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Updated: May 20, 2025
Horsemen galloped down the slopes in squadrons and such horsemen! cowboys from "Lost Park" and "the Animas." Prospectors like Casey and Kelly who were quite as much at home on a horse as with a pick in a ditch, and men like Marshal Haney and Grassi, who were all-round plainsmen, and by that same token born horsemen. Haney and Kelly rode with Reynolds and Mose, while Cora and Mrs.
The Mongols engaged in the caravan service pass a large part of their lives on the road, and are merry as larks over their employment. They seem quite analogous to the teamsters and miscellaneous "plainsmen" who used to play an important part on our overland route.
Old plainsmen and the Indians aver that the buffalo never return south; that each year's herd was composed of animals which had never made the journey before, and would never make it again. All admit the northern migration, that being too pronounced for any one to dispute, but refuse to admit the southern migration.
We were only half a mile from home, but in blizzards, we had been warned, one can easily become lost within a few feet of his own door. Many plainsmen have walked all night in a circle trying to find a familiar shack or barn and perished within a few yards of shelter.
The population was extremely mixed, and almost every language could be heard spoken on the streets. The men were fine types of the pioneer, buffalo hunters, freighters, and other plainsmen, though hardly as picturesque in figure and costume as a modern artist would paint them.
See where the point juts out beyond the great medlar tree. If, by the mercy of God, we can but make it!" The horses gallantly replied to call and spur. They rounded a curve which made a sort of apse to the side of the valley, and presently they were hid from their pursuers. Looking back from the thicket they saw the plainsmen riding hard. All at once Tang-a-Dahit stopped.
The trip had been full of excitement for me. The camp life was rough, the bacon often rusty and the flour moldy, but the hard work gave us big appetites. Plainsmen learn not to be particular. I remember that on some of our trips we obtained such "luxuries" as dried apples and beans as part of our supplies.
Their very poses seemed to convey a sense of menace of danger. Suddenly they wheeled and turned, and their mounts, as the spurs struck their damp sides, broke into a lope. As they galloped, Red Bill burst into a song. A lugubrious, melancholy thing, like most of the songs of the plainsmen.
And Beverly Clarenden and I, with the whole battalion of plainsmen "bull-whackers," in the common parlance of the Santa Fé Trail who drove those caravans to and fro, may also have been State-builders, as Uncle Esmond had declared we would be. Yet we hardly looked like makers of empire in those summer days when we followed the great wagon-trains along the prairies and over the mountain passes.
It would not be recognized by any of the old plainsmen were they to come out of their isolated graves; for it is only a disintegrated, low mass of sandstone now, utilized for the base purposes of a corral, in which the village herd of milch cows lie down at night and chew their cuds, such peaceful transformation has that great civilizer, the locomotive, wrought in less than two decades.
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