Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/382

 clippings it was learned that the stream of adventurers pouring into the Black Hills was unabated, and that at the confluence of the Deadwood and Whitewood Creeks a large town or city of no less than four thousand inhabitants had sprung up and was working the gold "placers," all the time exposed to desperate attacks from the Indians, who, according to one statement, which was afterwards shown to be perfectly true, had murdered more than eighty men in less than eight days. These men were not killed within the limits of the town, but in its environs and in the exposed "claims" out in the Hills.

Several new correspondents had attached themselves to Merritt's column; among them I recall Mills, of the New York Times, and Lathrop, of the Bulletin, of San Francisco. These, I believe, were the only real correspondents in the party, although there were others who vaunted their pretensions; one of these last, name now forgotten, claimed to have been sent out by the New York Graphic, a statement very few were inclined to admit. He was the greenest thing I ever saw without feathers; he had never been outside of New York before, and the way the scouts, packers, and soldiers "laid for" that man was a caution. Let the other newspaper men growl as they might about the lack of news, Mr. "Graphic," as I must call him, never had any right to complain on that score. Never was packer or scout or soldier—shall I add officer?—so weary, wet, hungry, or miserable at the end of a day's march that he couldn't devote a half-hour to the congenial task of "stuffin' the tenderfoot," The stories told of Indian atrocities to captives, especially those found with paper and lead-pencils, were enough to make the stoutest veteran's teeth chatter, and at times our newly-discovered acquisition manifested a disinclination to swallow, unstrained, the stories told him; but his murmurs of mild dissent were drowned in an inundation of "Oh, that hain't nawthin' to what I've seed 'em do." Who the poor fellow was I do not know; no one seemed to know him by any other designation than "The Tenderfoot." He had no money, he could not draw, and was dependent upon the packers and others for every meal; I must say that he never lacked food, provided he swallowed it with tales of border horrors which would cause the pages of the Boys' Own Five-Cent Novelette series to creak with terror. I never saw him smile but once, and that was under