These Mormons traveled through the Indian country more safely than if they had been Indians themselves. I suggested that as the Mormon train was traveling light, they be impressed into service, and that I be permitted to load them near Court House Rock with pine timber for building purposes at Julesburg. This seemed to meet approval, and Colonel Collins took it up over the telegraph with General Mitchell, commanding at Fort Kearney, who approved the plan. The train came along; we equipped it with axes, a few picks and shovels to make roads with, a small supply of provisions, and passing through Fort Laramie it went on down the road. I expected to overtake them on the route, which I did at Mud Springs. Lieutenant Williams wanted to start October 29th in the afternoon, and so we went on down with him ten miles to Bordeaux Ranch and camped there, so as to get a good start the next morning. At Bordeaux Ranch I met with a frontiersman whom I had heard considerable of, and whom I had met once before, by the name of Sam Dion. He was one of the pioneer Frenchmen of the period, a jolly, royal, generous fellow who cared for nothing particularly, was happy everywhere, and whom the very fact of existence filled with exuberance and joy. He gave me a beautiful Indian-tanned beaver-skin, one of the largest and prettiest I ever had seen. A beaver-skin has two classes of hair. One is a coarse hair which sheds water, and the other is a fine hair which is intended for warmth. Dion had a way of taking a sharp razor, running it over a beaver-skin, and cutting out the coarse hair without at all injuring the fine hair, so that the skin which he gave me was as beautiful a piece of fur as I ever saw. I afterwards made it into a collar and cape for my big blue military overcoat, and wore it all through the service and long afterward. At Bordeaux we met Captain Shuman and First Sergeant George Marsh, going up to Fort Laramie for supplies with a small escort. I was glad to meet 'Shad-blow' again, and we sat up talking over the invasion of Arkansas.
There rode with us from Fort Laramie an officer of the Eleventh Ohio, whose name I will not here mention, as he afterwards rose to considerable distinction in civil life. He had been stationed at Fort Laramie, and had been ordered to Leavenworth. Coming on down to Bordeaux Ranch he every once in a while took a nip from his canteen, and said that he felt bad, and hated to go from Fort Laramie and hated to stay there; that he had received a very excellent detail from the general commanding the department, and was going away from Fort Laramie, never to see it again. He went on in a somewhat melancholy strain all the way down, and took but little observation of the scenery on the route. After we had got down to Bordeaux Ranch, and had supper, he took me one side and told me his story. He said: 'I came away from Fort Laramie and I did not act right. I have got an Indian baby up in that squaw camp, and I have got to go back and tell the baby's mother that I am never going to see her again, and it is going to raise Cain. I dreaded it, and I was too cowardly to go and tell her before I left. Now I will never see her again, nor will I ever see the baby again. I am going to get onto my horse and ride back there, and then I will be here in the morning ready to go on with you down the road.' I told him that he was taking a good deal of a chance to be riding at night along that road, not knowing whom he would meet, and he said that he did not care; that he could get back there to Fort Laramie, kiss the baby good-by, and be on hand in the morning. He quickly saddled up, and off he went through the darkness as swift as his horse could carry him. The next morning when we were ready to start he turned up all right, and we went on down. I asked him if he had much trouble on the trip, and he said that he had a whole lot of it. He said it was a heart-breaking sort of thing, but that it was now over; that he had made up his mind to it, and he would never be back again, and that the whole thing was now ended. He kept taking nips from his canteen all day, but never became talkative or effusive, and although I was with him off and on for quite a while after that, he never again referred to the circumstance.
We left Bordeaux ranch at six o'clock on the morning of October 30, 1864, and rode forty-three miles to Camp Shuman, now called 'Camp Mitchell,' near Scott's Bluffs, as before stated. Captain Shuman had named it after General Mitchell. We all slept on the dirt floor in the headquarters room at Camp Mitchell that night. Lieutenant Williams never drank anything. He was one of the few officers I ever saw who were total abstainers. He and I slept under the same blanket on the floor. The room was about fifteen feet square, and Lieutenant Boyd, who was the Second Lieutenant, slept on the floor near us. Captain Shuman, as stated, had gone to Fort Laramie. Lieutenant Ellsworth commanded the post, and Lieutenant Boyd the company. This was a technical arrangement. There must always be a post commander although there is only a company present at the post, so that Lieutenant Boyd commanded all the men at the post as 'Company Commander,' and Lieutenant Ellsworth commanded all the men at the post as 'Post Commander.' While we were lying on the floor Boyd every once in a while got up and went to the corner of the room. We ascertained in a little while that he was going into Captain Shuman's box of 'St. Croix Rum Punch.' After a while Boyd got gloriously drunk, all by his lone self. He never offered us anything, but just filled up. Finally he got us up and wanted to tell us a 'simple instance.' What he meant was 'a simple incident,' but he was so full that he could not get his words straight, and he would pull at us and at the blankets over us and have us listen to his 'simple instance.' His 'simple instance' was how he and Captain Shuman had recently had a fight, and he had 'knocked Captain Shuman just twenty feet.' It was not an inch more or less. He had measured and it was just even twenty feet; and after he had told it all over and we had dropped off into a doze he would wake us up again to relate this 'simple instance,' and tell it all over again. By one o'clock in the morning Lieutenant Williams got a little bit tired of the 'simple instance,' and finally Boyd dropped off to sleep. The next morning Lieutenant Williams took some affidavits at the post, and among others the affidavit of Lieutenant Boyd about his 'simple instance,' and the result was that Boyd got dismissed from service for striking a superior officer and for drunkenness, and my old acquaintance 'Shad-blow' got to be Second Lieutenant.
The ride of forty-three miles the day before had very much quieted down our horses; in the morning a storm came up, and the wind, blowing from the northeast, began to beat the snow into our faces. It was a very unpleasant day, and after a while it became positively distressing. Williams crept into the ambulance, and in its secure shelter ordered the driver to whip up, and then ordered me to keep up with the escort. The result was that we made fifty-three miles that day against the storm, and the men and horses were nearly used up.
At Mud Springs, on the evening of October 31, 1864, we found the Mormon train camped, together with eight wagons drawn by nineteen yoke of oxen belonging to Alexander Noble, who had come down a little while before with an escort, having hauled some stuff up to Fort Laramie. Noble's wagons were in bad condition, and so were his oxen. I pressed them all in; two of the Mormon wagons had to be loaded up with blankets and stuff which the train was carrying, and one of Noble's wagons was too weak to hold up a load of logs. It had snowed and hailed all day, the wind was blowing hard, skits of snow were coming all night, and the weather was growing colder. On the morning of November 1st we made a road and got the wagons and stock several miles up to where the trees were, and as we had plenty of help we cut the trees as long as the wagons could hold them, loaded them up as far as we dared, then put the wagon-boxes and all on top of the load of logs, tied down or chained them on, and let the wagons start down to Mud Springs. We cut only small, straight trees that were easily handled. No sign of Indians was seen anywhere. On November 2, 1864, we finished the loading of the wagons and sent them all, except a weak one, on down to Mud Springs. My squad of men was camped up on the north side of Lawrence's Fork, in a very nice little grove that stood about forty feet above the stream and formed a sort of shelf, above which, back of us, rose the high ragged edges of the plateau. It was a beautiful little camping-place, and was up three or four miles above Court House Rock. All this time it had been snowing. And as the snow fell upon the plateau the wind blew it down onto our camp, and it began to get deeper and deeper. We had run out of provisions and had borrowed some from the Mormon train, that really did not have much to spare; we had divided with the men on Noble's train because they had only enough to get them to Julesburg. The result was that we were short of provisions all around.
The snow kept falling and kept drifting all during the day of the 1st and 2nd, and all of the wagons had been loaded and got down to Mud Springs except one, and I determined that I would stay in camp over-night where I was, because there was plenty of wood for fires and we on horseback would overtake the train in the morning. Along in the evening of the 2nd the snow came furiously. We already had a couple of feet of it, and had dug paths around our little camp from the ground of shelter-tents to the fire. But during the night the snow fell so furiously that we got up and kept clearing the ground so as not to be entirely buried. The horse-feed and shovels were in the weak wagon then in camp with us. The snow fell on the plateau and the wind swept it all over onto the ravine, so that we were not contending with the snow that fell from above us, but with all the snow that fell upon the plateau for miles. The horses were tied to the trees, and they kept tramping the snow under them until they stood two or three feet above the ground. In the morning the snow around us was from ten to twenty feet deep. On the wind- swept plateau there was hardly any. Along about nine o'clock in the morning it cleared off cold. We dug out with shovels the places where the horses were standing and where our tents were and where our camp-fires were. We did not see any good way of getting out of camp. It was entirely a new experience for all of us, and we debated what to do. The snow all around us was deeper than a man on horseback was high. The worst of it was our shortage of provisions. While we were there undetermined what to do, Corporal Lippincott saw, up on the edge of
