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Updated: May 22, 2025
Our explorers now pressed on for twenty-four hours without encountering any molestation, though they saw many indications that the Indians were hovering about their track. Hungry and weary, they reached Fort Lawson, on the Sacramento river, where they tarried for a week to recruit. They then followed down the river some distance, to the well-known camping-grounds, "The Buttes."
Camping-grounds were prepared, commissariat stores and ammunition forwarded to the front, wood cut and stacked for fuel, and every preparation made, so that there might be no delay or hitch at the critical moment.
Since my early knowledge of that wilderness, a railroad had been built through it, and to see the portion through which it passed a section far from my old haunts I followed it as far as "Paul Smith's Hotel," on the northern edge of the woods, and then took a boat across the lake country, reaching "Martin's," on the south, near my former camping-grounds.
Unable to carry many provisions in their crowded canoes, they were often forced to stop and fish or hunt for game. As the Indians told them they would find no good camping-grounds for many miles below the Ohio, they stopped for ten days at its mouth, hunting and gathering supplies. Parties were sent out to explore in various directions, and one of the men, Peter Prudhomme, failed to return.
Next we entered the narrow, tortuous valley of Howeri, which ascends towards the highland, in which the midday heat was intense; and at our evening halts we suffered not a little from camel-ticks, which abound in the sand, until we learnt to avoid old camping-grounds and not to pitch our tents in the immediate vicinity of the wells.
I saw on our arrival how automatically, as it seemed to me the regiments found camping-grounds, and how well the ragged men arranged for shelters of boughs, or made tents with two rails and a blanket. The confusion disappeared. Sentries and pickets were posted, fires were lit, and food cooked. The order of it seemed to me as mysterious as the seeming disorder of the march.
And yet they too had their share of the work, for as soon as the waggons halted, all save the very little ones started at once over the plain to search for the dried buffalo dung, or, as it was called, chips, which formed the staple of the fires; for wood was very scarce, and that in the neighbourhood of the camping-grounds, which were always at a stream or water-hole, had long since been cleared off by the travellers who had preceded them.
Next day we travel on under a sky as heavy as lead. No human beings or nomad tents are to be seen, but we find numerous tracks of flocks of sheep and yaks, and old camping-grounds. The danger of meeting people increased hourly, and so did my anxiety as to how the Tibetans would treat us when we were at last discovered. On July 31 the rain was still pouring down.
And the boys saw Jesus in every buttercup and every primrose, and every little daisy, and in every dewdrop, and heard something of the song of the angels in the notes of the nightingale and the skylark. Oh! Jesus was there, and they felt Him, and they saw Him. I took them amongst the gipsy tents, amongst the woodlands and dells of the old camping-grounds.
He accepted half-rations and muddy camping-grounds without remonstrance; if his boots wore out he made shift to march without them; and when his uniform fell to pieces he waited for the next victory to supply himself with a new outfit. He was enough of a philosopher to know that it is better to meet misery with a smile than with a scowl.
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