across the continent, back and forth, meeting all the perils of the trail, and escaping hardly with more than their lives; men who saw the vast hordes of the buffalo and the tepees of the Indians disappear before the trapper, the hunter, and the grazer, and these again vanish before the farmer and the homesteader. Surely, in all the story of this world’s adventures, so much history was never before packed into so short a space of time.
It was in 1861 that the telegraph was finally stretched from ocean to ocean, putting an end to the famous Pony Express. And in 1880, that the first train of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé Railroad ran over the new rails and killed the old trails. This was the beginning of the end, the beginning of To-day, and our easy hurryings over the routes mapped out by the pioneers.
In “The Old Santa Fé Trail” we follow the tracks of Kit Carson, and many a story is told of him, and of Dick Wootin and other famous scouts and Indian fighters. There is a lot of fighting in these pages, for Indian and white disputed every step with the rifle and the scalping-knife—it was, first of all, a war-path, this way across the country.
There seems to be no end to the number of stories told in the two books. There is the Mexican War, as it affected the scouts and trappers and cavalry of the army; there is the great tale of the first wagon expedition across the Divide and the Plains, a record of amazing hardship and grim endurance, in which the few who won out were compelled to finish on foot, wagons and baggage abandoned.
And oh, the hundreds of anecdotes of bear- and beaver-trapping, deer- and buffalo-shooting! It was the ruthless slaughter of the buffalo that first aroused the hatred of the Sioux, or Dakotas, which was the real name of the nation. These Sioux, with the Comanches, became the terror of the whites, and left a trail of blood behind them as they were slowly driven back. The Pawnees were troublesome too, but, on the whole, more friendly. There is one story Buffalo Bill tells of a Pawnee baby who was adopted by a Pony Express rider, known by the name of Whipsaw, which reveals the devotion of an Indian to his friend. Whipsaw had rescued the three-year-old child from a wicked-looking old Sioux warrior who had stolen him from his own people, and after that the boy would have nothing to do with the redskins; in fact, he hated them, and never lost a chance to do them harm.
In the end, the little boy, who was called Little Cayuse, saved not only Whipsaw, but several other Express riders from murder by the Sioux. It is a good yarn, as you ’ll find out in reading it.
The picture Buffalo Bill gives of these riders is a wonderful one. The service was so dangerous that few men were willing to undertake it, and of these scarcely one escaped quite unhurt. The lightning speed at which they rode, the loneliness, the heat, cold, and drought they suffered, are thrilling to read of. At any moment, as they fled along, an enemy might rise up, a shot whistle past—not always past! Then, after the mail-bags were tossed to the waiting rider at the next post, who immediately started at full gallop, the drop into a sleep of utter exhaustion, rolled in a blanket on the floor of the cabin.
A MOUNTAIN HUNTER.
There are, especially in “The Old Salt Lake Trail,” a number of Indian legends and beliefs, and much concerning their customs, both in their tribal life, and when they came into contact with the intruding white men. Tales, too, that were told at night by the old scouts and trappers as they sat smoking round the fire. One of the most famous of these men was known as “Old Hatcher,” and we hear one of his stories as he sits “under the silvery pines, with the troops of stars overhead,” one of a group of buckskin-clad men, speaking in his western dialect, with telling gestures, his pipe always in his mouth, and his eyes fixed, with a far-away look, on some glowing spot in the fire as though he were seeing the scenes and adventures he described.
There is a good deal told of General Sherman, and of the great task of building the Union Pa-