Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/284

 on one occasion a man offered grievous wrong to one of the young squaws, and that same evening the wagon-train with which he was travelling was surrounded by a band of determined warriors, who quietly expressed a desire to have an interview with the criminal. The Americans gave him up, and the Sioux skinned him alive; hence the name of "Raw Hide Creek," the place where this incident occurred.

Another interesting story was that of the escape of one of the corporals of Teddy Egan's company of the Second Cavalry from the hands of a party of Sioux raiders on Laramie Peak; several of the corporal's comrades were killed in their blankets, as the attack was made in the early hours of morning, but the corporal sprang out in his bare feet and escaped down to the ranchos on the La Bonté, but his feet were so filled with fine cactus thorns and cut up with sharp stones that he was for months unable to walk.

"Black Coal," one of the chiefs of the Arapahoes, came in to see General Crook while at Fetterman, and told him that his tribe had information that the hostiles were encamped on the lower Powder, below old Fort Reno, some one hundred and fifty miles from Fetterman. Telegraphic advices were received from Fort Laramie to the effect that three hundred lodges of northern Sioux had just come in at Red Cloud Agency; and the additional information that the supplies of the Indian Bureau at that agency were running short, and that no replenishment was possible until Congress should make another appropriation.

This news was both good and bad, bitter and sweet; we should have a smaller number of Sioux to drive back to the reservation; but, on the other hand, if supplies were not soon provided, all the Indians would surely take to the Black Hills and Big Horn country, where an abundance of game of all kinds was still to be found. The mercury still remained down in the bottom of the bulb, and the ground was covered deep with snow. In Wyoming the air is so dry that a thermometer marking zero, or even ten degrees below that point on the Fahrenheit scale, does not indicate any serious discomfort; the air is bracing, and the cold winters seem to have a beneficial effect upon the general health of the inhabitants. We have no sturdier, healthier people in our country than the settlers in Wyoming and Montana.

Winter campaigning was an entirely different matter; even