating and panting into the yard, and is instantly recognised as belonging to one of those soldiers who had passed through in the early day, looking after buffalo and red-skins. One or other he seems to have found. Bill the driver pulls at his reins, doubtful whether he ought to go out; but on second thoughts, with an ugly twist of the jaw and resolute scowl on his brow, he whips his team into a rage, and plunges out with them upon the hot and arid plains. Half a mile from the station, we come upon a dying horse, which the driver says had belonged to one of those soldiers who had gone before us. The beast is ripped through the belly; but whether he has been gored by a buffalo horn or slit open with a knife, we cannot decide as we roll swiftly by. Saddle and trapping have been taken away; but there is nothing to tell by whom, or for what end. With fingers laced on our revolvers, we keep a keen eye upon objects, both far and near. At Chalk Bluff we find Kelly and Walden, the two stockmen, horribly scared. Kelly, an Irish lad, makes a wry CARRYING THE MAIL. 87 face and a joke about the dirty vermin, who have just been here; but Walden, a Yankee, who has been through the war, is painfully white and grave. They believe these Cheyennes mean mischief. We give the brave lads a little cognac, wring their hands, and bid them be of good cheer, as we rattle off in the waggon. (I am sorry to say, that three weeks afterwards these men were murdered by the Cheyennes. The Indians came to the hut, and, as usual, asked for food and tobacco. Kelly put their dinners on the table, which they instantly devoured. I cannot say how the poor men came to be so careless as they must have been, when the Cheyennes, catching them off their guard, lanced Kelly through the heart, and shot Walden in the bowels. Kelly fell dead, and Walden only lived a few hours. A waggon came up, and a white man heard the story from his lips.) The whole road is unarmed, unprotected ; for the two forts, Ellsworth and Wallace, each with a couple of weak companies, stand at a distance from each other of two hundred and twenty miles. If they are able to defend themselves it is thought enough. Pond Creek lies a mile from Fort Wallace : a woman and her daughter, Mrs. and Miss Bartholomew, live here ; and when a party of Cheyennes came into the sta- tion yesterday, eating it up, and threatening to burn it down, the woman sent a driver up to the fort, which contains a garrison of one hundred and fifty men, with two field-pieces, and begged for help; but Lieutenant Bates, the gentleman in command, replied to her cry of distress, that if she and her daughter 88 NEW AMERICA. need protection, they must seek it in the lines, as he cannot spare a man to defend the road along which we are guarding the imperial mail ! She is packing a few things in a handkerchief, and as we drive out of the yard, we see the two women start off for the military post. From Big Timber station, a place where we find a few trees, most welcome to our sight, the red-skins have hardly gone, as we roll in; they have been here three days, a party of twenty-eight, with Little Blanket at their head; eating the fat bacon, sipping the hot coffee, and lording over the stockmen like kings over conquered slaves. The country, they said, is theirs, and everything brought into it is theirs. When about to go away, they counted these trees, fifty-one in number. "No cut down trees," they said, "we like them to stand there, in the creek." Pointing to a stack of hay, laid up for the mules, they added, with a grim and smiling humour, "Cut grass, cut plenty grass, make big fire;" and, as they rode away, the chief turned round, and said, "Fifteen days we come back; you gone, good; you not gone ugh!" accompanying his threat with a horrible pantomime, expressive of lapping flames. At Cheyenne Wells we have another domestic scene. Long before coming to this station, we heard from drivers and train-men of Jack Dunbar, the station-keeper, as a reckless Colorado devil, one of those heroes of Sand Creek who had sent a slug into the heart of White Antelope, when the aged red-skin had bared his breast and called on the troops to fire. CARRYING THE MAIL. 89 We hoped to find one man, at least, unscared by this Indian raid along our line; but on our wheeling into his yard, we see that everything is wrong, for Dunbar has a wife at Cheyenne Wells, and his own share in the exploit of Sand Creek being well known to the Indians, he is fearful that the first sharp blow of the coming war may fall upon her head. A glance at the way-bill tells him that the stage is full, that passengers who have paid their hundreds of dollars have been left behind for want of room; but then, as he says, it is a question of life and death, of a woman's life and death, and he comes to us, cap in hand, with a prayer that we will carry on his wife into a place of safety. For him- self, he is willing to stand by his stock,' defending himself and his stable to the last; but the poor woman cannot fight, and in case of his own death, before he should have time to kill her, her fate would be revolting, far beyond the power of an English imagination to conceive. What can we do, but offer to comply? A fresh disposal of the mail-bags; a new twist of our limbs; and a hole is made in the vehicle, into which the hero's wife inserts her slim and plastic body. A pillow thrust behind her head, protects her from many a bump and blow; but when we lift her, thirty hours later, from the waggon, it is hard to say whether she will live or die. In the night, we rougher fellows get a little rest and relief by climbing to the box, breathing the cold air, and occasionally curling up our legs in the boot. It is only the fiery day that kills. 90 NEW AMERICA. As the sun works westward towards his setting, the air grows cooler to the skin, softer in the lungs; and a spring of life comes hack as it were into the veins. Our pulses quicken, our chests dilate, our limbs put out new strength. The weird and pensive solitude of the prairie grows into our souls as the stars peep out; and when the crescent moon lifts up her head from the horizon, bathing the vast ocean of rolling grass in her tender light, we feel in the beauty and majesty of Nature such a sovereign balm, that unless the scalping-knife were in his hand, we could salute either a Cheyenne or a Sioux as a man and a brother. RED COMMUNITIES. 91 CHAPTER IX. Red Communities. BETWEEN the great lakes and the Gulf of Mexico, there may be two hundred tribes and tribelets of these red men: Creeks, Dakotas, Mohicans, Chey- ennes , Pawnees , Shoshones , Cherokees , Sioux, Comanches, and their fellows, more or less distinct in genius and in shape: men who once roamed over these hills and valleys , danced in their, war-paint, hunted the elk and the bison, and left their long and liquid names to many American rivers and American states. What to do with these forest people has been the thought of colonist and ruler from those early days when the first Saxon came into the land. At times, perhaps, an adventurer here and there has plied them too freely with the carbine and the cruse; but his better nature and his higher principle have brought him to regret this use of powder and whisky, the destroying angels of civilisation; and from the days of Penn, at least, the red man's right in the country has been commonly assumed by writers, and his claim to compensation for his lost hunting-ground has been recognised by the laws. This policy of paying money for the land taken by the white men from the red was the more just and noble, as Indians, like the Senecas and the 92 NEW AMERICA. Walla- Wallahs, have no clear sense of what is meant by rights in the soil. The soil? They know no soil. A Seneca comprehended his right to fish in the Hudson river; a Walla- Wallah understood his right to hunt bison in the plains at the feet of the Blue Mountains; but as a thing to plough and plant, to dig wells into, to build houses upon, the soil was no more to them than the sea and the sky are to us. A right to go over it they claimed; but to own it, and preserve it against the intrusion of all other men, is a claim which the red men have never made, and which, if they should learn to make it, could never be allowed by civilised men. No hunting tribe has any such right; perhaps no hunting tribe can have any such right; for, in strict political philosophy, the only exclusive right which any man can acquire in land, the gift of nature, is that which he creates for himself by what he puts into it by way of labour and investment alike for his own and for the common good. Now, a slayer of game does nothing for the land over which he roams; he clears no forest, he drains no marsh, he embanks no river, he plants no tree, he cultivates no garden, he builds no city; what he finds at his birth he leaves at his death; and no more property would, under such conditions, accrue to him in the soil than in the air. But, in dealing with such tribes as the Sioux and the Delawares, is it wise to be always bringing our political logic to the front? A law which the strong has to enforce, and which weighs upon the weak, may be tempered with mercy, even when it cannot be generally set aside. A little love, say the philan- &ED COMMUNITIES. 93 thropists, may go a long way. The land is here; we come and seize it; gaining for ourselves a pos- session of untold wealth, while driving the hunter from rivers and forests which before our coming had yielded his family the means of life. Ours is the profit, his the loss. Our wants can hardly be the measure of our rights ; and if the Walla- Wallah has few rights in the soil, the stranger who displaces him has, in the first instance, none at all, beyond that vague common right which every human being may be supposed to possess in the earth on which he is born. A compromise, then, would appear to these reasoners to offer the only sound issue out of such conflicting claims; and an Englishman, jealous for family reasons of everything done by his brethren in the United States, may feel proud that, as between Yengees and Indians, the strong have dealt favourably with the weak. Washington laid down a rule for paying to each tribe driven back from the sea by settlers a rental for their lands; arrangements for that purpose being made between a government age-nt and a recognised chief; and these payments to the Apalachian and Algonquin tribes and tribelets, have ever since that day been made by the United States government with unfailing good faith. But a legal discharge of this trade obligation was far from being enough to satisfy conscientious men, who felt that in coming upon the Indian plain and forest they were driving a race of hunters from their fields, and cutting away from them the means by which they lived. Could nothing else be done 94 NEW AMERICA. for the red man? These white men saw that the past was past. A tribe of hunters, eating the flesh of antelope and buffalo, could not dwell in a province of farms and pastures. The last arrow had been shot when the homestead rose; it was only a question of years until the bow must be broken and the archer pushed aside. A hunter needs for his sub- sistence an area wide enough to feed thousands of men who can make their living by the plough and the spade. In a planet crowded like ours, no room can be found to grow the hunter's food; for the beaver which he traps, the elk which he runs down, the bison which he slays, will only breed in a country that is seldom disturbed by man. The smoke of a homestead drives away buffalo and deer. Even a pastoral tribe can find room enough only in the wilds of Asia and Africa, where the feuds be- tween tent and city burn with consuming heat; yet a people living by pasturage, driving their flocks before them in search of herbage, require very little ground for their sustenance compared against a people living by the chase. What then? Must the red man perish from the earth? Should he die to let the white man live upon his land? Thousands of voices cried out against such sentence; at least until the white man, who had brought his law upon the scene, could say that every effort to save the Indian had been made, and that every experiment had failed. Then came the question (only to be laid at rest by trial), whether the Seneca, the Delaware, the Oneida, and the Chippewa, could be trained in the RED COMMUNITIES. 95 arts of life; could be persuaded to lodge in frame- houses, to live in one place, to plant corn and fruit- trees, to wear trousers and shoes, to send their little ones to school? A number of pious persons, full of zeal for the red race, though lacking true knowledge of the course through which Nature works, put themselves to much cost and trouble in trying these experiments. These reformers had a strong belief in their power of doing things, so to say, by steam of growing habits of life under glass, and of grafting civilisation with the knife. They fell to their work with unflinching spirit. Lands were given up to the red-skins; teachers were provided for them; schools, chapels, saw-mills, houses, were built for them; all the appliances of farming ploughs and flails, corn-seed and fruit-trees, horses and oxen, poultry and pigs were furnished, more or less freely, from the white man's stores. A true history of these trials would be that of a great endeavour, an almost uniform failure; fresh proof that Nature will not suffer her laws to be broken, her order con- travened, and her grades disturbed. A tribe of Senecas was placed upon the Alle- ghany river in a fine location; a tribe of Oneidas settled on a reservation, in the centre of New York, called Oneida Creek. Care and money were lavished on these remnants of red nations; farms were cleared, houses built for them; but they would not labour with their hands to any purpose; not with the caution, the continuity, needful to success in growing grain and stock. A good harvest made them lazy and improvident; a bad harvest thinned them by 96 NEW AMERICA. starvation and disease. One or two families, in whom there was a tinge of white blood, made pretty fair settlers; the rest only lived on the land so long as they could sell the timber and the game. As wood grew scarce, and game disappeared, they began to sell the land; at first to appointed agents; and to move away into the wild country of Green Bay. Most of the tribe have now left Oneida; with the exception, perhaps, of the Walkers, all will quit their ancient Creek in time. Bill Beechtree, one of the remnants, cut me some hickory sticks, and showed me some bows and arrows which he makes for sale. He can do and will do nothing else. Though he never drew bow against an enemy in his life, and has a very nice voice for a psalm- tune, he considers any other occupation than cutting sticks and barbing arrows unworthy of the son of a brave. The Delawares whom we saw near Leavenworth, the Pottawottamies whom we found at St. Mary's Mission, are in some respects better off than the Oneidas, being settled in the midst of friendly whites, among whom they continue to live, but only in a declining state. Both these tribes have engaged in farming and in raising stock. The Delawares rank among the noblest nations of the red men; they have finer forms, cleaner habits, quicker senses, than the Cheyennes and the Pawnees. A fragment of this people may be saved, by ultimate amalgama- tion with the surrounding whites, who feel less anti- pathy for them than for Sioux and Utes. The Pottawottamies have been lucky in attracting to- wards their settlement in Kansas the wise attentions RED COMMUNITIES. 97 of a Catholic bishop. At St. Mary's Mission, half- a-dozen priests have founded" schools and chapels, taught the people religion, and trained them to habits of domestic life. Two thousand children are receiving lessons from these priests. The sheds are better built, the stock better tended, and the land better tilled, at St. Mary's than they are in the re- servation of any Indian tribe that I have seen except one. At Wyandotte, on the Missouri river, some Shawnee families have been placed; and here, if anywhere in the Red Land, the friends of civilisa- tion may point the moral of their tale. Armstrong, their chief and their richest man, has English blood in his veins-, indeed, many of these Shawnees can boast of the sarnie high title to respect among their tribe. They farm, they raise stock, they sell dry goods; some of them marry white girls, more give their daughters to whites; and a few among them aspire to the mysteries of banking and lending money. A special Act endows these Shawnees with the rank of citizens of Kansas, in which capacity they serve on juries and vote for members of Con- gress. But the Shawnees of Wyandotte, being a people mixed in blood, can hardly be used as set-off against a score of undoubted failures. Neio America. I. 98 NEW AMERICA. CHAPTER X. The Indian Question. Now, the blame arising from these failures to found any large red settlement in the old countries once owned by Iroquois and Algonquin has been constantly charged against the red man. Is this charge a just one? Is it the Delaware's fault that he cannot pass in one generation from the state of a hunter into that of a husbandman? If a man should have his lodge built with a green shoot instead of with a strong tree, whose fault would it be when the lodge came down in a storm? Everyone who has read the annals of our race a page of nature, with its counterfoil in the his- tory of everything having life is aware that in our progress from the savage to the civilised state, man has had to pass through three grand stages, corresponding, as it were, to his childhood, to his youth, and to his manhood. In the first stage of his career, he is a hunter, living mainly by the chase; in the second stage he is a herdsman, living mainly by the pasturage of goats and sheep, of camels and kine; in the third stage, he is a husband- man, living mainly by his cultivation of corn and maize, of fruits and herbs. These three conditions of human life may be considered as finding their purest types in such races as the Iroquois, the Arabian, and the Gothic, in their present stage; THE INDIAN QUESTION. 99 but each condition is, in itself and for itself, an affair of development and not of race. The Arab, who is now a shepherd, was once a hunter; the Saxon, who is now a cultivator of the soil, was first a hunter, then a herdsman, before he became a hus- bandman. Man's progress from stage to stage is continuous in its course, obeying the laws of phy- sical and moral change. It is slow; it is uniform; it is silent; it is unseen. In one word, it is growth. No one can step at his ease from the first stage of human existence into the second; still less can he step from the first stage into the third. All growth is a work of time, depending on forces which are often beyond the control of art; work ;to be helped perhaps, not to be hurried, by men. As in the training of a vine, in the rearing of a child, a wise waiting upon nature seems our only course. These three stages in our progress upward are strongly marked; the interval dividing an Iroquois from an Arab being as wide as that which separates an Arab from a Saxon. The hunter's habits are those of a beast of prey. His teeth are set against everything having life; every beast on the earth, every bird in the air, being an enemy against which his club will be raised and his arrow will be drawn. On passing into the stage of a herdsman, he becomes used to the society of horses, dogs, and camels, animals of a tender breed; 'he finds himself charged with the care of sheep and goats, of cattle and fowls, creatures which he must pity and tend, bearing with their humours under penalty of their loss. If he would feed upon their 7* 100 NEW AMERICA. milk and eggs, if he would clothe himself in their wools and skins, he must study their wants, and care for them with a parent's eye. It will become his business to serve and guard them; to seek out herbage and water for them; to consider their times and seasons; to prepare for them a shelter from the heats of noon and the frosts of night. Thus , a man's relation to the lower world of life must undergo a change. Where, in his savage state, he sharpened his knife against every living thing, he has now to become a student of nature, a nursing father to an ever-increasing family of beasts and birds. Such cares as occupy all pastoral tribes the Arab in his tent, the Caffir in his kraal, the Kirghis in his hut are utterly unknown to the Seneca, the Shoshonee, and the Ute; the softer manners which result from the paternal relation of men to domestic animals having no existence in any hunt- ing tribe. To advance from the stage of a Seneca into that of an Arab, is a march requiring many years, perhaps many generations, to accomplish; and even when that stage of pastoral existence shall have been gained, with all its changes of habit and of thought, the hunter will be only half-way on his path towards the position occupied by a' grain-growing Saxon. After the second stage of this journey has been accomplished by the red man, those who have visited Nahr Dehab in Syria, and watched the trials there being made by the Turks in settling the Fer- doon Arabs on the soil, will feel inclined to wait for any further results of his effort in a very calm and dispassionate frame of mind. THE INDIAN QUESTION. 101 The Cheyenne is a wild man of the woods, whom neither cold nor hunger is strong enough to goad into working for himself, his children, and his squaws. How should it? A man may die of frost and snow, and even for lack of food , without bringing dishonour upon his tribe; but to labour with his hands is, in his simple belief, a positive disgrace. A warrior must not soil his palm with labour, seeing that his only duties in the world are to hunt and fight. If maize must be planted, if roots must be dug, if fires must be lit, if water must be carried, where is the squaw? Not much' work is ever done in a Chey- enne lodge; but whether it be much or little, the man will take no part of the trouble upon himself. To kill his enemy and to catch his prey that, in a line, is the Cheyenne's whole duty of man. Starva- tion itself will not drive him into treating industry as a duty; the neglect of which, even in another, is never, in his eyes, an offence. In some of the western tribes, where game is running scarce and the beavers evade the trap, the squaws and little ones throw a handful of grain into the soil; but the hunters give no heed to their work; and if, on their return to the spot, later in the year, the men find that their squaws have omitted to sow the maize, the idea of anybody working and waiting for a crop to grow is so foreign to their Indian taste, that they sit down and laugh at the neglect as a passing jest. If the tribe runs short of food, the hunter's remedy is to march against his neighbour, and by means of his bow and his tomahawk , to create a fresh balance between the mouths to be fed and the quantity of 102 NEW AMERICA. buffalo and elk which may be found to feed them. This rude remedy for want is his only art. Any thought of making the two ends of his account meet by setting up beehives and multiplying herds , would never present itself unbrought to his simple mind. His fathers having always been hunters, the only resource of his tribe, when their food runs short, is the original one of breaking through every obstacle to a fresh supply with his club. Can we marvel, then, that when the Senecas were placed upon such land as the Alleghany re- servation, in a bountiful and fruitful country, rich in white pines, and in other valuable trees, they should have done little or nothing in the way of planting and sowing; that they should have sold their timber to the whites; that they should have rented their saw-mills and ferries to the whites; that they should have let out their rafting yards and landing-places to the whites; in short, that they should have starved on a few dollars derived from rent, while the more eager and industrious Yankee, placed in the same location, would have coined the real riches of the country into solid gold? Like his Arab brother at Nahr Dehab, the Seneca on the Alleghany could not defile his hands with work, the business, not of warriors, but of squaws. It is only fair, then, to remember, that the failure of so many attempts to convert the hunter into a husbandman at a single step was due to great laws of nature, not to the perversity of man. The chasm could not be bridged; but your eager and well-meaning friends of the red race, having no THE INDIAN QUESTION. 103 science to guide them, had to work this truth for themselves out of vague ideas into visible facts. In their ignorance of the general laws of growth, they saw their very sympathies and generosities changed into destroying powers; for the Indians who gave up their lands to the white men, receiving rentals or annuities in return for them, had to abandon their old habits of life without being able to enter on any new employments. Arid what was' the end of this change for them? Hanging about the skirts of towns, they ate and drank, rioted and smoked them- selves into premature old age. Of a hundred mil- lions of dollars which have been paid to the red man, it is said that fifty millions at least have been spent in grog-shops and in houses of evil name. The misery is, that in their savage state the red men have to live in the light of a high civilisation. The ferns which grow in their native forests would not more surely perish if they were suddenly planted out in the open sun. The same hasty desire to bring the red savage into close relation with white civilisation affects the policy pursued by government agents in these Plains. In the American part of Ked India failure of justice is the rule; in the Canadian part of Red India failure of justice is extremely rare; and the reason is this, the trappers and traders living beyond the Canadian frontier deal with robbery and murder with a prompt- ness and simplicity unknown to American judges. My friend, Jem Baker, a sturdy old trapper, who resides with his squaws and papooses on Clear Creek, near Denver, put the whele case into a few 104 NEW AMERICA. words. "You see, colonel," says Jem, to whom every gentleman is a colonel, "the difference is this: if a Sioux kills a white man near Fort Ellice, you English say, 'Bring him in, dead or living, here's two hundred dollars;' and when the Indians have brought him in , you say again , 4 Try him for his life; if he is guilty, hang him on the nearest tree.' All is done in a day, and the Indians have his blood upon themselves. But, if a Sioux kills a white man near Fort Laramie, we Americans say, i Bring him in with care, along with all the witnesses of his crime; and when the Indians have brought him in, we say again, 4 He must have a fair trial for his life; he must be committed by a justice and sent before a judge, he must have a good counsel to speak up for him, and a jury to try him who know nothing about his crime.' So most times he gets off, has a present from some lady perhaps, and goes back to his nation a big chief." I have heard the details of cases in which Indian assassins, taken all but red-handed, have been sent to Washington for trial, three thousand miles away from the scenes and witnesses of their crimes ; who, on being acquitted from the lack of such evidence as complicated legal methods require, have come back into these prairies , bearing on their arms and necks gifts of philanthropic ladies , and taking instant rank as leaders in their tribes. A simpler and swifter form of trial is needed on these Plains on penalty of such irregular acts of popular vengeance as the battle of Sand Creek. The truth is v the eastern cities have always THE INDIAN QUESTION. 105 shirked the Indian question ; fearing to face it boldly, hoping it would drop out of light and vex their spirits no more. "We push our way," said Secre- tary Seward to me, condolingly; "ninety years ago, my grandfather had the same sort of trouble with Indians, only sixty miles from New York, that you have now been suffering six hundred miles beyond St. Louis." I am often surprised by the splendid confidence which Americans express in their power of living down everything which they find unplea- sant; but I am not convinced that this policy of pushing the red man off this continent is the only method of procedure. If policy compels this people to make a new road from St. Louis to San Francisco, policy suggests that the road should be made safe. Thus much will be admitted in Boston as well as in Denver. But how is a path through the buffalo-runs to be made safe? By the white men going out every spring to beg a treaty of peace from Kornan Nose and Spotted Dog, paying for it with baby talk, blankets, fire- arms, powder, and whisky? That is the present method of proceeding, and no one, except the agents, finds it much of a success. My own impression is, that such a method can have only one result, to deceive the red man into an utterly false impression of the white man's weakness. These Cheyennes ac- tually believe that they are stronger, braver, and more numerous than the Americans. If one of these fellows, who may have been at St. Louis, reports to his tribe that the white men of the sunrise are many beyond counting, like the flowers on the prairie, 106 NEW AMERICA. they say that he has been seized by a bad spirit, and made into a speaker of lies. Thus, they hold the white men in contempt. If these new roads are to be kept open, and blood is to be spared, this position of the white and red man should be reversed, and the order of things in this country made to correspond with the actual facts. The Indians must be driven into sueing for treaties of peace. If you admit their right to the land, buy it from them. When they come to you for peace, let them have it on generous terms, and then compel them to observe it with religious faith. A little severity may be necessary in the outset; for the Cheyenne has never yet felt the white man's power; but a policy, at once clear, clement and firm, would soon become intelligible to these sons of the prairie. If the policy of leaving things alone, and letting the trader, emigrant, and traveller, push their way through these deserts, is continued, the Americans will never cease to have trouble on their Indian frontiers. CITY OF THE PLAINS. 107 CHAPTER XL City of the Plains. AT the head of these rolling prairies stands Denver, City of the Plains. A few months ago (time runs swiftly in these western towns; two years take you back to the middle ages, and a settler of five years' standing is a patriarch) Denver was a wifeless city. "I tell you, sir," exclaimed a fellow-lodger in the wooden shanty known to emigrant and miner as the Planter's House, "five years ago, when I first came down from the gulches into Denver, I would have given a ten-dollar piece to have seen the skirt of a servant- girl a mile off." This fellow was sitting at a lady's feet; a lady of middle age and fading charms; to whom, an hour or so afterwards, I said, "Pray, madam, is the gen- tleman who would have given the ten-dollar piece to see the skirt of a girl's petticoat, your husband?" "Why do you ask, sir?" Having had no particular reason for my query, I replied, with a bow, "Well, madam, I was rather hoping that so good a lover had met with a bright reward." "No," she answered with a smile, "I am not his wife; though I might be to-morrow if I would. He 108 NEW AMERICA, has just buried one lady, and lie wants to try on with a second." On alighting at the Planter's house I had noticed, swinging near the door, a little sign, on which these words were painted "MADAME MORTIMER, " CLAIRVOYANT PHYSICIAN." In the shop-windows of Main Street I had seen a hand-bill, which appeared, from its ragged look, to have done service in some other house,, of dirty habits, announcing that the celebrated Madame Mortimer had arrived in Denver, and might be con- sulted daily (no address being given) on what I may, perhaps, be allowed to call diseases of the heart. Her room in the hotel stood next in the cor- ridor to mine, and as a large panel over her door (door discreetly locked) leading from my room into hers was open, I could at any time of the last three or four nights and days have made her personal acquaintance by simply standing on tip-toe and looking through. Strange to say, I have not thought of arming myself against the wiles of my neighbour, even by a cursory inspection of her camp; and when I spoke just now to the faded woman in the parlour, I was utterly unaware that she was the celebrated Madame Mortimer, who could tell everybody's for- tune show every man a portrait of his future wife, every woman a picture of her future husband for the low charge of two dollars per head! Poor sorceress! there is not much poetic charm CITY OF THE PLAINS. 109 in her; not a tradition of the art, the grace, and suppleness of spirit which made the genuine witch. This afternoon, in passing my door in the lobby, with the adoring lover at her heels, she saw me looking on the ground for something. It was only a match, which I had dropped while drawing on the wall for a light. "You have lost something?" "Madam, it is only a match; can you make me a new one?" said I, looking from her face to that of the miner. "We do not make matches in Denver," she re- plied, in the saddest spirit. " Surely they cannot help making them wherever you are," I said with a bow. She looked quite blank, though the lover began to chuckle. "How?" she asked, still simpering. "How! by gift and grace of heaven, where all matches are made." At last she smiled. "Ha! thank you, sir; I like that, and will keep it;" on which she and the lover slipt away into the parlour, and I lit my cigar with a fusee. Yet this poor sorceress is a feature in the City of the Plains; and I am told that, while the bloom of her coming was fresh among these mining men, the curiosity about her was keen, the flow of dollars into her pocket steady. But the charm ap- pears to be nearly spent; the landlord, properly pro- tected by a wife, and not being of a romantic turn, is said to be dunning her for bills; and she is con- sequently being driven by adverse fates to trifle with the affections on her own account. Her life in this 110 NEW AMERICA. city of rakes and gamblers must have been a very hard one; the nearest town is six hundred miles away; the price of a seat in the stage is about two hundred dollars. Poor artist in fate the stars appear to be very hard on her just now! Note. On my return from Salt Lake City to Denver, I found that her little sign had been re- moved from the house- front, and I began to fear that she had been driven off by adverse angels to either Leaven worth or Omaha; but in skipping upstairs to my room I met the poor creature on the landing- stage, and made her my politest bow. From a friend in the house I learned that she had retired from her profession into domestic life; but only, I am grieved to add, with what in this City of the Plains, is de- scribed at the brevet rank of lady and wife.) The men of Denver, even those of the higher classes, though they have many strong qualities bravery, perseverance, generosity, enterprise, endur- ance heroic qualities of the old Norse gods are also, not unlike the old Norse gods, exceedingly frail in morals; and where you see the tone of so- ciety weak, you may always expect to find aversion to marriage, both as a sentiment and as an institu- tion, somewhat strong. Men who have lived alone, away from the influence of mothers and sisters, have generally but a faint belief in the personal virtue and fidelity of women; and apart from this lack of belief in woman, which ought to be a true religion in the heart of every man, the desire for a fixed connexion and a settled home will hardly ever spring up. Men may like the society of women, and yet CITY OF THE PLAINS. Ill not care to encumber themselves for life. The worst of men expect, when they marry, to obtain the best of wives; but the best of women do not quit New England and Pennsylvania for Colorado. Hence it is a saying in Denver, a saying confirmed by prac- tice, that in these western cities, though few of the miners have wives, you will not find many among them who can be truly described as marrying men. On any terms short of marriage these lu^ty fel- lows may be caught by a female snare. They take very freely to the charms of negresses and squaws. One of the richest men of this city, whose name I forbear to give, has just gone up into the mountains witli a couple of Cheyenne wives. Your young Norse gods are nervously afraid of entering into a Chris- tian church. Denver is a city of four thousand people; with ten or twelve streets laid out; with two hotels, a bank, a theatre, half-a-dozen chapels, fifty gam- bling-houses, and a hundred grog-shops. As you wander about these hot and dirty streets, you seem to be walking in a city of demons. Every fifth house appears to be a bar, a whisky- shop, a lager-beer saloon; every tenth house appears to be either a brothel or a gaming-house; very often both in one. In these horrible dens a man's life is of no more worth than a dog's. Until a couple of years ago, when a change for the better began, it was quite usual for honest folks to be awakened from their sleep by the noise of exploding guns ; and when daylight came to find that a dead body had been tossed from a window into the street. No inquiry 112 NEW AMERICA. was ever made into the cause of death. Decent people merely said, "Well, there is one sinner less in Denver, and may his murderer meet his match to-morrow!" Thanks to William Grilpin, founder of Colorado, and governor elect, aided by a Vigilance Committee ; thanks also to the wholesome dread which unruly spirits have conceived of the quick eye and re- solute hand of Sheriff Wilson; thanks, more than all, to the presence of a few American and English ladies in the streets of Denver, the manners of this mining pandemonium have begun to change. English women who have been here two or three years as- sure me it is greatly altered. Of course, Gilpin is opposed in theory, at least to all such juris- diction as that exercised by the Vigilance Committee ; but for the moment, the society of this city is un- settled, justice is blind and lame, while violence is alert and strong; and the Vigilance Committee, a secret irresponsible board, acting above all law, espe- cially in the matter of life and death, has to keep things going by means of the revolver and the rope. No one knows by name the members of this stern tribunal ; every rich , every active , man in the place is thought to be of it; and you may hear, in con- fidential whispers, the names of persons who are sup- posed to be its leaders, ministers, and executioners. The association is secret, its agents are many, and nothing, I am told, escapes the knowledge, hardly anything escapes the action, of this dread, irrespon- sible court. A man disappears from the town: it is an offence to inquire about him; you see men CITY OF THE PLAIHS. 113 shrug their shoulders; perhaps you hear the mys- terious words " Gone up." Gone up, in the slang of Denver, means gone up a tree that is to say, a cotton-tree by which is meant a particular cotton-tree growing on the town creek. In plain English, the man is said to have been hung. This secret committee holds its sittings in the night, and the time for its execution is in the silent hours between twelve and two, when honest people should be all asleep in their beds. Sometimes, when the store-keepers open their doors in Main Street, they find a corpse dangling on a branch; but commonly the body is cut down before dawn, removed to a suburb, where it is thrown into a hole like that of a dead dog. In most cases, the place of burial is kept a secret from the people, so that no legal evi- dence of death can be found. Swearing, fighting, drinking, like the old Norse gods, a few thousand men, for the most part wife- less and childless, are engaged, in these upper parts of the Prairie, in founding an empire. The expres- sion is William Gilpin's pet phrase; but the con- gregation of young Norse gods who drink , and swear, and fight along these roads, are comically unaware of the glorious work in which they are en- gaged. "Well, sir/' said to me, one day, a burly stranger, all boots and beard, with a merry mouth and audacious eye; "well, what do you think of our Western boys?" Kemembering Gilpin, and wishing to be safe and complimentary, I replied, "You are making an New America. J. 8 114 NEW AMERICA. empire." "Eh?" he asked, not understanding me, and fancying I was laughing in my sleeve a liberty which your Western boy dislikes he brought his hand, instinctively, a little nearer to his bowie-knife. u You are making an empire?" I put in once again, but by way of inquiry this time, so as to guard against giving offence and receiving a stab. "I don't know about that," said he, relaxing his grim expression, and moving his hand from his belt: "but I am making money." Gilpin, I daresay, would have laughed, and said it was all the same. William Gilpin is perhaps the most noticeable man on the Plains, just as Brigham Young is the most noticeable in the Salt Lake Valley, and it would hardly be a figure of speech to say that his office in Denver (a small room in the Planter's House, which serves him for a bed-room, for a library, for a hall of audience, for a workshop, and the upper ten thousand of Colorado, generally, for a spittoon) is the high school of politics for the gold regions and the mountain districts. By birth, Gilpin is a Pennsylvanian ; by nature and habit, a state founder. Descending from one of the best Quaker families of his state (his ancestor was tji6 Gilpin who came out with Penn and Logan), taught by history the need of that large and graceful tolerance of religious sentiment which Penn displayed in the court of Charles the Second, which the Friends have put into practice on the Susquehannah, and armed by nature with abundant gifts of genius, CITY OF THE PLAINS. 115 patience, insight, eloquence, enthusiasm, he has played, and he is now playing, a singular and dra- matic part in this western country. He describes him- self to me as in sympathy a Quaker- Catholic: that is to say, as a man who embraces in his single per- son the extremes of religious thought the feeling of personality with the dogma of authority the laxest forms of liberty with the sternest canons of order-, an unusual blending of sentiments and sym- pathies, one not made in a day, not springing from an individual whimsy, but the result of much his- tory, of a long family tradition; and nowhere, per- haps, to be found in this generation except on the frontier-land which unites Quaker Pennsylvania with Catholic Delaware. Gilpin abounds in apparent con- tradictions. A Quaker, he is also a soldier a West Pointer and of singular distinction in his craft. He bore a prominent part in the Mexican war; was the youngest man in the army who attained the rank of lieutenant-colonel; and but for his re- signation, on moving out west, would have been the superior officer of Grant and Sherman. It is a jbappy circumstance for him that no call of duty made it necessary for him to hold prominent command against any section of his countrymen during the civil war. Gilpin's work is in another field, in the Great West, of which he is the champion and the idol ; and which he has given his mind to explore, to advertise, to settle, and to subdue. Under this man's sway, the city is changed, and is changing fast; yet, if I may believe the witnesses, the advent of a dozen English and American ladies, 8* 116 NEW AMERICA. who came out with their husbands, has done far more for Denver than the genius and the eloquence of William Gilpin. A lady is a power in this coun- try. From the day when a silk dress and a lace shawl were seen in Main Street, that thoroughfare became passably clean and quiet; oaths were less heard; knives were less frequently drawn; pistols were less frequently fired. None of these things have ceased; far, very far, is Denver yet from peace; but the young Norse gods have begun to feel rather ashamed of swearing in a lady's presence, and of drawing their knives before a lady's face. Slowly, but safely, the improvement has been brought about. At first, the ladies had a very bad time, as their idiom runs. They feared to associate with each other; every woman suspected her neigh- bour of being little better than she should be. Things are safer now; and I can testify, from ex- perience, that Denver has a very charming, though a very limited, society of the better sex. PRAIRIE JUSTICE. 117 CHAPTEK XII. , Prairie Justice. THE chief executive officer of this city is Robert Wilson, sheriff, auctioneer, and justice of the peace; though he would hardly be recognised in Colorado under such a description. As Quintus Horatius Flaccus, poet and good-fellow, is only known as Horace, so Eobert Wilson, sheriff and auctioneer, is only known as Bob, in polite society as Bob Wilson. The Sheriff, who is said, like our Judge Popham of immortal memory, to have been a gambler, if nothing worse, in his wild youth, is still a young-looking man of forty or forty-two; a square, strong-chested fellow, low in stature, with a head like the Olympian Jove's. The stories told in the Prairies of this man's daring make the blood freeze, the flesh creep, and the pulse gallop. To-day he came and sat with me for hours, talking of the city and the ter- ritory in which his fortunes are all bound up. One of his tales was that of his capture of three horse- stealers. According to the code in fashion here in Denver, murder is a comparatively slight offence. Until two or three years ago, assassination - incidental, not deliberate assassination was a crime of every day. At the door of some gambling-house and every tenth house in Main Street was a gambling- 118 NEW AMERICA. house, openly kept, with the stimulants of drinking, singing, and much worse it was a common thing to find a dead man in the streets each day-break. A fight had taken place over the roulette-table; pistols had been drawn-, and the fellow who was slowest with his weapon had gone down. No one thought of searching into the affray. A ruffian had been shot, and the city considered itself free of so much waste. Human life is here of no account; and what man likes to bring down upon himself the vengeance of a horde of reckless devils by seeking too parti- cularly into the cause of a fellow's death? A lady, whom I met in Denver, wife of an ex- mayor of that city, told me that when she first came out into the West, four or five years ago, there were sixty persons lying in the little graveyard, exclud- ing criminals, not one of whom had died a natural death. Exact enquiry told me this account was somewhat beyond the mark; but her statement showed the belief still current in the best houses; and, indeed, it was only a little beyond the truth. Men quarrel in the streets and fight, but no one dreams of going to the help of the weaker side. One night, when I was writing in my room, a pistol-shot exploded near my window, and, on looking out, I saw a man writhing on the ground. In a few mo- ments he was carried off by his comrades; no one followed his assailant; and I heard next day, that the assassin was not in custody, and that no one knew for certain where he was. Opposite my win- dow there is a well, at which two soldiers were drinking water late at night; an English gentleman, PRAIRIE JUSTICE. 119 standing on the balcony of the Planter's House, heard one soldier say to the other, "Look, there is a cobbler, bang at him!" on which his comrade raised his piece and fired. Poor Crispin jumped up into his shop and shut the door; he had a near escape with life, for the ball had gone through the boarding of his house, and lodged itself in the op- posite wall. Nothing was done to those two sol- diers; and every one to whom I expressed my sur- prise at such negligence on the part of their com- manding officers, marvelled at my surprise. Unless a ruffian is known to have killed half-a- dozen people, and to have got, as it were, murder on the brain, he is almost safe from trouble in these western plains. A notorious murderer lived near Central City; it was known that he had shot six or seven men; but no one thought of interfering with him on account of his crimes until he was taken red-handed in the very act. Some persons fancied he was heartily sorry for what he had done, and he himself, when tossing off cocktails with his rough companions, used to say he was sick of shed- ding blood. One day, on riding into Central City, he met a friend whom he invited to take a drink. The friend, not wishing to be seen any more in such bad com- pany, declined the offer, on which the ruffian drew his pistol in the public street, in the open day, and saying, with a comic swagger of reluctance , "Good God, can I never come into town without killing some one?" shot his friend through the heart. Seized by the indignant crowd, the callous ruffian 120 NEW AMERICA. had a stern trial, a short shrift, and a midnight escape up the famous cotton-tree in the city ditch. But with respect to theft, most of all the theft of horses , public opinion is far more strict than it is with respect to murder. Horse-stealing is always punished by death. Five good horses were one day missed from a corral in Denver; and on Wilson being consulted as to the probable thieves, the Sheriff's suspicions fell on three mining rowdies, gamblers and thieves, named Brownlee, Smith, and Carter, men who had recently come into the city from the mines and the mountain roads. As enquiry in the slums and grog-shops could not find these worthies, Wilson, feeling sure that they were the men he wanted, ordered his horse, and, after looking well at his revolver and bowie-knife, jumped into the saddle and turned towards the Platte road. The time was early spring, when the snow was melting and the water high. Coming to the river, he stript and crossed the rapids, holding his clothes and pistols above his head, and partly swimming his horse across the stream. Eiding on all day, all night, he came upon the thieves on a lonely prairie, one hun- dred and fifty miles from Denver, and five miles from the nearest ranch. Carter and Smith were each leading a horse, in addition to the one he rode; Brownlee rode alone, bringing up the rear. It was early day when he came up with them, and, as they did not know him by sight, he entered into conver- sation, chiefly with Brownlee, passing himself off with the robbers as a broken miner going home to the States; and riding with them from eight o'clock PRAIRIE JUSTICE. 121 until twelve, in the hope of meeting either the public stage, or some party of traders who could lend him help. But he looked in vain. At noon he saw that no assistance could be got that day, and feeling that he must do his perilous work alone, he suddenly changed his air and voice, and reining in his horse, said: "Gentlemen, we have gone far enough; we must turn back.' 7 "Who the h are you?" shouted Brownlee, drawing his weapon. "Bob Wilson," said the Sheriff, quietly; "come to fetch you back to Denver. You are accused of stealing three horses. Give up your arms, and you shall be fairly tried." "You go to h !" roared Brownlee, raising his pistol; but, before he could draw the trigger, a slug was in his brain, and he tumbled to the ground with the imprecation hot upon his lips. Smith and Carter, hearing the loud words behind them followed by the exploding pistol, turned round suddenly in their saddles and got ready to fire; but in the con- fusion Smith let drop his piece; and, in an eye- blink, Carter fell to the ground, dead as the dust upon which he lay. Smith, who had jumped down from his horse to get his pistol, now threw up his hands. "Come here," cried Wilson, to the surviving thief; "hold my horse; if you stir a limb, I fire; you see I am not likely to miss my mark." "You shoot very clean, sir," answered the trem- bling ruffian. 122 NEW AMERICA. "Now, mind me,' 7 said the Sheriff; "I shall take you and these horses back to Denver; if you have stolen them, so much the worse for you; if not, you are all square; any way you shall have a fair trial." Wilson then picked up the three pistols, all of them loaded and capped. "I hesitated for a mo- ment," he said to me, in this part of his tale, " whether to draw the charges; on second thought I resolved to keep them as they were, as no one could tell what might happen." Tying the three pistols in a handkerchief, and carefully re-loading his own re- volver, he then bade Smith get on one of the horses, to which he then made the fellow fast by ropes passed round his legs. Leaving the two dead men on the ground, and turning the horses loose to graze, "Wilson led his captive along the road as far back as the ranch. A French settler, with an English wife, lived at this prairie ranch, and on Wilson stating who he was, and what his prisoner was more than suspected of being, the brave couple entered into his plans. After lashing Smith to a post, and telling the woman to shoot him dead if he struggled to get free (an order which her husband said she would certainly carry out, should the need for it arise), the two men rode back to the scene of execution, buried the two bodies, recovered the four horses, and brought away many articles from the dead men's pockets, which might serve to identify them in evidence. Returning to the ranch, they found the woman on guard, and Smith in despair. In their absence, Smith had used all his arts of appeal upon PRAIRIE JUSTICE. 123 the woman; lie had appealed to her pity, to her vanity, to her avarice. At length she had been forced to tell him that she would hear no more, that if he spoke again she would fire into his mouth. Then he grew white and silent. Next day brought the Sheriff and his prisoner to Denver, when Smith had a short shrift and a violent escape up the his- torical tree. 124 NEW AMERICA. CHAPTER XIII. Sierra Madre. * FROM Denver City up to Bridgets Pass, the highest point of the Sierra Madre (Mother Crest, or saw-line), over which trapper and trader have worn a track, the ascent is easy as to gradients, though it may be most uneasy in the matter of ruts, creeks, sand and stones. So far a traveller finds but little difference between the mountains and the prairies, which are also rolling uplands, rising between Leaven- worth and Denver upwards of four thousand feet, the height of Snowdon above the sea. Yet Bridger's Pass is the water-parting of a great continent; the eastern slopes shedding their snow and rain towards the Atlantic Ocean, the western slopes towards the Pacific Ocean. For ninety miles the road runs quietly north of Denver, along the base of a lower range of moun- tains known as the Black Hills, in search of an open- ing through the towering wall of rock and snow. At Stonewall, near Virginia Dale, it finds a gorge, or canyon, as the people call it, leading into a pretty woodland district, full of springs and streamlets, in which the trout are so abundant you may catch them in a creel. The scenery is not yet wild and grand, though it is picturesque, from the strange rock formation and the brilliance of its body colour. The SIERRA MADRE. 125 moment you enter into the mountain land, you see why the Spaniards called it Colorado. The prevailing tint of rock, of soil, of tree (especially in the fall), is red. Between Virginia Dale and Willow Springs, the country lying south of our track may be called beautiful. The road runs high, commanding a sweep of many valleys, bright with welcome foliage, there- fore blessed with water-, broken by cols and ridges, with long dark intervals of space between; the whole landscape crowned in the distance by the mighty and irregular range from Long's Peak to Pike's Peak. This is a true Swiss scene; the hills being clothed with pine, the summits capped with snow; a scene as striking in its natural features as' the more famous view of the Oberland Alps from Berne. At Laramie we lose this mountain picture. Low mounds of earth and sand, covered with the wild sage, peopled by prairie dogs, coyotes, and owls, shut out the snow-line from our sight. Here and there along the track we pass the shoulder, we cross the summit, of a height which may be called a mountain (out of courtesy), such as Elk Mountain, the Medicine Bow Mountain, and the ridge of North Platte, before we descend upon Sage Creek and Pine Grove; but we see no peaks, we climb no alps; jog jog, trot trot, grind grind, we rumble in the light waggon over stones, over grass, over sand, across creeks and water-ruts, with a uniform misery, day after night, night after day, that would murder any man outright, from sheer ex- haustion of his animal spirits, were it not for the 126 NEW AMERICA. strong reaction caused by the ever-expected appearance of Ute, Cheyenne, and Sioux. The life is hard at its best, intolerable at its aver- age. Only twice in the night and day we are al- lowed to eat. The food is bad, the water worse, the cooking worst. Vegetables there are none. Milk, tea, butter, beef, mutton, are commonly wanting. Even the talismanic letters from New York are use- less in these high and desolate Passes through the sage-fields. If there were food, it would be sold to us; but, as a rule, there is simply none at all. Hot dough, which they call cake, you may have, though you will find it hard to eat, impossible to digest you who are not to the material and the method born, and who have been pampered and spoiled by the chefs in Pall Mall. No beer, no spirit, sometimes no salt, can be found. As a luxury, you may get dried elk and buffalo-flesh, seasoned with a dash of powder-, and for these horrid dainties you are charged a dollar and a half, in some places two dollars per meal. But if the life seems hard to us, who get through it in a dozen days and nights, what must it prove to the trapper, the teamster, the emigrant? Spite of its perils and privations, this mountain road is alive with trains of people going to and fro between the River and Salt Lake. Hundreds of men, thousands of oxen, mules, and horses, climb these desolate tracks-, bearing with them, in light mountain waggons built for the purpose, the produce of eastern fields and cities, green apples, dried corn, salt beef, flour, meal, potted fruits and meats, as well as SIERRA MADRE. 127 tea, tobacco, coffee, rice, sugar, and a multitude of dry goods, from caps and shoes to coffin-plates and shrouds, bearing them to the mining districts of Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Montana, where such things find a ready sale. The train-men march in bands for safety, and a train from Leavenworth to Salt Lake resembles in many ways the great caravan of commerce on a Syrian road. A trader on the river, at Omaha, in Nebraska, at Leavenworth, in Kansas, hears, or perhaps suspects, that some article, such as tea, cotton, fruits, it may be mo- lasses, tanned leather, is running short in the mountains, and that in a few weeks a demand for it is likely to spring up at high rates. Buying in a good market, he takes the risk of being 'wrong in his conjecture. With his one prime article of trade he combines a dozen minor articles; say, with a huge bulk of tea, a little cutlery, a little claret, a little quinine and other drugs, store of blankets and gauntlets, perhaps a thousand pairs of top-boots. He buys fifty or sixty light waggons, with a dozen oxen to each waggon; engages a train boss, or cap- tain, hires about a hundred men, packs up his goods, and sends the caravan off into the plains. No actuary in his senses would ensure the arrival of that train in Denver, in Salt Lake, in Virginia city. The journey is considered as an adventure. The men who go with it must be excellent shots, thoroughly well armed; but they are not expected to defend their cargo against the Indians; and should the red- skin plunderers show in force, the teamsters are allowed to cut the traces, mount on the fleetest mules, 128 NEW AMERICA. and fly to the nearest post or station, leaving their waggon, stock, and cargo, to be plundered as the Indians list. No man likes his poll to be scalped; and the teamster, with a wife and child, perhaps, lying in Omaha, in Leavenworth, loves to keep his hair untouched. Murder will happen in the best- conducted trains; but the bravest Western boy sets his life above a hundred chests of tea and a thousand sacks of flour. Some of these trains haul passengers along the road at the rate of fifty dollars a-head for the journey (in the stage it is two hundred and fifty) the passenger finding himself in food, herding with the teamsters, and cooking his own meals. The trip, when it is done at all, is made in about ninety days, from the River to Salt Lake; a journey of more than twelve hundred miles; with the city of Denver as a resting-place, six hundred miles from the starting-point and from the end. The average rate is fourteen or fifteen miles a-day; though some of the train-men will push through twenty miles on the plains. Four or five hours in the middle of the day they rest to let the cattle graze, and to cook their food; at night- fall they encamp near to fresh water, if possible in the vicinity of a little wood. They cor- ral the waggons; that is to say, they set them in the form of an ellipse, open only at one end, for safety; each waggon locked against its neighbour, overlapp- ing it by a third of the length, like the scales on plate armour; this ellipse being the form of defence SIERRA MADRE. 129 against Indian attack, which long experience in frontier warfare had proved to the old Mexican traders in these regions to be the most effective shield. When the waggons are corralled, and the oxen are turned loose to graze, the men begin to cut and break wood, the women and children (if there be any in the party) light the fires, fetch water from the spring or creek, boil the kettle, and bake the evening bread. Some of the young men, expert with the rifle, tramp across gully and creek in search of plover, prairie dog, and chicken; and on lucky days these hunters may chance to fall upon antelope and elk. Luck going with them, the evening closes with a feast. Others hunt for rattle-snakes, and kill them; also for stray coyotes and wolves, many of which, driven mad by hunger, infest the neighbour- hood of a camp. I saw a huge grey wolf shot within two yards of a waggon, which had been lifted from the wheels and set on the ground, and in which lay 'a sleeping child. When supper is done, the oxen, having had their mouthful of bunch-grass, are driven for safety into the corral of waggons; otherwise the morning light would haply find them miles away in an Indian camp. A song, a story, perhaps a dance, winds up the weary day. In warm weather, train folks sleep in the waggons, to escape the rattle-snakes and wolves. When the snow is deep in the gulley, when the wind comes sweeping down the ice, a wag- gon on wheels is too cold for a bed, and the train- men prefer a blanket on the ground, with a whisky- bottle for a pillow. Long before dawn they are up and about; yoking the cattle, hitching up the wag- New America. I. 9 130 NEW AMERICA. gons, swallowing their morning meal. Sunrise finds them plodding on the road. Sometimes the owner travels with his train; not often; for the boss can manage these unruly, drunken, quarrelling teamsters better than the actual owner of the cargo. If the rations should run short, if the whisky should turn out bad, if the waggons should break down, the boss can join chorus with the teamsters in swearing at his chief. A strong out- burst of abuse is said to do the men much good; and as the owner does not hear it, he is none the worse. When the chief is present, every man in the train has a complaint to make; so that time is lost by the way, and a spirit of insubordination shows itself in the camp. When anything goes wrong and every day, in such a country, some- thing must go wrong if the real master is not present, the boss can say, he cannot help it, they are all in one boat, and they must make the best of a bad job. In this way grumbling, drinking, fighting they get through the mountain-passes; to end their ninety days of stern privations by a week's debauchery, either in the secret slums of Salt Lake City, or in the solitude of some mountain ranch. The owner travels in the mail, more swiftly, not more pleasantly, than his servants, and is ready in Denver, in Salt Lake, in Virginia City, to receive his waggons; when he may sell the whole train, tea, drugs, hosiery, waggons, oxen, in a lump or lumps. The ranch-men are of two classes; (1), the enter- prising class, who go out into the mountains SIERRA MAD RE. 131 much as eastern farmers go into the back-woods to clear the ground, to grow a little corn, to feed a few sheep and kine; fighting the battle of life, on one side against reluctant nature, on the other side against hostile red-skins; living on bad food and bad water, in the hope of getting a first footing on the unoccupied soil, and laying the foundation of a for- tune for their sons and grandsons; (2), the more reckless class, who build a log-hut by the roadside, in the highway of teamster and emigrant, with a view of selling whisky and cordials to the passers- by, and even to the tipsy Cheyenne and Sioux, making in a brief season a fortune for themselves. Both classes lead a life of much peril and privation. Even more than the teamster and the emigrant, the ranch-man bears his life in the palm of his hand ; for every ruffian on the road who calls for drink, with a bowie-knife and a revolver in his belt, has the quick, quarrelsome spirit of the Western boy, and often wants whisky to drink when he has never a dollar in his pouch to pay for the delicious dram. But the chief peril comes to the ranch-man in the shape of Indians ; most of all , when a powerful tribe, like that of the Sioux, that of the Pawnees, sets out on the war-path. The red-skin loves whisky more than he loves either wife or child; in peace he will sell anything to obtain his darling poison; his papoose, his squaw, even his captive in war: but when a Sioux has put the red paint on his cheek, and slung the scalping-knife to his side, he no longer thinks of buying his dose of fire-water from the white man; he sweeps down upon the ranch, takes 9* 132 NEW AMERICA. it by force, and with it, not unfrequently, the life of its vendor. Yet the spirit of gain tempts the ranch-man to rebuild his burnt shed, to replenish his plundered store. If he lives through two or three seasons of successful trade in whisky and tobacco, he is rich. Paddy Blake, an Irishman, from Virginia city, keeps a ranch near the summit of Bridger's Pass, in a field which is the very model of desolation. He lives at Fort Laramie; by trade he is a suttler; but he finds it pay better to sell bad spirits to the teamsters at three dollars a bottle, and cake-tobacco for chewing at six dollars a pound, than to deal in decent stores among soldiers and civilians at the fort. A small log-hut contains his stock of poisons, which he vends to the passer-by, including Utes and Cheyennes, about four months in the year, while the roads are open and the snow is off the ground; tak- ing buffalo and beaver skins from the red men, dollars and kind (the kind too often stolen) from the whites. Along this mountain road, in every train, among the callous teamsters, among the raw emigrants, among the passing strangers, among the resident stockmen, there is one topic of conversation night and day, the Indians. Every red man moves in this region with the scalping-knife in his hand. Spottiswood, one of the smart agents of the Over- land mail, told me that he saw a white man taken by the Sioux from his waggon, and burnt to death on a pile of bacon. The antelope-hunter of Virginia SIERRA MADRE. 133 Dale was killed only a few weeks ago. Between Elk Mountain and Sulphur Springs a train was stopped by Cheyennes, and eighteen men, women, and children, were massacred and mutilated. Two young girls were carried off, and, after being much abused by the Indians, were sent into Fort Laramie, and exchanged for sacks of flour from the quarter- master's store. Near the top of the first pass stands a lonely mail-station , called, by a pious and permissible fic- tion, Pine Grove; two stockmen occupy the log- hut; one of them, named Jesse Ewing, is the hero of a tale more striking than many a deed that has earned the Victoria Cross. In the spring of this year a party of Sioux, then out on the war-path, came to Pine Grove, and by accident found Jesse there alone. As usual, they made free with what was not their own; ate up the bread and coffee, the dried elk, and the salt bacon; and having gorged their stomachs, they told Jesse to light a big fire, as they meant to roast him alive. Burning their captives is a common pastime with the Sioux; not their Pawnee enemies only, but the Swaps (as they call the Yengees) or Pale-faces also. Up to this time Jesse had contrived to keep his knife and his revolver hidden in his clothes, and neither of these weapons being seen, the Indians supposed that he was quite unarmed and at their mercy. At first, he refused to light a fire, knowing they would carry out their threat; and on their say- ing they would set their squaws to skin him if he 134 NEW AMERICA. did not swiftly obey their chief, he said he could not make a big fire unless* he were allowed to fetch straw and faggots from the stable. The fact being obvious to the Sioux, he was told to go and fetch them, two of the Indians going out into the night to see him do it; one entering the stable with him, the second standing at the door on guard. Quick as thought, his knife was in the side of the red man near him; a second later a slug was in the brain of the one outside. The firing brought out all the yelping band; but Jesse, swift as an antelope, leaped into a creek, got under some trees and stones, in a place which he knew very well, and lay there under cover, still as the dead, while the Sioux, infuriated by their sudden loss, kept up for hours around his hiding-place their wild and horrible yep, yep. The night was intensely cold; he had no shoes; no coat: worse than all else, the snow began to fall, so that he could not stir without leaving traces of his feet along the ground. Happily for him, snow slobbers and numbs an Indian's feet as quickly as it chills a Yengee's. He could hear the Sioux crying out against the cold; after a few hours he found that his enemies were turning their faces eastward. Slowly, the noise of feet and voices bore away; the Indians taking the path towards Sage Creek; and when the air was a little still, Jesse stole from his covert, and ran for his life to the home-station at Sulphur Springs, where he arrived at daybreak, and obtained from his comrades of the road the welcome relief of food and fire. This brave boy has come back to Pine Grove; SIERRA MADRE. 135 a fact which I mention with regret, since the Indians are again menacing the road; and if they come down in strength, Jesse will be marked in their score of vengeance as one of the first to fall. 136 NEW AMERICA. CHAPTER XIV. Bitter Creek. THE Camp of Peaks, composing the Sierra Madre, having their crown and centre in Fremont's Peak, three hundred feet above the height of Monte Rosa, shed from their snowy sides three water-lines ; on the eastern side, towards the Mississippi and the Atlantic Ocean; on the western side, towards the Columbia river and the Pacific Ocean; on the southern side, towards the Colorado river and the Gulf of California. South-westward of this Peak rises the Wasatch chain, shutting out from these systems of rain-flow the de- pression known as the Valley of Utah and the Great Salt Lake. Between the two great mountain chains of the Sierra Madre and the Wasatch lies the Bitter Creek country, one of the most sterile spots on the surface of this earth. This wild Sahara, measuring it from Sulphur Springs to Green river; is one hundred and thirty- five miles in width. It is a region of sand and stones, without a tree, without a shrub, without a spring of fresh water. Bones of elk and antelope, of horse and bullock, strew the ground. Here and there, more thickly than elsewhere, you come upon a human grave; each of which has a story known to the mountaineers. This stone is the memorial of five stock-men who were murdered by the Sioux. BITTER CREEK. 137 Yon pole marks the resting-place of a young emigrant girl, who died on her way to the Promised Land. That tree is the gallows of a wretch , who was hung by- his companions in a drunken brawl. The whole track is marked by skeletons and tragedies; and visible nature is in sternest harmony with the work of man. A little wild sage grows here and there, scattered in lonely bunches in the midst of a weak and stunted grass. The sun-flower all but disap- pears, attaining, where it grows at all, no more than the size of a common daisy. The hills are low, and of a dirty yellow tint. A fine white film of soda spots the landscape, here in broad fields, there in bright patches, which the unused eye mistakes for frost and snow. When the creek, which lends its bitter name to the valley, is full of water, as in early summer, while the ice is melting, the taste of that water, though nauseous, may be borne-, but when the creek runs dry, in the later summer and the fall, it is utterly abominable to man and beast; rank poison, which inflames the bowels and corrupts the blood. Yet men must drink it, or they die of thirst ; cattle must drink it, or they will die of thirst. The soil is very heavy, the road is very bad. A train can hardly cross this Bitter Creek country under a week, and many of the emigrant parties have to endure its stern privations ten or twelve days. Oxen cannot pull through the heavy sand, when from scanty food and poisonous drink their strength has begun to fail. Some fall by the way, and cannot be induced to rise; some simply stagger, and refuse to tug their chains. The whip curls 138 NEW AMERICA. round their backs in vain; there is nothing for a teamster to do but draw the yoke and let the poor creatures drop into the rear, where the wolves and ravens put an end to their miseries. The path is strewn with skeletons of ox and mule. Again and again we meet with trains in the Bitter Creek country, in which a third of the oxen are in hospital ; that is to say, have been relieved from their labour, thrown on the flank to graze, or left behind on the chance of their recovery, perhaps in care of a lad. When many animals of a stock fall sick, the strain put on the healthy beasts becomes severe, and the whole caravan, unable to go forward, may have to camp for a week of rest in most unhealthy ground. Lying between the two great ridges of the Rocky Mountains, the Bitter Creek country, a valley about the average height of Mons Pilatus above the sea, is, of course, intensely cold. The saying of the herds- men is, that winter ends with July, and begins with August. Many of the mules and oxen die of frost, especially in the fall, when the burning sun of noon is suddenly exchanged for the icy winds of mid- night. Frost comes upon the cattle unawares, with a soft seductive sense of comfort, so that they seem to bend their knees and close their eyes in perfect health; yet, when the morning dawns, it is seen that they will never rise again from their bed of sleep. It is much the same with men; who often lie down in their rugs and skins on the ground, a little numb, perhaps, in the feet; not miserably so, their toes being only just touched with the chill of ice ; yet the more knowing hands among them feel that they will BITTER CREEK. 139 never find life and use in those feet again. I heard of one train captain , who , being careful of his men and teams, had put them up for the night, near Black Buttes, in a time of trouble with the Sioux; and who, being well clothed and mounted, had under- taken, in relief of another, to act as their sentinel and guard. All night he sat his pony in the cold; shivering a little, dozing a little; but on the rustling of a leaf, awake, alert, and watchful. When daylight came, and the camp began to stir, he shouted to one of his drivers , and would have drawn his foot from the leather rest, which serves the mountaineer in- stead of a stirrup; but his leg was stiff, and would not obey his will. In his surprise, he tried to raise the other leg, but the muscles once more' refused to answer. When he was lifted down from the saddle, his legs were found to have been frozen to the knee; and after three days' agony he expired. Nothing is more usual than to see men on the prairies and in the mountains who have lost either toes or fingers, bitten away by frost. Hardly less trying to the mountaineers than frost and snow, are the sudden storms which rage and howl through these lofty plains. On my return from Salt Lake City across the Bitter Creek, a storm of snow, of sleet and hail, swept down upon us, right in our front, hitting us in the face like shot, and soaking us suddenly to the skin. At first we met it bravely, keeping our horses to the fore, and making a little progress, even in the teeth of this riotous squall. But the horses soon gave in. Ter- rified by the roaring wind, chilled by the smiting 140 NEW AMERICA. hail, they stood stone still; dogged, stolid, passive, utterly indifferent to the driver's voice and the driver's whip. Taught by his long experience, the driver knew when the brutes must have their way; he suddenly wheeled round, as though he was about to return, and setting the waggon to the fore, put his team under its lee, with their hindquarters only exposed to the pelting storm. In this position we remained three hours, until the swirl and tumult had gone by; after which we got down from the waggon, shook ourselves dry in the cold night air, and with the help of a little cognac and tobacco (taken as medicine) we resumed our journey. A train of emigrants, which had to draw up near us, and await the tempest's passage, was not so lucky in arrangement as ourselves. The men had stopped their caravan as soon as the mules and horses had refused to move; but instead of bracing their frightened animals closer to the waggons, they had loosened their bands and suffered them to face the elements as they pleased. Some of them could not stand this freedom from the trace and curb. For a moment they stood still; they sniffed the air; they shook with panic; then, turning their faces from the wind, they pawed the wet ground, bent down their heads, and went off madly into space; a regular stampede, in the course of which many of the poor creatures would be sure to drop down dead from terror and exhaustion. We could not see the end of our neighbours' troubles, for the night came down between us and their camp, and on the instant slackening of the wind, we wheeled the waggon BITTER CREEK. 141 round, and trotted on our way. The emigrants would have to wait for dawn, to commence their search for the wandering mules and horses; some they would find in the nearer creeks, where they happened to first shelter from the driving storm; others they would have to follow over ridge and gully, many a long mile. Once in motion, with the hail and wind beating heavily on their backs, horses will never stop; will climb over mountains, rush into rivers, break through underwood, until the violence of nature has spent itself out. Then they will stand and shiver, perhaps droop and die. Bullocks, like mules and horses, suffer from these storm-frights, and the experienced teamster of the plains will yoke them together, and lash them to the waggons whenever he sees the sign of a tempest coming on. Herding in a corral, hearing the voices of their drivers, they are less alarmed than when, loose and alone, they break into a stampede; yet even in a corral, with the song of the teamster in their ears, they shake and moan, lie down on the earth and cry, and not unfrequently die of fright. In the midst of these terrors and confusions in a train when the horses are either strayed or sick, when the boss is busy with his stock, when the teamsters are exhausted by fatigue and hunger - the road-agents generally fall on the corral and find it an easy prey. Road-agent is the name applied in the mountains to a ruffian who has given up honest work in the store, in the mine, in the ranch, for the perils and profits of the highway. Many ruined traders, broken I 142 NEW AMERICA. gamblers, unsuccessful diggers, take to the road, plundering trains of their goods, robbing emigrants of their mules, and sometimes venturing to attack the mail. They are all well armed, some of them are certain shots. No fear of man, and no respect for woman, restrain these plunderers from committing the most atrocious crimes. Their hands are raised against every one who may be expected to have a dollar in his purse. Every law which they can break, they have already broken; every outrage which they can effect, they have probably effected; so tha*t their dregs of life are already due to justice; and nothing they can do will add to the load of guilt which they already bear. These plunderers, who roam about the tracks in bands of three or five, of ten or twenty, sometimes of thirty or forty, are far more terrible to the merchant and the emigrant than either Sioux or Ute. The Sioux is but a savage, whom the white man has a chance of daunt- ing by his pride, of deceiving by his craft; but his brother on the road, himself perhaps a trader, a train-man in his happier days, can see through every wile, and measure with a glance both his weakness and his strength. Many men, known to have been road-agents, suspected of being still connected with the bands, are at large; this man keeping a grog-shop, that man living in a ranch, the other man driving the mail. In this free western country you cannot ask many questions as to character. A steady wrist, a quick eye, a prompt invention, are of more importance in a servant than the very best testimonials from his BITTER CREEK. 143 recent place. Life is too rough for the nicer rules to come into play. I saw a fellow in Denver whose name is as well known in Colorado as that of Dick Turpin in Yorkshire. He is said to have murdered half-a-dozen men; he is free to come and go, to buy and sell; no one molests him; fear of his companions, and of men who live by crimes like his, being strong enough to daunt, for a time, even the Vigilance Committee and their daring Sheriff. On my return through the Bitter Creek country, I had the honour of riding in the mountain waggon with an old road- agent, who laughed and joked over his exploits, caring not a jot for either sheriff or judge. One of his stories ran as follows. He and a wretch like himself, being out on the road, had been rather lucky , and having got a thousand dollars in green- backs in their pouch, they were making for Denver city, where they hoped to enjoy their plunder, when they saw in the distance five mounted men, whom my companion said he knew at once to be part of a gang in which he had formerly served on terms of share and share. "We are lost now," he said to his companion in crime; "these men will rob us of our greenbacks, possibly shoot us into the bargain, so as not to leave a witness of their deed alive." "We shall see," replied his more crafty friend. "I know them, and have been out with them; we must get over them as broken-down wretches." Smearing themselves with dirt, dragging a long face, and looking hungry and miserable, they met the five horsemen with the cry, "Give us five dollars, captain; we are broken down and trying to get on 144 NEW AMERICA. to Denver, where we'll find some friends; give us five dollars!" This cry of distress went straight to the highwayman's heart. He tossed my companion the greenbacks, telling him to be mum, and then dashed on in front of his more suspicious comrades. Not long ag