poisoning of wolves was discontinued.
We killed our own beef at the Post, and the cattle were selected from time to time from a herd that was kept in a corral down near the river. The method of measuring meat was different out in the Western country from what it was down South in the army. I never heard of the method pursued until we were at Cottonwood Springs. Army beef was to be heavy beef so far as it could be obtained, and was to be well cleaned and trimmed, and to contain as much net meat as possible. The way they measured was this: They put a line around the beef, back of the fore legs, and allowed a hundred pounds for every foot of circumference. That is to say, if an animal were eight feet around he would net, for army ration purposes, eight hundred pounds, although the animal might be live weight twice as heavy. If he measured seven and one-half feet around, it was called seven hundred and fifty pounds. The Quartermaster used to say that as cattle ran, the above method was exact enough. As to hay, the measurement was, after the prairie hay had been stacked ninety days, -seven feet cube represented a ton, the whole stack being taken into consideration. So our meat and hay were bought and figured by the above rules.
We never had any fresh vegetables at Julesburg; they could not be got to us. But there were issued to us what were called 'desiccated vegetables.' In the true pronunciation of the word the second syllable is long, but it was called by the boys as if it were dessy-kated, with accent on the third syllable. It was made of onions, cabbages, beets, turnips, carrots and peppers, steamed, pressed and dried. They were almost in the form of leaves pressed together. They were pressed, after they were dry, into cakes twelve inches square, and an inch thick. They were pressed so hard that they weighed about as much as wood, and came sealed up in tin cans about a foot square. They were intended to be put into the soups, and were largely used by us for that purpose. They were very nutritious, and it was convenient, when we went on scouts, for the boys to break off a piece and put it in a saddle- pocket. The boys would nibble at it as they were riding along; it was a kind of leguminous bread, and they ate about as much of it dry as they did by putting it into soups. But we had been so long without vegetables that indications of scurvy began to make themselves noticeable. Along in November, the first thing we knew one of our men was suddenly taken ill; black spots formed over him, which very much worried Dr. Wisely, and the soldier was immediately sent east on one of the trains to Fort Kearney. Other of the boys complained of the symptoms.
One day Dr. Wisely came to me, and told me that he had made a discovery that he thought of great value. He asked me to send out and have about a bushel of the 'hands' of the prickly-pear gathered from the plains, and brought in. I ordered the quartermaster sergeant to attend to it, which he did. And Dr. Wisely, taking these prickly- pear hands, the common, coarse, ordinary opuntia, scraped the bristles and prickles off from it, cut it up and boiled it with sugar, and made a variety of apple-sauce which was quite new, and not altogether undesirable. Those men who were afflicted with symptoms were immediately cured, and the Doctor continued to use the remedy all of the winter, and as long as we stayed at the post. I have never heard of such a food, before or since, but think from the experiments of Dr. Wisely it must have much of merit in it.
All of this time we kept busy laying sod. There was always improvement to be planned, and more things to be built. There had been some little cold snaps, and some little snow, but as yet there had been no such weather as to freeze up the sod, and prevent us from plowing it.
On November 25, 1864, being in command of the post, I ordered the First Sergeant, Milo Lacey, to take the wagon-master, Donley, and all of the teams that he could get, and go over to Ash Hollow for another supply of wood. The trail was well laid out now to Ash Hollow and all the noncommissioned officers knew where to go, and how to handle the business.
We had no Indian scare for some time. It was reported that the Cheyennes had sent a delegation to Denver asking that a definite treaty of peace be made between the Cheyennes and the people of Denver, and that the Indians be permitted to come in near Denver below the town where there was plenty of wood, and go into winter quarters. As these Cheyennes had been ravaging Colorado and Kansas, killing men and murdering women and children, and driving in all the frontier settlements, and as the Colorado people were very much wrought up about it, a conference is reported to have been had in Denver, and to have given back word that the Cheyenne chiefs could not control their men, or would not if they could; that now the summer was over, and the raiding season past, they could not entertain the Cheyennes in that sort of way. They further said that they believed they would not make peace with the Cheyennes until they had given them a good whipping. And it was reported that the Indian delegation retired from Denver in very sullen anger.
The wood train, after four days, did not turn up on the evening of the 28th as was expected. It did not turn up on the 29th. There was not a sliver of wood at the post, nor was there anywhere anything that would burn except the hay, and that could not be burned to any advantage. We had received a lot of sheet-iron from Fort Kearney, out of which our company blacksmith had made several stoves and some pipe. The stovepipes ran up through the roof. These stoves were economical heaters, and we burned splinters and bull-chips in them. On the 30th we burned some wisps of hay in the forenoon; we were getting cold, and I concluded to go out and see if I could get word of the train. One of the boys said that he had seen a smoke signal go up from the Lodgepole Lookout, which I have heretofore described as on the northeast comer of the junction of Lodgepole and the Platte.
Going over onto the plateau, I saw the train coming, quite near. They had seen Indian signals from time to time, and had felt constrained to march closely and well packed, but no attack had been made upon them. We were delighted to receive the wood train and get warm again.
While the wood train was over at Ash Hollow, a very ridiculous circumstance occurred. An Englishman, who claimed to be of some degree of nobility, turned up at the post with two four-mule wagons, a camping outfit, some dogs and servants, and said that he had come to the Western country to kill game. He wanted to get bear, buffalo, black-tail deer, and everything else which ran on four legs. He was a man of about thirty-five to forty years. He considered himself the smartest man that ever crossed the plains. He was always talking about English manners, and English etiquette. He was a scamp with a lot of money.
He came up, as he said, to pay his respects to the post commander. I soon saw that he was a rich, unprincipled scalawag. His egotism was enormous. He was talking about himself and his family most of the time; his idea of good morals was confined to the impression that a man should not eat with a knife. That seemed to be the sum total of his views of morality and good form. He was vulgar, indecent, loud, and a general nuisance in every respect; but he didn't eat with his knife.
He spoke of his traveling in America, and how he had been entertained by some of the best families of the land, and he had actually seen people eat with the knife. There was nothing else coarse enough or vulgar enough to attract his attention. I got tired of him in a short time, and launched him back onto the prairie with my kind regards, and he went to his wagons down at the station. Among his dogs was a very nice thoroughbred greyhound. The frontiersmen, who were all smart enough for anybody, and could read the new-comers like books, immediately began to make this Englishman their prey.
In the first place they got some green coffee, boiled it until it was tender, then soaked it in strychnine. The Englishman wanted to bet on everything, and was so all-wise that nobody could offer a bet that he did not take, either one side or the other of it. Some of the pioneers got into a conversation with this Englishman, and asked him if he had ever traveled in Java. Of course, the Englishman had traveled in Java, and knew all about it, and then one of these pioneers suggested that he had heard that green coffee was one of the most fatal poisons to swallow; that while it would not hurt a cat or a horse or a human being, that five grains swallowed by a dog were fatal. The Englishman sneered at the idea. Then one of the bystanders said that he had heard the same thing, and would bet a hundred dollars that it was true, because his old friend A. B. C. had told him so. The Englishman immediately took up the bet, and thereupon they slid down the dog's throat the five grains of green coffee, well prepared, and in a short time this beautiful dog was in articulo mortis, and the Englishman had lost his $100 and his dog.
At the ranch there was a man who sold, among other things, beans, the common navy beans, out of a sack, having a sack holding about a bushel, dipping them out with a quart cup. One of these fellows took a quart of the beans somewhere to the rear, and spent a sufficient time to count how many beans there were in the quart, and then he came around to where the Englishman and the beans were. One of the pioneers made a bet with another pioneer in regard to how many beans there were in a quart. After they had guessed wildly and at random, from three thousand to twenty-four thousand, the Englishman got into the game, and they took him for another $100.
It would have been all right, and would have ended here if the joke had not been too good, and some one told the Englishman of the tricks that had been played upon him. He came to our post to have the 'bloody scoundrels' arrested for robbery.
The whole story was told by the Englishman, and vouched for by one of his servants, and the confession of one
