Following the Guidon (Illustrated Edition). Elizabeth Bacon Custer

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СКАЧАТЬ add the odor of rain-soaked clothes, the wet leather of troop boots, a dog or two with his shaggy, half-dry coat, and one can well imagine that Colonel Tom was the traditional "last straw."

      When the pair had been in the second tent long enough to have the joke take effect, they bolted out into the night, roaring with laughter, and then went on to a third. The jeers of the officers next day were some-what toned down because of the evening episode, but poor Tom was around, begging for clothes again, and soon every one knew that his own outfit lay "without the camp" for all time.

      Arrests are not at all unusual in military life, and the discipline is so strict it often happens that this punishment is inflicted for very small delinquencies. Sometimes, of course, it is a serious matter; a set of charges is preferred, and a trial by court-martial and sentence ensue. Still, to be in arrest is so common that it is not in the least like the serious affair of civil law. If an officer was missed from the line that winter, and inquiries made by his comrades for him, his messmate or captain, laughing lightly, replied, "Why, don't you know he's leading the pelican?" and this expression, as a synonym for being in arrest, stayed by the regiment for a long time after the bird had gone.

      The pelican General Custer refers to in the letter already quoted was a rare specimen, and all the command had great curiosity about it, considering it was unusual in the country where it was captured, and it was also the first specimen most of our command had seen. The bird was carried in a box in the wagon train that always travels at the rear of a column, and as an officer or soldier is condemned to this ignominious position also, when deprived of his place with his company, it became the custom to describe arrest as "leading the pelican."

      A perfect fusillade of wit was always being fired at men to whom accidents had happened or on whom jokes had been played. One unfailing subject for badinage was the matrimonial opportunities neglected in the winter's campaign. After the battle, the old squaws were as full of admiration for the successful troopers as they were for their liege lords, and the willingness to part with their daughters was quite equal to that of the predatory mother in the States, who is accused of roaming from one watering-place to another in search of game. But the primitive mother and father resort to no subtle plan; they offer their daughters outright. One officer was proffered a dusky bride by her father, and a cup of sugar was asked for in exchange; while the commanding officer, after hearing a mysterious mumbling going on near him, found himself already married, before any formal tender of the girl had been made by the parents. It was with difficulty that the fathers and mothers were made to understand that among white people a man was required by our laws to content himself with one partner at a time.

      There were many references to the scouts in General Custer's letters, and the subject was an unfailing source of interest to me, so much romance attends the stories of these men's lives. Osage Indians were employed, being not only at peace with us, but imbittered against the Indians by the marauding of hostile tribes on their herds of ponies and their villages.

      I find a few words about these friendly Indians in a letter General Custer wrote to a friend at that time: "Yesterday my twelve Osage guides joined me, and they are a splendid-looking set of warriors, headed by one of their chiefs called 'Little Beaver'. They are painted and dressed for the war-path, and well armed with Springfield breech-loading guns. All are superb horsemen. We mounted them on good horses, and to show us how they can ride and shoot, they took a stick of ordinary cord - wood, threw it on the ground, and then, mounted on their green, untried horses, they rode at full speed and fired at the stick of wood as they flew by, and every shot struck the target."

1. Eliza was our colored cook who was with me at Fort Leaven-worth.

2. This cook was the only woman on the expedition. She had been a camp woman many years, and was tanned and toughened by roughing it. She was perfectly fearless, but the life had sadly affected her temper. Even her brave husband (that is, brave in battle) approached her guardedly if anything went wrong. When the expedition was attacked at one time, she was cooking by a camp-fire, and was heard to mutter when a bullet passed her by, Git out, ye red divils ye, and went on with her work as if nothing were happening.

3. When the earth becomes much trodden, and it is difficult to keep camp clean, it is customary to move on for a short distance to fresh ground.

      CHAPTER III.

       WHITE SCOUTS.

       Table of Contents

      The scouts and friendly Indians were an independent command that winter, and afforded much interest and variety to the whole regiment. They each received seventy-five dollars a month and a ration, and whoever took the regiment to an Indian village was to receive one hundred dollars additional.

      A half-breed Arapahoe boy was the beauty of the command. He was nineteen years old: his eyes, large soft, and lustrous, were shaded by long lashes. I had been amazed at the tiny feet of the Delawares the summer before, but this lad's feet were smaller, and the moccasin showed them to be perfect in shape. His hair was long and black. He was educated, but it was a disappointment to me in hearing of him to find that he called himself Andrew Jackson Fitzpatrick. With the ardor of a novel reader, I should have preferred at that time that he should lift the fringes of his soulful eyes in response to a Claude or a Reginald. Indians not only lose their picturesqueness when they encounter the white man, but they choose the most prosaic names in place of their own musical appellations. Think how "Running Antelope", or the "Eagle that flies", or "Fall Leaf" would have suited this boy.

      One of the scouts had a nickname that ought to have pleased the most romantic, but the trouble in his case was that he did not fit the name. His real name was Romero, for he was a Mexican, and the officers soon dropped into calling him Romeo. His short, stocky figure, swarthy skin, and coarse features made him a typical Greaser, and quite the replica of many we had seen in Texas; but Romeo had lived with the Indians and spoke Cheyenne.

      Another scout was a New Yorker by birth, who emigrated to Michigan in 1836, thence to Texas, and finally to Kansas. He was over fifty, and gray-headed. It is surprising how wonderfully men no longer young endure the hardships of this life. There is something remarkably preservative about the air of the plains.

      When we read now of the reunion of the Forty-niners, and learn what jovial hours they are capable of enjoying even after their years of privation, we are forced to conclude that a life sheltered from the rigors of climate and spared all deprivation is not the longest, and surely not the merriest. When a man's entire possessions are strapped in a small roll at the back of his saddle, and his horse and outfit constitute his fortune, he is not going to lie awake nights wondering what are safe investments for capital.

      After the campaign I saw the scouts, and though the winter of 1866 was the time of California Joe's first appearance among us, it was not long before I was introduced to him. It was not my privilege to hear him talk for some time, as he was as bashful before a woman as a school-boy. The general arranged a little plan one day by which I could hear him. I was sent into the rear tent and specially charged to keep quiet, as Joe could not talk without interlarding his sentences with oaths, many of them of his own invention, and consequently all the more terrible to me because so unfamiliar. A new oath seems much more profane and vastly more startling than those one hears commonly about the streets. At the time I listened to him surreptitiously he had been called to attend court at the capital of Kansas, and had made his first journey on a railroad. СКАЧАТЬ