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Updated: July 14, 2025
On the evening before the stampede that band of Nez Percés had been well supplied with riding ponies and pack-mules, and had also been rich in dogs. No other band of their size had more, although their failure to find buffaloes had already begun to have its effect upon the number of their barking stock.
Then there are the people, dark, bushy-bearded men, riding about like brigands, wrapped in green-lined cloaks upon their shaggy pack-mules; or loitering about, great, brawny, low-headed youngsters, like the parti-colored bravos in Signorelli's frescoes; the beautiful boys, like so many young Raphaels, with eyes like the eyes of bullocks, and the huge women, Madonnas or St.
Or, on the contrary, was it beating a retreat into the interior of the country, making way for the advent of the foreigner and monarchy and priest rule? The air was all aglow with excitement. Horsemen were galloping in the streets leading pack-mules, and the sleepy town seemed full of bustle and animation.
We have boot-jacks and a bath-tub, now, and yet all the mysteries the pack-mules carry are not revealed. What next? We had a tedious ride of about five hours, in the sun, across the Valley of Lebanon. It proved to be not quite so much of a garden as it had seemed from the hill-sides. It was a desert, weed-grown waste, littered thickly with stones the size of a man's fist.
It is of Padua that I am now called upon to report certain matters which may seem strange to one who does not know her well: to the others, verbum satis. Whether it is their University (too famous, perhaps, for so quiet a place) or the suspiration of their greatest citizen which has kindled their wits; whether that cauldron of brick, the Santo, bubbling with silver domes, is the stem or flower of their exaltation; whether their seat at the head of a sun-steeped marsh (at whose mouth is Venice) hath itself unseated them; whether Petrarch set boiling what Saint Antony could not allay; what it was, how it was, who gave them the wrench, I know not but the fact is that the people of Padua have been as freakish a race as any in Italy; at the mercy of any head but the aggregate's, pack-mules of a notion, galley-slaves of a whim, driven hither and thither in a herd, like those restless leaves (souls once) whose nearer sight first made Dante pitiful. Not that they, for their part, asked for pity or got it. Mostly they paid their tavern bills when the last cup had been drained and the last chorus led. When Ezzelin was master of the revels they paid in blood: that tower of his by the river is dark with it yet. Petrarch from his mountain-vineyard at Arqu
In fact, the road, all the way to Santiago, proved equal to most country roads, and there was not the slightest excuse for not using the hundred or more wagons stowed in the hold of the Cherokee to transport tentage, medical and other supplies close upon the heels of the slow-moving Fifth Corps.... There is a mystery about the 'condition of the road' that may remain so unless it is fixed upon as the scape-goat for the lack of transportation.... The condition of the road at no time would have prevented a farmer from taking a load of hay to market.... There was no point from Daiquiri to the trenches which could not have been as easily reached by wagons as by pack-mules between June 22 and July 18."
We have boot-jacks and a bath-tub, now, and yet all the mysteries the pack-mules carry are not revealed. What next? We had a tedious ride of about five hours, in the sun, across the Valley of Lebanon. It proved to be not quite so much of a garden as it had seemed from the hill-sides. It was a desert, weed-grown waste, littered thickly with stones the size of a man's fist.
For this was no-man's-land. Bands of renegade Apaches lurked among its empurpled peaks. Companies of Mexican smugglers came northward through its steep-walled border cañons driving their laden burros to lonely rendezvous where hard-eyed traders awaited them with pack-mules loaded down with dobie dollars.
Here were the first signs of change. He recalled the train of pack-mules of the old days, the file of pole-and-basket carrying Chinese, the squaw with the papoose strapped to her shoulder, or the wandering and foot-sore prospector, who were the only wayfarers he used to meet.
When he was relieved in his duties by Major Waggman, of the regular Commissary Department, the latter found Perry Seawell & Co. so prompt and satisfactory that he continued the patronage; for which there was a good reason, because stores for the use of the troops at remote posts had to be packed in a particular way, to bear transportation in wagons, or even on pack-mules; and this firm had made extraordinary preparations for this exclusive purpose.
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