Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/464

 mountains in central Idaho. There was the Ute outbreak, dating back to inadequate rations and failure to keep pledges. The Utes were not of Crook's department, but it was a battalion of the Third and Fifth Cavalry and Fourth Infantry, which moved out from Rawlins, Wyoming, under Major Thornburgh, Fourth Infantry, to save the agency and the lives of the employees; and, after poor Thornburgh had been sacrificed, "it was Merritt's column which made the wonderful march of one hundred and sixty miles in two and a half days to rescue the survivors in the "rat-hole" on Milk River.

Merritt had been preceded by a company of the Ninth Cavalry, commanded by Captain Dodge and Lieutenant M. B. Hughes, who had aided the beleaguered garrison to withstand the attack of the Utes till the arrival of re-enforcements. The concentration of cars and the clearing of obstacles from the track of the Union Pacific Railroad imposed a great tax upon the shoulders of its principal officials, Mr. S. H. Clark and Mr. T. L. Kimball, but they were found equal to every demand made upon them and turned over their track to General Williams and Colonel Ludington, the two staff officers charged with aiding the Merritt expedition. In the campaign, we lost Thornburgh and Weir, killed—two noble soldiers whom the country could ill afford to lose; and had a number of men killed and wounded and several officers badly hurt—Grimes, Paddock, Payne, and Cherry.

A very singular thing occurred during the time that the troops were besieged behind their feeble rifle-pits down in the hollow. One of the first to be struck was the blacksmith of the citizen train which had moved out from Fort Fred Steele under Lieutenant Butler D. Price, Fourth Infantry; his corpse, without wasting ceremony, was rolled up in place and made to do its part in supplying protection to the soldiers; a piece of canvas was thrown over it, and in the excitement and danger the dead man was forgotten. When Merritt's column arrived on the ground, the trumpeter alongside of him was ordered to sound "Officers' Call," upon hearing which the invested troops sprang upon the earthworks and gave cheer after cheer. It may have been the noise—it may have been something else—but at any rate there was a movement at one end of the rifle-pits, and slowly and feebly from under the overlying clay and canvas, the