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Updated: September 13, 2025
"What is it another one of them blamed stampedes?" the old blind trapper asked in a queer and petulant falsetto, as the cries of men and dogs and the grind of the sleds swept the silence of the room. "It sure is," Lucy answered. "An' I never seen gold like it. Feel that, old man." She put the big nugget in his hand. He was but slightly interested.
There was a half-breed Mexican in the outfit, a very quiet man, and when the causes of the stampedes were being discussed around the camp-fire, I noticed that he shrugged his shoulders in derision of the reasons advanced. The half-breed was my horse wrangler, old in years and experience, and the idea struck me to sound him as to his version of the existing trouble among the cattle.
Nor did the marches ever cease to be fraught with peril and, hardship. There were tempests, droughts, famines, stampedes of the stock, prairie fires, and Indian forays.
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.
Or is it that all these stories of mad stampedes and of chaotic anarchy breaking loose here and there anarchy gibbering, blind, profligate and senselessly cruel are true only of exceptional communities, as yet unaffected by the great lift which optimists confidently believe in, and which they unhesitatingly assure us is steadily going on?
The history of Wichita and Newton and Fort Dodge was the history of Abilene and Ellsworth and Hays City and all the towns at the head of the advancing rails. The bad men and women of one moved on to the next, just as they did in the stampedes of placer days. To recount the history of one after another of these wild towns would be endless and perhaps wearisome.
That's because Black Dog is in mournin' for a squaw who stampedes over the Big Divide, mebby it's two months prior. Black Dog's mournin' has got dealt down to the turn like; an' windin' up his grief an' tears, Osage fashion, he out to give a war-dance. Shore; the savages rings in a war-dance on all sorts of cer'monies.
Six hours later Topkuk was history. You've seen stampedes you understand. "My name became a by-word and caused people to laugh, though they shrank from me, for miners and sailors are equally superstitious. No man ever had more opportunities than I, and no man was ever so miserably unfortunate in missing them. In time I became whipped, utterly without hope.
"Mace tells the party to take a cinch on his feelin's, an' stampedes over to the Mexican part of camp, which is called Chilili, on a scout for the boy. Whatever do you-all reckon's become of him, son? I'm a wolf if a Mexican ain't somehow cut him out of the herd an' stole him. Takes him in, same as you mavericks a calf.
The other cowpuncher runs the gauntlet an' gits out safe. He hikes back the next day with a bunch o' boys, an' they follows up the herders an' wipes out that camp for fair, an' stampedes the herd over the nearest canyon. Then they circles back to the coulee to pick up the cook. "When they gits there, they surely finds themselves up against evidences of a tragedy.
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