Joe was made the chief of scouts at once; but honors did not sit easily upon him, for in celebrating his advancement he made night hideous with his yells. The scout gets drunk just as he does everything else—with all his might. Living all his life beyond the region of law and its enforcement; being a perfect shot, he is able, usually, to carry out his spree according to his own wishes. He tells the man who might express a wish for a peaceful, quiet night that he had better not tackle him, and emphasizes his remark by drawing out of the small arsenal that encircles his body a pistol, which, pointed accurately, renders the average man quick to say, "It's of no consequence", and retire. I do not even like to say that the scouts were ever drunk, for they were profoundly sober when they went off on their perilous journeys with despatches; and when I think how all our lives were in their hands when they were sent for succor, and how often they took messages across country to put troops or settlements on their guard, or of a hundred other daring deeds of theirs, I prefer to remember only the faithful discharge of duty, not the carousal that sometimes followed the reaction caused by overstrained nerves and the relief from hours and days of impending death.
Anticipating a little, I remember that California Joe was selected for the most important scouting duty of the winter, which was nothing less than the transmission of the despatch announcing the success of the battle of the Washita. The command was then far away from Camp Supply; it was midwinter, and the Indians were thoroughly aroused and on guard. It was not known how great the distance was that he must traverse, but the troops had taken four days to accomplish it. Joe was asked how many scouts he would like to take, and after going off to deliberate, returned, with the reply that he "didn't want no more ner his pardner, fur in this 'ere bizness more is made by dodgin' and runnin' than by fightin'." At dark he started, without giving the slightest evidence that he regarded the perilous undertaking as anything more than a commonplace occurrence.
One peculiarity of these men was their evident inability to feel surprise; the most extraordinary occurrences made so little impression upon them that it would seem as if they must have had a previous existence, and become familiar in another life with the strange events which made us gasp with astonishment. How often I have heard the officers refer to the variety these men made in the tedium of the march, by their stories of adventure, their wit, and their fearless and original expression of views! It was conceded that they "drew a long bow" sometimes, but the tales of their own lives were startling enough without the least necessity for exaggeration.
One story from the mines was told me, and may have lost nothing in the telling. An Irishman who was pretty drunk fell into a shaft sixty-five feet deep. He picked himself up unhurt, but partially sobered, and seeing a passage leading into the open air, he made his way out to the side of the mountain. Then he walked up till he reached the shaft, and looking down into its depths, was heard to say, "Be gorry, and I'm thinking it would kill me if I was to fall down there agin."
The scouts and frontiersmen were not slow to express their opinion on the few women they encountered, and a tale was told of a family consisting of a mother and several strapping daughters who lived in a cabin on the route over which cattle were driven to market. The "gals", as the Western man terms them, took care of some cows, and the narrator of the story stopped there to get milk. As he sat near the fire smoking, the rawboned, shrivelled old mother bent over the fireplace puffing at a clay pipe, perfectly stolid and silent, until one girl came in and silently stood at the fire trying to dry her homespun dress. Without raising herself, and in a drawling tone, the mother said, presently, "Sal, there's a coal under you fut." In no more animated tone and without even moving, her offspring replied, "Which fut, mammy?" The girl had run barefoot all her life over the shale and rough ground of that country, and the red-hot coal was some time in making its way through the hard surface to a tissue that had any sensitiveness.
The widow of a miner, who kept boarders, was also on the scant list of female acquaintances of one of the frontiersmen, who describes a person called the "bouncer", who seems to be a well-recognized functionary in such establishments. He is always big and strong, and his duties consist in bringing to time people who neglect to pay their bill, and for this service he is boarded without charge. An Eastern man, a "tenderfoot", on one occasion asked some one to pass the gravy, whereupon the bouncer placed his pistol on the table and quietly remarked, "Any man as calls sop gravy has got to eat dust or 'pologize."
At that time we all returned to civilization with a goodly collection of frontier stories that had not found their way into the omnivorous newspaper, and our talk was full of allusions to jokes among ourselves, or to portions of these way-side tales that we had appropriated, because they fitted into our daily life so well. We believed, and there was no reason why we should doubt it, that the amusing or venturesome stories of these men were their own experiences, and I need not dwell upon the zest it gives to the listener when the hero of a tale is present as he tells it.
Another relief to the weariness of a march was hunting game, which was so plentiful that no one need run the risk of straying far from the command in search of it. The wild turkeys were the greatest treat of all, that winter, and there were so many of them that the soldiers' messes had all they wanted while the command remained in the locality they frequented. A former officer of General Sheridan's staff has been only recently reminding me of what a feast they were. In the vicinity of the Antelope Hills the trees were black with these wild-fowl.
One of the officers afforded great amusement at the time, and gave opportunity for many a sly allusion during the winter because of an attack of "buck fever." At sight of a tree weighed down to the ends of the branches with turkeys, he became incapable of loading, to say nothing of firing, his gun; he could do nothing but lie down, great strong man as he was, completely overcome with excitement. At one point where General Sheridan and his staff came upon an immense number of turkeys, they sent videttes on the neighboring hills to keep watch for Indians, and then began to shoot the fowls. Between half-past five and half-past seven they killed sixty-three with rifles. The place where they first came upon this game is now marked on the map as "Sheridan's Roost." This officer remembers to have seen General Custer cut the head from a turkey with a Spencer repeating rifle at two hundred yards. The poor soldiers, armed only with their short-range carbines, of course saw many a shot go foul, but if they happened to be the selected orderlies of the officers they were often permitted to use the rifle, and in a case where an officer had two, the soldier riding behind his commanding officer proudly carried the second best. I know that when General Custer and his orderly returned from a hunt, their eyes like coals, so brilliant were they, and with every evidence of suppressed excitement, yet neither, as is the custom of the army, speaking a word, I used to accuse the commanding officer of only waiting to get beyond the first bluff that separated him from the camp before he forgot to be military, and fell to talking with the enlisted man. There is so much in common among enthusiastic sportsmen!
The soldiers knew how to make the best of their short-range guns, and many of them became such accurate marksmen that they could select the particular part to be hit, and not tear the game into shreds with their large bullets. The best shots in a company were allowed to leave the column and bring in game for the rest. At night, when the troops were bivouacked, the fires lighted for the soldiers' suppers, the men hovered around the coming dinner, rejoicing in its savory smells, suggesting to the company cook their ideas of how game should be prepared, and calling out triumphantly to any neighboring mess whose hunters had not been so fortunate as their own. Think what it must have been