that did, and that is why I have told you the story.
I went buffalo hunting during the next couple winters, and summers I wandered about the Kansas cowtowns, playing poker and I also got to dealing faro, a popular game of the time. As to buffalo, by God if you couldn’t notice already by the season of ’72-’73 that the herds had commenced to dwindle. There was still hundreds of thousand, but not millions. Plenty, but not infinite. If you seen one of them railhead collection points where the skins was brung in, you’d appreciate why. What looked like a new block of buildings from out on the prairie, was in actuality stacks of hides awaiting to be loaded on the freight cars. And down on the range, you never encountered no more of them immense herds me and the skinner come across that time in ’71. No, that Was a wondrous sight never to be repeated on this continent.
But if the buffalo had started to fail because he was wild, his tame cousin the steer was gaining. Up the Chisholm Trail from Texas the cattle herds was drove, through the Nations and into Kansas, to the new towns that had sprung up as the railroads came. Now almost every year in the early ’70’s another place was in fashion, commencing with Abilene and then Ellsworth, Wichita, and Dodge City. Everyone wanted the herds, for the cowboys was paid off after they had delivered their animals to the railside stock pens, and of course not having seen a woman in some months nor any other feature of civilized life, they would blow their rolls on the local amusements.
So it was profitable for the business people, and the cowboys was encouraged to enjoy themselves to the hilt, except when you tell that to such men they are inclined to take it literal, for they been eating dust for weeks and enduring foul weather and stampedes-a loud sneeze in dead of night will panic a herd of cattle-and maybe also rustlers and Indians. So you let a cowboy see a slogan like the one a certain town had posted on the trail in: EVERYTHING GOES IN WICHITA, why, he’ll get crazy drunk the first minute he sets foot on Douglas Avenue and in the next he will have drawed his gun and started to discharge it recklessly.
Well, I had my run-ins with cowboys and bear yet the scars to prove it, and I was in Wichita a couple times in the years that everything “went” there, except that after a time they hired my old friend Wyatt Earp to see it never went too far, and when I seen him in action, busting skulls with his gun barrel, I’ll tell you I thought better of the Texans.
I guess you get my point that during these years I never belonged to no particular faction. I might not have been all that old, but I got to thinking of myself as being a holdover from an earlier era, before the railroads and steers and gunfighters and main streets full of gambling halls and dry-goods stores. I was only in my early thirties at this time, so maybe it was mere sentiment. Whatever, the years had got to passing without a worthwhile mark upon them, and all I see when looking back is a blur of poker hands and whiskey fumes and occasionally the muzzle of a weapon, and I always survived that emergency in one style or another, and though I won at cards more often than I lost, I was at the same time ever broke. I believe now that I was actually expecting to be killed. I even got to where I was setting with my back to the door.
I mean I did that once, and I was promptly shot through the shoulder from behind, by a man I never saw. It was in Dodge City, and I never did find out who done it. That was the most hateful town on the face of the earth. Everybody there hated everyone else, buffalo hunters hated mule skinners, both hated cowboys, gamblers hated anyone who played against them, and all joined in detestation of the soldiers from the fort nearby.
All you had to do to make an enemy in Dodge was to be seen by another human being: he immediately loathed your guts. Look into the sky and predict rain, and you could get a fight out of it. So when I got it in the back, I was not surprised. He was a bad shot, incidentally, for the slug missed the bone. After six or eight months the stiffness was gone except when it rained. By that time I had left Dodge, though, and I didn’t try very hard to determine the identity of the near-assassin. I would only have been interested could I have got enough dynamite to blow the whole place sky-high. For I was no exception to the rule: I hated everyone there.
My last buffalo-hunting season was the winter of 1874-75, and we spent a good deal more time looking for herds than shooting them. I cleared only about $350 from fall to spring-to give you an idea of how slim was the pickings. Then, not long after I got the skins into Dodge, I was shot in the back as aforesaid.
I headed north when I was fit to travel and went all the way to Wyoming without seeing a wild Indian. Instead, I run across plenty of homesteaders, who built themselves houses out of sod and planted wheat and corn, and they was real friendly and sometimes had young daughters they wanted to marry off, so I was well received and they shared with me what food they had-which come in right handy, for you didn’t see no game any more on the central plains.
It was nicer inside them houses than you would have thought, for the ladies tied cloth against the ceiling to catch the dust that fell, and the sod was so thick that it would endure a rainstorm without letting in a drop. The trouble come next day when the water at last penetrated; then it and mud dripped down for most a week. Of course, it rained very seldom-which was good for the houses, but death on crops. And then the summer of ’74 billions of grasshoppers descended on the plains in a great blanket stretching from Arkansas to Canada, and ate up not only what grew in the fields but also harness and covered-wagon tops and a Union Pacific train was stalled at Kearney, Nebraska, by a three-foot drift of them insects. When the grasshoppers left, after two weeks, it was as if nothing had yet been planted, all being gnawed right down to the ground. Now I have mentioned how difficult it often was for an Indian to get his three squares a day, but there was also considerable risk to being a white homesteader, at least in them days.
Well sir, sodbusting never held no attraction for yours truly, that’s for sure. I kept on moving north, and I’ll tell you why. Once again, it was curiously connected with the activities of George Armstrong Custer. Who by the way I was not looking to assassinate no more; no, unless I get revenge within a reasonable length of time after the offense is committed, I can’t keep up an active hatred for anybody. I reckon that’s a weakness of my character. I mean, I missed him in Kansas City in ’71, and then I got involved in reclaiming Amelia, and what with one thing another, eight years had went by since Washita. I guess most of us have got a sort of statute of limitations within our hearts; unless a man is a lunatic, violent feelings taper off after a while.
So though it was unlikely that Custer would ever become my personal hero, I had lost my former desire to do him in. I did not think about him at all, and when, in the summer of 1874 I heard he come back to the plains and led a column into the Black Hills to map that region, it never interested me none.
But as it happened, some scientists he carried along on that expedition found certain deposits in the area, and the journalists got hold of the report and spread it across the country:
GOLD!
The Land of Promise-Stirring
News from the Black
Hills.
The Glittering Treasure Found at Last
A Belt of Gold Territory
Thirty Miles Wide.
The Precious Dust Found in the
Grass under the Horses’ Feet
– Excitement Among
The Troops.
It Can be Reached in Six Days-Expeditions
