Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/282

 store advertised a supply of goods suited to the Black Hills' trade; the hotels were crowded with men on their way to the new El Dorado; even the stage-drivers, boot-blacks, and bell-*boys could talk nothing but Black Hills—Black Hills. So great was the demand for teams to haul goods to the Black Hills that it was difficult to obtain the necessary number to carry the rations and ammunition needed for Crook's column. Due north of Cheyenne, and ninety miles from it, lay old Fort Laramie, since abandoned; ninety-five miles to the northwest of Laramie lay Fort Fetterman, the point of departure for the expedition. To reach Fort Laramie we had to cross several small but useful streamlets—the Lodge Pole, Horse, and Chug—which course down from the higher elevations and are lost in the current of the North Platte and Laramie rivers.

The country was well adapted for the grazing of cattle, and several good ranchos were already established; at "Portuguese" Phillip's, at the head of the Chug, and at F. M. Phillips's, at the mouth of the same picturesque stream, the traveller was always sure of hospitable, kind treatment. The march of improvement has caused these ranchos to disappear, and their owners, for all I know to the contrary, have been dead for many years, but their memory will be cherished by numbers of belated wayfarers, in the army and out of it, who were the recipients of their kind attentions. The road leading out of Cheyenne through Fort Laramie to the Black Hills was thronged with pedestrians and mounted men, with wagons and without—all en route to the hills which their fancy pictured as stuffed with the precious metals. Not all were intent upon mining or other hard work: there was more than a fair contingent of gamblers and people of that kind, who relieved Cheyenne and Denver and Omaha of much uneasiness by their departure from those older cities to grow up with the newer settlements in the Indian Pactolus. There were other roads leading to the Black Hills from points on the Missouri River, and from Sidney and North Platte, Nebraska, but they offered no such inducements as the one from Cheyenne, because it crossed the North Platte River by a free Government bridge, constructed under the superintendence of Captain William S. Stanton, of the Corps of Engineers. By taking this route all dangers and delays by ferry were eliminated.

Much might be written about old Fort Laramie. It would