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The men fared pretty well, however, for on the rough march along the Washita, and during our stay at Fort Cobb, they had learned to protect themselves materially from the cold.
It was not until after the garrison was settled here that I saw much of these Indian tribes, whom Custer's victory on the Washita, and diplomatic handling of affairs afterwards, had brought into villages under the guns of our cantonment. I knew that Satanta and Lone Wolf, chief men of the Kiowas, were held as hostages, but I had not been near them.
This he gave a critical examination, before he mounted his horse to go, and on leaving said, "If your foreman don't want to help build a bridge, I want to borrow that axe of yours. But you fellows talk to him. If any of you boys has ever been over on the Chisholm trail, you will remember the bridge on Rush Creek, south of the Washita River. I built that bridge in a day with an outfit of ten men.
Daylight having brought zero weather again, our start on the morning of the 17th was painful work, many of the men freezing their fingers while handling the horse equipments, harness, and tents. However, we got off in fairly good season, and kept to the trail along the Washita notwithstanding the frequent digging and bridging necessary to get the wagons over ravines.
He said, however, that if he was disappointed as to the event of a war, he was about to complete a contract for a large quantity of land on the Washita; that he intended to invite his friends to settle it; that in one year he would have a thousand families of respectable and fashionable people, and some of them of considerable property; that it was a fine country, and that they would have a charming society, and in two years he would have double the number of settlers; and, being on the frontier, he would be ready to move whenever a war took place."
What he told me there by the rippling Washita River I did not repeat for many months, but I wrung his hand when I said good-bye. Of all the scouts with Custer that we left behind when we started northward, none had so large a present of tobacco as Hard Rope. My father had demanded that I return to Springvale as soon as our regiment was mustered out.
I received the first news of Custer's fight on the Washita on the morning of November 29. It was brought to me by one of his white scouts, "California Joe," a noted character, who had been experiencing the ups and downs of pioneer life ever since crossing the Plains in 1849.
Harrison was directed to get his regiment and battery to the west bank of the Washita, gather to him several independent local companies of horse, and report to General Liddell, sent to command on the north bank of Red River, whence he was to harass the enemy's advance up that stream.
To go two hundred miles and more away from the proper theatre of action in search of an indefinite something was hard; but orders are orders. Time was so important that I determined to run the risk of moving Walker by river, though the enemy could bring gunboats into the lower Red and Washita, as well as into the Tensas, and had some troops in the region between this last and the Mississippi.
This through with, the expedition, supplied with thirty days' rations, moved out to the south on the 7th of December, under my personal command. We headed for the Witchita Mountains, toward which rough region all the villages along the Washita River had fled after Custer's fight with Black Kettle.
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