I have a number of regrets associated with this life, but as I can not do a great deal about it, I can at least indulge myself by sharing a reality which the schools will never teach and is lost unless one takes the time to read what life in America was like once.
This following are parts of the journal of United States Soldier, Eugene Ware, on the central Great Plains of what is now Nebraska.
I believe you will find his real history interesting.
Ware on the Indians:
These Ponkas seemed to be a kindly, lazy, inefficient set of Indians, but the women had the same industrious appearance as other squaws.
The men had a sort of effeminate look. They seemed to have small feet and to be more feminine than the women. They were strutty, with a sort of Indian pride.
The women did all the work and appeared to think that it was the proper thing for them to show off their husbands all fixed up; they thought that they would not be considered good housekeepers if they could not show a well-dressed, idle husband.
The squaws all appeared to be of such fiber that they could trounce their husbands easily, and throw them out of the tent when they wanted to. In fact, it seemed to me that the women were about fifty-five per cent masculine, and the men about fifty-five per cent feminine.
I think that some of the contempt which the early settlers had for the Indian was due to his effeminate actions and appearance
Ware on the Soldiers
The volunteer soldier of that day was a very strongheaded, willful, obstinate fighter. He had been brought up from his boyhood to fight.
The men fought around among themselves, pounding each other up, and exercising the same sort of a feeling of emulation that a lot of roosters would in a barnyard.
When they wanted to stand off in a ring, and fight each other according to what were then considered "prize ring rules," we as officers never interfered. They had to fight somebody at some time, and little private fisticuffs were only an outlet for the energy and vigor of the men individually.
Building the Fort
The end room of the wing of MacDonald's cedar structure was used as "pilgrim quarters." It had a heavy clay roof, and a large simple cast-iron cook stove, with sheet-iron stovepipe running up through the roof.
Our "Post Headquarters" used that room for office and mess, but we slept in our tents. On October 13th we started up the canyon; six of our men had worked in the pineries, and were expert axmen. They went to work as three couples to fell the trees. Their axes were sharp, the weather stimulating, and they tumbled the trees rapidly. Other squads trimmed the branches; others with a crosscut saw worked in constant reliefs, cutting the logs the right length.
Our quarters had been planned to be built of twenty-foot logs. These logs were about a foot in diameter. We had our pick. After getting down a lot of the logs, we organized squads with our team mules to snake them out of the canyon. The men made rapid work, and every night every man who had worked in the canyon got a good snifter from my barrel of 1849 whisky. We were racing against the weather, and I never saw men work with more activity. The main barracks for the men were designed as six square rooms, which made a long building one hundred twenty feet long by twenty feet wide on the outside.
Among our number were those who had built log cabins, and knew how to "carry up a corner," as the expression was. So the logs were snaked down, and with assistance the men at the corners notched them up, and it was but a few days before the cabins seven feet high in the clear were ready for the roof. The best logs were kept out to build Company Headquarters with.
In a little while we had the pole roof on, with the interstices filled with cedar boughs, and about ten inches of good hard clay tamped down; but we were still without doors and windows, although we had places for them sawed out in the log walls.
The large logs, of which there were many over twelve inches in diameter, were reserved for lumber. We dug out a place on the bank of the arroyo as a saw-pit, and having two whip-saws, the men were started sawing out lumber one inch in thickness. The men took turns at the top, and the bottom, with the saw, sawing the length of a log. Then they were relieved by two others, so that the whip-saws were kept running all the time, but no one had more than one round a day at that particular work. With smaller cedar poles cut, and used as joists, we soon had bunks made in each of the rooms of our company's quarters.
We had drawn "hay bags" from the quartermaster at Fort Kearney. These we used as straw-ticks, and filled with whatever the soldiers wanted to put in. The boys chose partners, and began to occupy the bunks. We had drawn a lot of sheet-iron for the purpose of making stoves, and stovepipes. Our blacksmith rapidly fixed the company up with sorts of funnel-shape sheet-iron stoves, in which the cedar chips burned like tinder. These company quarters were rather close, there being no communication between the different rooms.
Sixteen men occupied a room, and between the bunks was a space where they had their mess-cooking, and their mess-eating. With the whipsaw, lumber enough was got out for a door in front of each room, and a window shutter in the rear.
The Wildlife
One thing that was remarkable was the number of skunks in the Platte valley. They were playing hide-and-seek all over Fort Kearney while we were there, and ranchmen said that they were plentiful, and a great nuisance.
We had hardly got established before they were in and out the floors and the stables, and other places where they could hide, and they appeared to be as tame and playful as kittens.
It was not long before in our new post they became an insufferable pest.
Jim Bridger
There was one sight which attracted my attention: an old Indian woman with two or three children around her was feeding them the raw stuff. She took the smaller entrails, stripped out their contents and cut them up into mouthfuls, then punctured the gall-duct, and, dipping the point of the knife into it, put a drop of gall onto each mouthful as if it were Worcestershire sauce. It was raw, with a flavor of the bitter.
The children seemed to enjoy it very much; it was Charlotte Russe for them. I was told that the Indians ate up all of the entrails of the beeves that were killed there at Laramie, at least during the time when there were many Indians at the squaw camp. I should have considered this revolting if it had not been for the happy, cheerful way in which the little Indians devoured this stuff, and shouted for more. And the old Indian woman seemed to be proud and happy to feed the little creatures so well.
During my comments upon this in a talk with Bridger, he said: "It's all right. They like it, and it's all right. I have cleaned up that kind of stuff and eaten it myself, when I had to. The Injuns haven't got the same kind of tasting apparatus we have; their 'taster' is different from a white man's.
Now, here is a band of Injuns that want to go off on a horse-stealing expedition, each one of them riding a spare pony. They whistle up their dogs, and start off. The dogs can keep up with the horses, and when they camp, the horses can eat grass, and the Injuns eat the dogs. That is the reason they don't have to have any commissary wagons. They don't have to have any corn for their horses, nor any bacon and hard-tack, and that is the reason that they can always run away from our people, and we never can chase them down on one of these raids, and catch them, unless we can travel like they do. They will swap horses every hour or so, and ride all the time.
If they did not have women and children to look after, they would never be caught. But when you go to chasing them with their women and children, the women and children die off pretty fast, and after a while you come up with them; they are at your mercy."
The High Plains Snow
Along in the evening of the 2nd the snow came furiously. We already had a couple of feet of it, and had dug paths around our little camp from the ground of shelter-tents to the fire. But during the night the snow fell so furiously that we got up and kept clearing the ground so as not to be entirely buried. The horse-feed and shovels were in the weak wagon then in camp with us.
The snow fell on the plateau and the wind swept it all over onto the ravine, so that we were not contending with the snow that fell from above us, but with all the snow that fell upon the plateau for miles. The horses were tied to the trees, and they kept tramping the snow under them until they stood two or three feet above the ground. In the morning the snow around us was from ten to twenty feet deep.
On the wind-swept plateau there was hardly any. Along about nine o'clock in the morning it cleared off cold. We dug out with shovels the places where the horses were standing and where our tents were and where our camp-fires were. We did not see any good way of getting out of camp. It was entirely a new experience for all of us, and we debated what to do. The snow all around us was deeper than a man on horseback was high.
The Chivington Battle
Taking the end of the year 1864, it is perhaps best for me to state what was the actual condition of things at that time. In the first place, the Indians between Cottonwood and Fort Kearney had committed depredations, the value of which was very great. They had harassed the frontiers in Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, and Colorado.
As stated, there was a squaw camp at Fort Laramie, where a lot of them were being fed. In the forts in southeastern Colorado, other Indians were being fed. The Arapahoes and Cheyennes, after committing all kinds of depredations, had pretended to surrender, and to come in and want peace. At Fort Lyon, down on the Arkansas river, the persons surrendered consisted of women and children and old men, who brought in a lot of worn-out horses used up in the raids of the frontiers; and they brought in some old guns that had become unserviceable. The young bucks, however, were on the war-path, and from these very Indian refugees at Fort Lyons occasional parties would go out, and rob a train and steal a lot of stock.
There was no confidence to be placed in any of these Indians, They were a bad lot. They all needed killing, and the more they were fed and taken care of the worse they became.
The Indian idea was to have the Government feed the old people, women and children, while the bucks would ravage the country. As I have stated, the embassy to Denver was a failure, because the Denver people understood the Indian quite fully. After the Denver embassy the murdering and plundering along the frontier and line became so great that Colonel Chivington made up his mind to take the field, and hunt up the Indian villages and punish them.
While he was getting ready, the refugee Indians who were being fed at Fort Lyons went out and plundered some trains and killed some women and children, and carried their scalps to the Cheyenne villages up on Sand Creek.
There came a great fall of snow in the latter part of November, about two feet deep, and Colonel Chivington, taking advantage of that fact, and knowing that the Indians could not travel in deep snow as the whites could, started out, and after a three-days march, day and night, he came onto one of the Cheyenne villages, and is reported to have killed about five hundred of them, captured a large lot of horses, and scattered the band; although he lost nine killed and forty wounded, because the Indians put up a pretty good fight. That fight occurred on November 29th, 1864.
Among the humanitarians of Boston it was called the "Chivington Massacre," but there was never anything more deserved than that massacre. The only difficulty was that there were about fifteen hundred Indian warriors that didn't get killed.
History is a completely different matter for those who lived it and those fortunate enough to read the actual history.
agtG
Eugene Ware Journals
