horses, and after dinner I rode them into Fort Laramie, a distance of ten miles from Bordeaux Ranch. When I got into Laramie I got good quarters for my men, saw them all well established, and they started in eating and sleeping, and getting rested. I went around to the doctor and he took my case. He began feeding me with quinine and whisky, and cured my cold, from which I fully recovered in a couple of days, although I was up and around all of the time. I put in most of my time at headquarters with Major Woods (afterwards of Ottumwa, Iowa), who was still commander of the post, and in the evening we all gathered at the sutler store. Williams told me that he would go back with me in less than a week.
While at Fort Laramie I ran across my new friend Bridger, and in conversation with him there we talked a great deal about the country, and the Indians, and he told me over again his Buffalo Dam story, and his Diamond Mountain story, and I recognized the fact that he told them verbatim as he told them before. That is to say, that he had told each story so often that he had got it into language form, and told it literally alike. He had probably told them so often that he got to believing them himself.
There were among the soldiers at Fort Laramie several very fine voices, and they had organized a glee club who were accompanied by musicians. And they were in the habit of going around and serenading various officers, and places, and among others the sutler store. There was an old ordnance sergeant at the post who was a sort of permanent detail. He was one of those who had been left over from the regular army, a perfect martinet, knew everything which there was to be known about the details of post service, and he looked after the ordnance and ordnance stores. I recognized a piece which I had heard sung two or three times before, and when I heard it this last time the old ordnance sergeant asked me if I knew what that was; when I told him, No, he said that it was the favorite piece of General Albert Sidney Johnston. He said that on the Salt Lake campaign, before the Civil War, Albert Sidney Johnston had a headquarters brass band, and that he used to ask them every night to play that piece of music. It was a rather nice piece, pleasant and easy to learn, and the refrain to it when sung, at least all I remember of the refrain, was:
'Ever through life's campaign I'll be a soldier still.'
The ordnance sergeant used to describe Albert Sidney Johnston in very kind terms as a melancholy man of great genius and ability, apparently cramped by his jurisdiction and command, bigger than the flower-pot in which he was growing, devoted to duty, and, in matters outside of duty, very orderly and very kindly. He arrived at considerable distinction in the Confederate army, and had been killed in battle at the time when the sergeant had told me of this, his favorite piece of music. I had heard that piece of music down at Fort Kearney. I have never heard it since I left Fort Laramie.
Chapter XXV.
Jules Coffey and the Jacks – Snake Fight – Indian Fight – October 29, 1864 – Sam Dion – The Indian Baby – Camp Shuman – The 'Simple Instance' – 53-mile Ride – The Snow-storm – The Mormon Train – The Black-tailed Dear – Sergeant Lippincott – Stephenson and the Wolf – Venison – Arrival at Lodgepole
On this visit to Laramie was the last I ever heard or saw of Jules Coffey. As stated before, Jules had a great deal of superstition about holding jacks while playing cards. He thought they were his lucky card. Happening in the back room of the sutler store where an almost continuous game of poker was going on, I saw Jules betting ferociously upon a poker hand. He said he would never lay it down, but he finally did. It consisted of three jacks, and Jules was beaten. His superstition had, in the language of the place, 'busted him.'
There were a couple of civilians in the employ of the Government, or who had dropped in the post some time before, who were gathering snakes for the Smithsonian Institution. There was a great deal said about the great quantity of snakes that could be found around in the rocky ledges of that country. A great many stories were told about the Indians eating them, and about the scientific way of capturing them. It seems that the Indian women would go out and hunt for them, but had to be very careful in capturing the snake so that the snake would not bite itself, and poison its own meat. The Indian women with a long forked stick would try to pin the snake down close to its head so that it could not bite itself. The trappers said that a rattlesnake was good to eat, and worth catching, providing it did not bite itself. One evening one of these men in the snake business asked me to go around and look at some snakes he had in a box. He had got a musket-box which was made long, to hold a musket, but was not of very much interior capacity, and was heavily built. On one of these boxes they had fixed a heavy double glass top, and the snakes had been fastened in so that it wasn't expected that they could be fed or taken care of. The man said the snakes didn't need it. In this box were coiled, one at each end, two monstrous rattlesnakes, each one as long as the musket-box, and they were there motionless, looking at each other. The next day I was called to go and see the box again. The two snakes had coiled themselves around each other like strands of a rope from head to tail, except that the heads and necks were free. These were bent around looking at each other, and formed a picture not unlike the medical symbol of a caduceus. Just before I left Fort Laramie I was called again to look into the box. One of the snakes was dead, and the other was coiled loosely up in the end of the box, drooping as if hardly alive. The whole thing left me a most ghastly memory; one had strangled and killed the other.
While at Laramie on this trip a beef was killed, and the Indian women came and carried off all of the entrails. There was one sight which attracted my attention: an old Indian woman with two or three children around her was feeding them the raw stuff. She took the smaller entrails, stripped out their contents and cut them up into mouthfuls, then punctured the gall-duct, and, dipping the point of the knife into it, put a drop of gall onto each mouthful as if it were Worcestershire sauce. It was raw, with a flavor of the bitter. The children seemed to enjoy it very much; it was Charlotte Russe for them. I was told that the Indians ate up all of the entrails of the beeves that were killed there at Laramie, at least during the time when there were many Indians at the squaw camp. I should have considered this revolting if it had not been for the happy, cheerful way in which the little Indians devoured this stuff, and shouted for more. And the old Indian woman seemed to be proud and happy to feed the little creatures so well.
During my comments upon this in a talk with Bridger, he said: 'It's all right. They like it, and it's all right. I have cleaned up that kind of stuff and eaten it myself, when I had to. The Injuns haven't got the same kind of tasting apparatus we have; their 'taster' is different from a white man's. Now, here is a band of Injuns that want to go off on a horse-stealing expedition, each one of them riding a spare pony. They whistle up their dogs, and start off. The dogs can keep up with the horses, and when they camp, the horses can eat grass, and the Injuns eat the dogs. That is the reason they don't have to have any commissary wagons. They don't have to have any corn for their horses, nor any bacon and hard-tack, and that is the reason that they can always run away from our people, and we never can chase them down on one of these raids, and catch them, unless we can travel like they do. They will swap horses every hour or so, and ride all the time. If they did not have women and children to look after, they would never be caught. But when you go to chasing them with their women and children, the women and children die off pretty fast, and after a while you come up with them; they are at your mercy.'
Bridger also said that the Indians believed that like parts of the animal nourished like parts of the man, hence they ate all there was of the animal. When any organ of an Indian was sick he would eat the corresponding organs of animals and game for a cure. He told many revolting stories concerning this belief.* [*NOTE: Since the foregoing was set in type an article has appeared concerning Bridger, in a Kansas City newspaper, which I will copy as an appendix hereto.]
While at Fort Laramie Lieutenant Williams was constantly engaged in taking affidavits of enlisted men and citizens as to some facts concerning which I never found out. Williams was very secretive. Rumor had it that there had been some misconduct on the part of quartermasters and commissaries at the post, and that Williams, as Provost Marshal of the district, had made up his mind to investigate. He swore all of the witnesses, when he got through, never to divulge what they had testified to until called upon by the court; so it was not very easy to know what he was at, although Williams about a year afterward incidentally remarked that his trip up to Fort Laramie resulted in the cashiering of several officers. I had a very pleasant visit again with Colonel Collins of the Eleventh Ohio Cavalry, and he again expressed his wish to lose me out on the desert prairie with nothing but a little salt and see how I would get along. This was one of his favorite remarks.
There came word at the post that an empty Mormon train with quite a lot of extra men, and seventeen wagons drawn by mules, was coming down, bound for Omaha, to load up with goods to be brought back in the spring.
