Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/300

 the villages of the Sioux when the latter were not raiding upon theirs. Cottonwood by the hundreds of cords lay scattered about the villages, felled by the Sioux as a food for their ponies, which derive a small amount of nourishment from the inner bark. There were Indian graves in numbers: the corpse, wrapped in its best blankets and buffalo robes, was placed upon a scaffold in the branches of trees, and there allowed to dry and to decay. The cottonwood trees here attained a great size: four, five, and six feet in diameter; and all the conditions for making good camps were satisfied: the water was excellent, after the ice had been broken; a great sufficiency of succulent grass was to be found in the nooks sheltered from the wind; and as for wood, there was more than we could properly use in a generation. One of the cooks, by mistake, made a fire at the foot of a great hollow cottonwood stump; in a few moments the combustible interior was a mass of flame, which hissed and roared through that strange chimney until it had reached an apparent height of a hundred feet above the astonished packers seated at its base. Buffalo could be seen every day, and the meat appeared at every meal to the satisfaction of all, notwithstanding its stringiness and exceeding toughness, because we could hit nothing but the old bulls. A party of scouts was sent on in front to examine the country as far as the valley of the Yellowstone, the bluffs on whose northern bank were in plain sight.

There was a great and unexpected mildness of temperature for one or two days, and the thermometer indicated for several hours as high as 20° above zero, very warm in comparison with what we had had. General Crook and the half-breeds adopted a plan of making themselves comfortable which was generally imitated by their comrades. As soon as possible after coming into camp, they would sweep clear of snow the piece of ground upon which they intended making down their blankets for the night; a fire would next be built and allowed to burn fiercely for an hour, or as much longer as possible. When the embers had been brushed away and the canvas and blankets spread out, the warmth under the sleeper was astonishingly comfortable. Our pack-mules, too, showed an amazing amount of intelligence. I have alluded to the great trouble and danger experienced in getting them and our horses across the different "draws" or "coulées " impeding the march. The pack-mules, of their own motion,