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Story of the Crow Emigrant Train of 1865 - Section 2
There were ten wagons in our train as we left Alba. Each of my married brothers had his own wagon. Father had three wagons and our two neighbors had five wagons between them. We traveled as a small emigrant train the hundred and twenty-five miles to Council Bluffs. We crossed the Missouri River on a ferry boat and landed in Omaha. Here we expected to meet up with other emigrants and form a large train to travel through the Indian country. We fell in with a train from Missouri. It went under the name of the Blodgett train and consisted of about fifty wagons. They took us in and we traveled together as one train until we got to Fort Laramie, in Wyoming.
The emigrant trains followed the same road along the Platte River that the Overland Stages traveled. We often saw the stages going by on the gallop. The stage stations were about twelve to fifteen miles apart, close enough together so that the horses could travel at a stiff gallop all the way. When a stage rolled into a station the exhausted horses stopped abruptly. The driver threw the lines to the ground. The attendants hitched fresh horses right in, handed the lines up to the driver and away the stage would go again on the dead run. There were lots of people traveling on the stages.
A bunch of about twenty-five soldiers were kept at every stage station. Every hundred miles or so a whole company of soldiers were stationed at a regular fort. They were to protect the stages and emigrants from the Indians. Whenever there was a stagecoach coming you would always see eight cavalrymen galloping along beside it. Four rode in front and four more followed behind. In case the stage was attacked it was the duty of the cavalrymen to fall back and fight the Indians while the stage driver whipped up his horses and got to the nearest military post- if possible.
The government orders to the emigrant trains were to shoot any Indians seen skulking on the north side of the emigrant road. All on that side of the road were considered as enemies and no risks were to be taken. On the south side of the road the government orders were to keep a sharp lookout for Indians but not to shoot them if they came up peacefully. The year 1865 was the worst year of all for Indians on the plains. It was just at the close of the war and any number of bad men who had been driven out of the war zone had gotten out among the Indians and were stirring them up.
No doubt there were Indians hiding along the north side of the road as we passed along but all kept out of sight and none were ever killed by any of our train. Indian warfare is different from that of white men. Their way of fighting is to rush in on their ponies and then for a little while just make the arrows fly. Then they run their horses for all they are worth and get out of gun shot as quickly as possible. They won't stand and fight like white men.
I'll bet our train threw a ton of bullets into the Platte River. We always camped about a hundred yards from the river in order to have water. It was the rule for everybody to take all his guns after supper and go down to the river and shoot. All guns were kept loaded. Some snag perhaps a couple of hundred yards away would be selected and everybody would shoot at it. Another test was to shoot upstream to see how far a gun would carry. There was lots of betting going on as to whose gun would carry the farthest. Each would shoot in turn and all would watch to see which bullet splashed the farthest.
At that time everybody used loose ammunition. Revolvers, rifles and shotguns were all muzzle loading and were cap and ball affairs. Powder was poured down the muzzle and then a ball rammed home. To fire the gun a cap was put on the tube to explode the charge. Even the six-shooters were muzzle loading. This target practice every evening was to make sure each gun was fresh loaded and that the cap would be sure to go off and not just snap.
The newest kind of rifle was the Henry. It would shoot sixteen times. There were not more than a dozen of them in our whole train. The Henry rifles were not so well thought of as other guns. They didn't shoot so accurately and when a fellow got one of them empty it took too long to get it loaded again. You had to pull out a long rod and put in the cartridges and then work to get the rod back again so that the spring would throw the cartridges up to you. It was as big a job as winding up a Waterbury watch.
We always had lots to eat. Mother was a fine cook and it didn't worry her a bit to cook over a camp fire. As she rode along in the wagon during the day she would be looking over a mess of beans for supper. Then just as soon as we got into camp a trench was dug and a camp fire started. She would have a kettle of these beans together with a big hunk of fat pork cooking over the fire in no time. By supper time they were cooked perfectly. Sometimes we had wood for fuel and sometimes buffalo chips. As soon as there was a bed of coals ready she would have the Dutch oven filled with bread and covered over, top and bottom, with hot coals. There is no better, sweeter bread in the world than that cooked in a Dutch oven over a camp fire. We always had plenty of sauce made out of dried fruit. When supper was ready we all sat down on the ground around the camp fire and ate like starved Injuns.
At breakfast time mother would always make a double shot of soda biscuits. As soon as the first batch was done we had them for breakfast while another batch was baking in the Dutch oven to be taken along on the road for dinner. At noon, of course, we didn't stop long enough to cook anything. The beans that were left over from the night before would get thick and jelly-like by morning. For lunch she would cut this in slices and lay them across chunks of bread or biscuits. It made our mouths water this fat pork tasted so good to us children. There is something about camping out that I like. Nothing would suit me better even now than to go up in the mountains way back from everybody and camp out again.
On a long trip it is necessary to take a day off occasionally. We always aimed to stay in camp one day each week. That was to wash up our clothes and give our stock a rest.
The soldiers along the road were very strict. Their orders were to stop all small squads of emigrants that came along who were too small an outfit to take care of themselves in case of an Indian attack. They would hold them in camp until enough more came along to make a sufficiently large force. People in small squads got so they knew where the soldiers were stationed. They would leave the road and circle around them. They didn't want to join in the big trains and have to do guard duty and be under military rules. They wanted to be independent and go as they pleased. The Indians slaughtered such people by the hundreds. They would attack the helpless train and tomahawk the people. Then they would take the horses and whatever they wanted from the wagons. They would burn the rest and leave the people lying there dead. When the soldiers would find them they would have to bury them. Over the graves one would see a board reading: "Slaughtered by the Indians." The wagon irons and tires would be all that was left of the train. I have seen as many as fifteen newly made graves in one place.
Every once in a while the soldiers themselves got cleaned out. We came along about five or six days after the stage station and soldiers quarters at Plum Creek were wiped out. The Indians had massacred everyone in the whole place.
Just the day before we got into Julesburg the Indians had burned that settlement up. There were a lot of soldiers stationed there and they had put up a hard fight. An ox freight train going to Utah happened to be in camp there at the time. The Indians kept the soldiers surrounded in an adobe house where they had taken refuge. Lots of Indians got put under, but they finally overpowered the whites. They burned the wagon train and the cavalry stables. Then they took all the stock and ran it off into the hills. When we got there the fight was over and everybody was gone. All the dead had been buried. The manure of the stables was still burning and some of the wagon timbers were still on fire. The freight train had been loaded with pancake smashers- steel burrs to grind quartz- and these were lying all about on the ground where they had fallen from the burning wagons. The present Julesburg is built right on the spot where this happened- about a mile from the railroad, down at the head of a kind of canyon.
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