Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/302

 This is how General Crook appeared on this occasion, as I find recorded in my notes: boots, of Government pattern, number 7; trousers, of brown corduroy, badly burned at the ends; shirt, of brown, heavy woollen; blouse, of the old army style; hat, a brown Kossuth of felt, ventilated at top. An old army overcoat, lined with red flannel, and provided with a high collar made of the skin of a wolf shot by the general himself, completed his costume, excepting a leather belt with forty or fifty copper cartridges, held to the shoulders by two leather straps. His horse and saddle were alike good, and with his rifle were well cared for.

The General in height was about six feet—even, perhaps, a trifle taller; weight, one hundred and seventy pounds; build, spare and straight; limbs, long and sinewy; complexion, nervo-sanguine; hair, light-brown; cheeks, ruddy, without being florid; features, delicately and firmly chiselled; eyes, blue-gray; nose, a pronounced Roman and quite large; mouth, mild but firm, and showing with the chin much resolution and tenacity of purpose.

As we halted for the night, a small covey of pin-tailed grouse flew across the trail. Crook, with seven shots of his rifle, laid six of them low, all but one hit in neck or head. This shooting was very good, considering the rapidity with which it had to be done, and also the fact that the shooter's hands were numb from a long march in the saddle and in the cold. These birds figured in an appetizing stew at our next breakfast. We remained in bivouac for a day at the mouth of a little stream which we took to be Pumpkin Creek, but were not certain, the maps being unreliable; here was another abandoned village of the Sioux in which we came across a ghastly token of human habitancy, in the half-decomposed arm of an Indian, amputated at the elbow-joint, two fingers missing, and five buckshot fired into it. The guides conjectured that it was part of the anatomy of a Crow warrior who had been caught by the Sioux in some raid upon their herds and cut limb from limb.

The forest of cottonwoods at this place was very dense, and the trees of enormous size. Upon the inner bark of a number, the Sioux had delineated in colors many scenes which were not comprehensible to us. There were acres of fuel lying around us, and we made liberal use of the cottonwood ashes to boil a pot of hominy with corn from the pack train. Half a dozen old buf