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Updated: June 24, 2025
The second day, after marching for hours through vast herds of buffalo, we made Hackberry Creek; but not, however, without several stampedes in the wagon-train, the buffalo frightening the mules so that it became necessary to throw out flankers to shoot the leading bulls and thus turn off the herds. In the wake of every drove invariably followed a band of wolves.
We made a most imposing and awe-inspiring spectacle as we strung out across the yellow landscape; the two hundred and fifty ornate and brightly colored chariots, preceded by an advance guard of some two hundred mounted warriors and chieftains riding five abreast and one hundred yards apart, and followed by a like number in the same formation, with a score or more of flankers on either side; the fifty extra mastodons, or heavy draught animals, known as zitidars, and the five or six hundred extra thoats of the warriors running loose within the hollow square formed by the surrounding warriors.
Every precaution was taken; and in some of the denser portions of the jungle they regularly felt their way with advance guards and flankers, who, poor fellows, had a most tough job to force their way through the tangled creepers and undergrowth.
The leading regiments and flankers instantly fixed bayonets; the staff-officers drew their swords; hardly a man fell out, but at a steady and even quickened pace, Emory's men forced their way through the confused mass in the eager endeavor to reach a position where the enemy might be held in check.
Though the balls of the smallest dimensions of cannon would have swept them away with ease, they were proof against the Indian rifle, patience, and skill. The only expedient of the red men was to dig under them and undermine them, or destroy them by fire; and even this could not be done without exposing them to the rifles of the flankers.
Under these disadvantages, then, the hunter commenced his retreat, disadvantages that he felt to be so much the greater from his knowledge of the habits of all Indians, who rarely fail in cases of sudden alarms, more especially when in the midst of cover, immediately to throw out flankers, with a view to meet their foes at all points, and if possible to turn their rear.
This one naturally resisted displacement, 'vi et armis, and the fights would become so general as to cause a resemblance to the famed Fair of Donnybrook. The cry would go up: "Look out for flankers!" The lines of the selected would dress up compactly, and outsiders trying to force themselves in would get mercilessly pounded.
There'll be a lot of death about to-night, if all goes well." Half an hour later Captain Bruce called his company of fifty picked men to "attention" as Colonel Ross-Ellison approached, the gate was opened and an advance-guard of four men, with four flankers, marched out and down the road leading to the open country.
Doubtless they had depended on the Andastes and advanced guard of Senecas for flankers, for the main body passed without even a glance up at the hilly ground where we lay watching them. Then there was a break in the line, an interval of many minutes before their pack horses appeared, escorted by green-coated soldiers.
Winthrop, active, eager, nervous in temperament, pushed forward boldly, rapidly, bent on "getting there," as he expressed it, and hitting hard before the reds could slip back to their holes. Chrome, slow, phlegmatic, cautious, advanced by carefully-studied marches, with scouts far ahead and flankers far dispersed.
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