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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. He complained bitterly of the hardships of railway travel. The car was too small, too warm, too fast, too everything to suit him. The officer who encountered him at Topeka said that Joe seized upon him with ardor, as being a link with his real life, and that he "never wanted to board them air keers agin, and was durned sorry he hadn't fetched his mule; he would a heap sight ruther go back on the old critter." He was too much dissatisfied with civilization for any one to doubt for one moment that he would willingly have taken the four hundred miles on horseback in preference to "them air wheezing, racing, red-hot boxes they shet a man in." After his return he came to our tent dressed in what the officers call "cit's" clothes, which he termed "store clothes." His long, flowing hair and shaggy beard were shorn, and his picturesqueness gone. One cheek was rounded out with his beloved "terbaccy", and he told the general he had "took his last journey on them pesky keers"; and when asked if he didn't like the States, said, "D——n a country where you have to wear a shirt-collar." He told us that he had been West forty years, and much of the time beyond the Rockies. He considered Kansas so far East that he "reckoned his folks would be thinking he was on his way home if they heard of him in there." At that time we were in the midst of such a wilderness it did not seem to us sufficiently far eastward to induce any one to think we were anywhere but on the stepping-off place. It was only to show off that he came in his travelling costume. The buckskin and flannel shirt soon appeared, but it took some time before his hair and beard grew out long enough to make him look natural.

When California Joe first joined the general in the Washita country he studied him pretty thoroughly. In his rough vernacular, he wanted to "size him up", and see if he was really soldier enough for him to "foller." The contrast between a plainsman's independence and the deference and respect for rank that is instilled into a soldier is very marked. The enlisted man rarely speaks to his superior unless spoken to, and he usually addresses an officer in the third person. The scout, on the contrary, owns the plains, according to his views, and he addresses the stranger or the military man with an air of perfect equality; but long acquaintance with their ways taught me that at heart these men were just as full of deference for any brave man they served as is the soldier. In coming to an understanding with the general regarding his giving his services as scout, Joe asked his commander a few pointed questions about himself. He wished to know how he intended to hunt Indians. There had been some officers whom he had known who had gone to war in a wagon; the troopers called them "feather-bed soldiers." So Joe said: "S'pose you're after Injuns, and really want to hev a tussle with 'em, would ye start after 'em on hoss back, or would ye climb into an ambulance and be hauled after 'em? That's the pint I'm headin' for." After putting the general through such a catechism, he decided to let himself be employed, as it was evident from his own impressions, and from what he had heard, that there was not much doubt that the chief was, in his own language, "spilin' for a fight" just as much as he himself was.

Joe was made the chief of scouts at once; but honors did not sit easily upon him, for in celebrating his advancement he made night hideous with his yells. The scout gets drunk just as he does everything else—with all his might. Living all his life beyond the region of law and its enforcement; being a perfect shot, he is able, usually, to carry out his spree according to his own wishes. He tells the man who might express a wish for a peaceful, quiet night that he had better not tackle him, and emphasizes his remark by drawing out of the small arsenal that encircles his body a pistol, which, pointed accurately, renders the average man quick to say, "It's of no consequence", and retire. I do not even like to say that the scouts were ever drunk, for they were profoundly sober when they went off on their perilous journeys with despatches; and when I think how all our lives were in their hands when they were sent for succor, and how often they took messages across country to put troops or settlements on their guard, or of a hundred other daring deeds of theirs, I prefer to remember only the faithful discharge of duty, not the carousal that sometimes followed the reaction caused by overstrained nerves and the relief from hours and days of impending death.

Anticipating a little, I remember that California Joe was selected for the most important scouting duty of the winter, which was nothing less than the transmission of the despatch announcing the success of the battle of the Washita. The command was then far away from Camp Supply; it was midwinter, and the Indians were thoroughly aroused and on guard. It was not known how great the distance was that he must traverse, but the troops had taken four days to accomplish it. Joe was asked how many scouts he would like to take, and after going off to deliberate, returned, with the reply that he "didn't want no more ner his pardner, fur in this 'ere bizness more is made by dodgin' and runnin' than by fightin'." At dark he started, without giving the slightest evidence that he regarded the perilous undertaking as anything more than a commonplace occurrence.

One peculiarity of these men was their evident inability to feel surprise; the most extraordinary occurrences made so little impression upon them that it would seem as if they must have had a previous existence, and become familiar in another life with the strange events which made us gasp with astonishment. How often I have heard the officers refer to the variety these men made in the tedium of the march, by their stories of adventure, their wit, and their fearless and original expression of views! It was conceded that they "drew a long bow" sometimes, but the tales of their own lives were startling enough without the least necessity for exaggeration.

One story from the mines was told me, and may have lost nothing in the telling. An Irishman who was pretty drunk fell into a shaft sixty-five feet deep. He picked himself up unhurt, but partially sobered, and seeing a passage leading into the open air, he made his way out to the side of the mountain. Then he walked up till he reached the shaft, and looking down into its depths, was heard to say, "Be gorry, and I'm thinking it would kill me if I was to fall down there agin."

The scouts and frontiersmen were not slow to express their opinion on the few women they encountered, and a tale was told of a family consisting of a mother and several strapping daughters who lived in a cabin on the route over which cattle were driven to market. The "gals", as the Western man terms them, took care of some cows, and the narrator of the story stopped there to get milk. As he sat near the fire smoking, the rawboned, shrivelled old mother bent over the fireplace puffing at a clay pipe, perfectly stolid and silent, until one girl came in and silently stood at the fire trying to dry her homespun dress. Without raising herself, and in a drawling tone, the mother said, presently, "Sal, there's a coal under you fut." In no more animated tone and without even moving, her offspring replied, "Which fut, mammy?" The girl had run barefoot all her life over the shale and rough ground of that country, and the red-hot coal was some time in making its way through the hard surface to a tissue that had any sensitiveness.

The widow of a miner, who kept boarders, was also on the scant list of female acquaintances of one of the frontiersmen, who describes a person called the "bouncer", who seems to be a well-recognized functionary in such establishments. He is always big and strong, and his duties consist in bringing to time people who neglect to pay their bill, and for this service he is boarded without charge. An Eastern man, a "tenderfoot", on one occasion asked some one to pass the gravy, whereupon the bouncer placed his pistol on the table and quietly remarked, "Any man as calls sop gravy has got to eat dust or 'pologize."

At that time we all returned to civilization with a goodly collection of frontier stories that had not found their way into the omnivorous newspaper, and our talk was full of allusions to jokes among ourselves, or to portions of these way-side tales that we had appropriated, because they fitted into our daily life so well. We believed, and there was no reason why we should doubt it, that the amusing or venturesome stories of these men were their own experiences, and I need not dwell upon the zest it gives to the listener when the hero of a tale is present as he tells it.

Another relief to the weariness of a march was hunting game, which was so plentiful that no one need run the risk of straying far from the command in search of it. The wild turkeys were the greatest treat of all, that winter, and there were so many of them that the soldiers' messes had all they wanted while the command remained in the locality they frequented. A former officer of General Sheridan's staff has been only recently reminding me of what a feast they were. In the vicinity of the Antelope Hills the trees were black with these wild-fowl.

One of the officers afforded great amusement at the time, and gave opportunity for many a sly allusion during the winter because of an attack of "buck fever." At sight of a tree weighed down to the ends of the branches with turkeys, he became incapable of loading, to say nothing of firing, his gun; he could do nothing but lie down, great strong man as he was, completely overcome with excitement. At one point where General Sheridan and his staff came upon an immense number of turkeys, they sent videttes on the neighboring hills to keep watch for Indians, and then began to shoot the fowls. Between half-past five and half-past seven they killed sixty-three with rifles. The place where they first came upon this game is now marked on the map as "Sheridan's Roost." This officer remembers to have seen General Custer cut the head from a turkey with a Spencer repeating rifle at two hundred yards. The poor soldiers, armed only with their short-range carbines, of course saw many a shot go foul, but if they happened to be the selected orderlies of the officers they were often permitted to use the rifle, and in a case where an officer had two, the soldier riding behind his commanding officer proudly carried the second best. I know that when General Custer and his orderly returned from a hunt, their eyes like coals, so brilliant were they, and with every evidence of suppressed excitement, yet neither, as is the custom of the army, speaking a word, I used to accuse the commanding officer of only waiting to get beyond the first bluff that separated him from the camp before he forgot to be military, and fell to talking with the enlisted man. There is so much in common among enthusiastic sportsmen!

The soldiers knew how to make the best of their short-range guns, and many of them became such accurate marksmen that they could select the particular part to be hit, and not tear the game into shreds with their large bullets. The best shots in a company were allowed to leave the column and bring in game for the rest. At night, when the troops were bivouacked, the fires lighted for the soldiers' suppers, the men hovered around the coming dinner, rejoicing in its savory smells, suggesting to the company cook their ideas of how game should be prepared, and calling out triumphantly to any neighboring mess whose hunters had not been so fortunate as their own. Think what it must have been to vary the frugal bacon of daily use with rump steaks of the buffalo or toothsome morsels of wild turkey! The men needed no sauces or jellies to whet the appetite or improve the flavor; that would have been painting the lily in their eyes. There has been much criticism regarding the destruction of the buffalo, but in the case of our soldiers it was often a health measure, as the use of salt meat and absence of vegetables produced scurvy.

All this hunting, joking, story-telling on the march, and around the camp-fire, lost some of its charm, however, as winter really set in. Although it is the custom of soldiers to make light of hardships, there were new features in this winter's campaign which needed all their fortitude to meet and endure.