Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/414

 grass, in patches of from one to six miles in breadth; the mud was so tenacious that every time foot or hoof touched it there would be a great mass of "gumbo" adhering to render progress distressingly tiresome and slow. Our clothing was in rags of the flimsiest kind, shoes in patches, and the rations captured at the village exhausted. Mules and horses were black to the houghs with the accretions of a passage through slimy ooze which pulled off their shoes.

Crook's orders to the men in advance were to keep a sharp lookout for anything in the shape of timber, as the column was to halt and bivouac the moment we struck anything that would do to make a fire. On we trudged, mile succeeding mile, and still no sign of the fringe of cottonwood, willow, and elder which we had been taught to believe represented the line of the stream of which we were in search. The rain poured down, clothes dripped with moisture, horses reeled and staggered, and were one by one left to follow or remain as they pleased, while the men, all of whom were dismounted and leading their animals, fell out singly, in couples, in squads, in solid platoons. It was half-past ten o'clock that never-to-be-forgotten night, when the last foot soldier had completed his forty miles, and many did not pretend to do it before the next morning, but lay outside, in rear of the column, on the muddy ground, as insensible to danger and pain as if dead drunk.

We did not reach the Belle Fourche that night, but a tributary called Willow Creek which answered every purpose, as it had an abundance of box-elder, willow, ash, and plum bushes, which before many minutes crackled and sprang skyward in a joyous flame; we piled high the dry wood wherever found, thinking to stimulate comrades who were weary with marching and sleeping without the cheerful consolation of a sparkling camp-fire. There wasn't a thing to eat in the whole camp but pony-meat, slices of which were sizzling upon the coals, but the poor fellows who did not get in killed their played-out horses and ate the meat raw. If any of my readers imagines that the march from the head of Heart River down to the Belle Fourche was a picnic, let him examine the roster of the command and tell off the scores and scores of men, then hearty and rugged, who now fill premature graves or drag out an existence with constitutions wrecked and enfeebled by such privations and vicissitudes.