Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/305

 grama. Stanton led the advance, having Frank Gruard and one or two assistants trailing in the front. The work was excellently well done, quite as good as the best I had ever seen done by the Apaches. Stanton, Mr. Robert E. Strahorn, Hospital Steward Bryan, and myself made a small party and kept together; we were the only white men along not connected with the reservations.

This march bore grievously upon the horses; there were so many little ravines and gullies, dozens of them not more than three or four feet in depth, which gashed the face of nature and intersected the course we were pursuing in so many and such unexpected places, that we were constantly halting to allow of an examination being made to determine the most suitable places for crossing, without running the risk of breaking our own or our horses' necks. The ground was just as slippery as glass, and so uneven that when on foot we were continually falling, and when on horseback were in dread of being thrown and of having our horses fall upon us, as had already happened in one case on the trip. To stagger and slip, wrenching fetlocks and pasterns, was a strain to which no animals could be subjected for much time without receiving grave injuries. Our horses seemed to enter into the spirit of the occasion, and when the trail was at all decent would press forward on the bit without touch of spur. When Frank Gruard had sighted the bluffs of the Powder, the command halted in a deep ravine, while Frank and a picked detail went out in front some distance to reconnoitre. The intense cold had made the horses impatient, and they were champing on the bits and pawing the ground with their hoofs in a manner calculated to arouse the attention of an enemy, should one happen to be in the vicinity. They were suffering greatly for water; the ice king had set his seal upon all the streams during the past week, and the thickness of the covering seen was from two and a half to three feet. This thirst made them all the more restless and nervous. While we halted in this ravine, many of the men lay down to sleep, much to the alarm of the officers, who, in fear that they would not awaken again, began to shake and kick them back to wakefulness.

By looking up at the "Dipper" we could see that we were travelling almost due east, and when our scouts returned they brought the important information that the two Indians whom