Campaigning with Crook

ISBN-10: 1546540016
ISBN-13: 9781546540014
Series: Campaigning With Crook
Pages: 120
Language: English
Published: 2017-05-07
Author: Charles King

Description

"Campaigning with Crook" (Originally published in 1890 by Charles King [1844-1933]) consists of a narrative, of General Crook's campaign against the Sioux in the Big Horn and Yellowstone country, in Wyoming and Dakota, in 1876. This was immediately after the massacre of Custer and his force on the Little Big Horn.Captain King's hand in fiction we know well. His true first-hand description of actual events is here proved to be equally clever; no narrative of frontier life, of cavalry march and bivouac, and Indian skirmish and battle, with which we are familiar, surpasses this in most of the elements of direct, strong, vivid, telling narration. The very country spreads before the reader - the great rolling ranges of mountains, the striking "buttes " or peaks of all manner of weird and grotesque shapes, the winding river courses marked by the cottonwoods, the sheltered, grassy valleys, the pools of stagnant alkali water, the thickets and tufts of sage brush, the sudden, impetuous sweep of prairie fire, the thick clouds of dust rising from the tramp of many hoofs, the flickering light of camp fires, the feverish haste of the alarm, the exciting scenes on the picket line, the reconnaissance, the attack - of all these and other kindred matters Captain King makes a truly artistic picture, and there is enough of dramatic incident and figuring to lend a strong human interest to the landscape.The Custer disaster took place on the 26th of June, 1876. The expedition to which Captain King was attached, under Generals Carr and Merritt, left Fort Hays in Western Kansas, two hundred miles to the south of the Little Big Horn, in the same month. It marched to the north to reinforce Crook and Terry, and to take part in the general movement against the Indians of that year. A period of three or four months is covered by this story - it is more readable than fiction; and after famished marches and sharp skirmishes, the campaign comes to a close in the Black Hills. There have been few more thrilling episodes in our army records than the race for rations which marked the close of this campaign, when Crook's columns, harassed by Indians in the rear, hungry and empty-handed, with horses starving and men emaciated, were pushing southward from the Little Missouri, through Western Dakota, to Deadwood in the Black Hills. Buffalo Bill is one of the characters on this expedition, not in theatrical disguise, but in sober earnest as a veritable scout. A still more interesting personage is his ''pardner," "Buffalo Chips," or James White, of whom Captain King says: "He never drank, I never heard him swear, and no man ever heard him lie." In these respects " Buffalo Chips "must have stood out, up, and apart from his kind like a "butte " from a prairie.