Page:Recollections of My Boyhood.djvu/23

 we sometimes had to use small willows for firewood, such as we found growing along the margin of streams and about springs. At other times, and quite often too, we had no wood of any kind and used "buffalo chips" for fuel. What we called "buffalo chips" was the dried dung of the buffalo.

I had quite an adventure one evening while gathering "buffalo chips." Several of us boys were out from camp some little distance, picking them up and throwing them into piles. Our party had a pile and other parties had their piles, and as we were not far apart, it seems that we had claimed certain small districts adjacent to our respective stacks of chips, and we had to guard against trespassers. We were working hard and had become considerably excited, when I remember, a boy about my size with yellow sun burnt hair and freckled face (at that time I thought he had scales or scabs on his face), came over into our district and attempted to get away with a large chip, but I caught him in the act and threw another into his face with such violence as to knock off a scale and make the blood come. I think I was urged to this by the elder boys, for I remember they laughed, when I could see nothing to laugh about.

I think it was in this part of the country we found the prairie dog towns. The prairie dogs seemed to prefer city life, for we always found them living in towns and cities. The population of some of their cities I should think was as great as that of Greater New York. The dog is about the size of a very young puppy dog. As we would pass through or near their towns they would come out of their holes and sit up straight on their hind quarters, always near their burrow, and utter something like a yelp, or so it seemed to me, and on the slightest alarm drop into their holes. I saw owls sitting among them, and it was said that prairie dogs, owls, and rattlesnakes lived together in the same holes.

It seems that matches were not in use when we crossed the plains, for I remember that to get fire at times a man would rub a cotton rag in powder and shoot it out of a musket, or put it in the pan of a flint-lock gun, and then explode the powder in the pan; often a flint steel and punk were used. I think many of the guns were flint-locks, but I know some