Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/140

 until after the whole matter had blown over or been stamped out, and the General back at his headquarters.

This aversion to display was carried to an extreme; he never liked to put on uniform when it could be avoided; never allowed an orderly to follow him about a post, and in every manner possible manifested a nature of unusual modesty, and totally devoid of affectation. He had one great passion—hunting, or better say, hunting and fishing. Often he would stray away for days with no companion but his dog and the horse or mule he rode, and remain absent until a full load of game—deer, wild turkey, quail, or whatever it might happen to be—rewarded his energy and patience. From this practice he diverged slightly as he grew older, yielding to the expostulations of his staff, who impressed upon him that it was nothing but the merest prudence to be accompanied by an Indian guide, who could in case of necessity break back for the command or the post according to circumstances.

In personal appearance General Crook was manly and strong; he was a little over six feet in height, straight as a lance, broad and square-shouldered, full-chested, and with an elasticity and sinewiness of limb which betrayed the latent muscular power gained by years of constant exercise in the hills and mountains of the remoter West.

In his more youthful days, soon after being graduated from the Military Academy, he was assigned to duty with one of the companies of the Fourth Infantry, then serving in the Oregon Territory. It was the period of the gold-mining craze on the Pacific coast, and prices were simply prohibitory for all the comforts of life. Crook took a mule, a frying-pan, a bag of salt and one of flour, a rifle and shotgun, and sallied out into the wilderness. By his energy and skill he kept the mess fully supplied with every kind of wild meat—venison, quail, duck, and others—and at the end of the first month, after paying all the expenses on account of ammunition, was enabled from the funds realized by selling the surplus meat to miners and others, to declare a dividend of respectable proportions, to the great delight of his messmates.

His love for hunting and fishing, which received its greatest impetus in those days of his service in Oregon and Northern California, increased rather than diminished as the years passed by. He became not only an exceptionally good shot, but ac