The War-Trail Fort: Adventures of Pitamakan & Thomas Fox. James Willard Schultz

powerful tribes of Indians. It was fear of the Indians that kept the settlers back.

      We were to embark for the mouth of the Musselshell upon the next steamboat that arrived, and my uncle was very busy getting together our necessary equipment and engaging the help that we should need. I helped him as much as I could, but found time to ride over to the camp on the Teton and ask Pitamakan to go down-river with us. His father objected to his going, on the ground that he was needed in camp to herd the large band of horses that belonged to the family, and in which I had then about forty head, my very own horses. But finally a youth was found to take his place, and Pitamakan was free to come with us. On the last day of May the second steamboat of the season tied up at the river-bank in front of the fort, and in the afternoon of the following day we went aboard it with our outfit and were off upon our new adventure. The outfit comprised ten engagés, all of them with their wives, women of the Pikuni, several of whom had children; six work-horses and two heavy wagons; three ordinary saddle-horses, property of the engagés, and three fast buffalo-runners, one of which was Is-spai-u, the Spaniard, the most noted, the most valuable buffalo-horse in all the Northwest; eleven Indian lodges, one to each family; tools of all kinds; some provisions; a six-pounder cannon with a few balls and plenty of grapeshot; and of course our own personal weapons.

      The women were tremendously excited over their first ride in a steamboat; they marveled at the swiftness with which it sped down the river and cried out in terror every time the boilers let off their surplus steam with a loud roaring. Soon after passing the mouth of the Shonkin, a few miles below the fort, we sighted buffaloes, and from there on to our destination we were never out of sight of them grazing in the bottom lands, filing down the precipitous sides of the valley to water and climbing out to graze upon the wide plains.

      Other kinds of game were also constantly in sight, elk, white-tailed deer and mule deer, antelopes, bighorns upon the cliffs, wolves and coyotes, and now and then a grizzly.

      All too quickly we sped down the river, which is swift and narrow here, and at night tied up at the mouth of Cow Creek, where twelve years later a small party of us from Fort Benton were to fight the Nez Percés, just before General Miles rounded them up. This was the Middle Creek—Stahk-tsi-ki-e-tuk-tai—of the Blackfeet, so named because it rises in the depression between the Bear Paw and the Little Rocky Mountains.

      Shortly before noon the next day the boat landed us and our outfit at the mouth of the Musselshell River. There was a fine grove of cottonwoods bordering the stream, but we had no thought of taking advantage of its cool, shady shelter. Instead we put up our lodges in the open bottom on the west side of the Musselshell, about three hundred yards from it and something like fifty yards back from the shore of the Missouri. My uncle declared that we had too many of them and made one lodge suffice for three families. We therefore put up four lodges, as closely together as possible, and cut and hauled logs for a barrier round them. We completed the barrier that evening and felt that we were fairly well protected from the attacks of war parties. As Pitamakan truly said, we were camped right upon one of the greatest war trails in the country. Crows, Cheyennes, and Arapahoes going north, and Assiniboins, Crees, and Yanktonnais going south, here came to cross the Missouri upon the wide and shallow ford just below the mouth of the Musselshell. Had my uncle been unable to buy the six-pounder cannon from Carroll and Steell, I doubt whether he would have ventured to build a post at this place. We felt that "thunder mouth" would be of as much service to us in a fight with a war party as fifty experienced plainsmen would be, could they be obtained. The Indians were terribly afraid of cannon, not so much because of the execution they did, I have often thought, as because of the tremendous roar of their discharge. To the mind of the red man it was too much like the fearful reverberations of their dread thunder bird, wanton slayer of men and animals, shatterer of trees and of the very rocks of the mountains.

      Taking no chances with our horses, we picketed them that evening with long ropes close to our barricade, and at bedtime Pitamakan and I went out and slept in their midst; but nothing happened to disturb our rest. At daylight we arose and turned the work-horses loose to graze near by until we needed them. The day broke clear and warm. Up in the pine-clad bad-land breaks that formed the east side of the Musselshell Valley we could see numerous bands of buffaloes, and there were more in the valley itself and in the bottom of the Missouri directly across from us. Hundreds of antelopes were with the buffaloes, and elk and deer were moving about in the edge of the timber bordering the smaller stream. We went over to the Musselshell and bathed, and then heard Tsistsaki calling us to come and eat.

      "Now, then, you youngsters," my uncle said to us when we were seated, "the engagés have their instructions, and here are yours. You are not to lift a hand toward the building of this fort, for I have three other uses for you. You are to take good care of the horses, keep the camp well supplied with meat, and be ever on the lookout for war parties."

      "Easy enough!" Pitamakan exclaimed. "With so little to do, I see us growing fat, and with fat comes laziness. I see this camp going hungry before many moons have passed."

      "You needn't joke," said my uncle, very seriously. "This is no joking matter. Upon the alertness and watchfulness of you two depend our lives and the success of this undertaking!"

      "I take shame to myself," Pitamakan said. "As you say, this is important work that you charge us with. If trouble comes, it shall be through no fault of ours!"

      Chapter II.

       A Hostile Tribe Leaves Footprints

       Table of Contents

      By the time Pitamakan and I had finished breakfast the engagés had hitched up the teams and gone to cut logs, and my uncle was marking out the site for the fort on level ground just behind our barricade. He had drawn the plan for it while we were coming down the river. It was to be in the form of a square. The south, west, and north sides were each to be formed by the walls of a building eighty feet long, twenty feet wide, nine feet high. The roof was to be of poles heavily covered with well-packed earth. At the southwest and northeast corners there were to be bastions with portholes for the cannon and for rifles. The east side of the square was to be a high stockade of logs with a strong gate in it.

      Leaving my uncle at his work, Pitamakan and I watered the saddle-horses and then, saddling two, rode out after meat. We could, of course, have gone into the timber just above the log-cutters and killed some deer or elk, but we wanted first to explore the valley. Here and there were narrow groves of timber with growths of willows between them; and again long stretches where the grass grew to the very edge of the banks.

      We carefully examined the dusty game trails and every sandbar and mud slope of the river for signs of man, but not a single moccasin track did we see. That was no proof, however, that war parties had not recently passed up or down the valley. Instead of following the course of the river, they were far more likely to keep well up in the breaks on the east side of the valley, from which they could constantly see far up and down it.

      I was not very keen for hunting that morning, because I was worrying about my uncle's charge to us. "Almost-brother," I said presently as I brought my horse to a stand, "the load that Far Thunder has put upon us is too heavy for our backs. Look, now, at this great country; this brush and timber-bordered stream; those deep, pine-clad bad-land breaks; the great plain to the west, seamed with coulees; the heavily timbered valley of the Big River. We cannot possibly watch it all. We have not the eyes of the gods to see right through the trees and brush and discover what they conceal. Watch as we may, a war party can easily come right down to the mouth of this stream and attack the log-cutters or charge our barricade, and we never know of their approach until we hear their shots and yells!"

      "What you say is plain truth!" Pitamakan exclaimed. "But well you know that Far Thunder is a wise chief. He does not expect us to do the impossible; his heavy talk was just to make us as watchful and careful as we possibly can be. But come, we waste time. We have to provide meat for the middle-of-the-day eating!"

      "All right, we go," I answered, "but I am uneasy. When we return to camp I shall say a few words to Far Thunder."

      Not far ahead a band of