“It would not do,” he continues, “for small hunting parties to build fires to cook with; for, in this hostile Indian country, a smoke would bring inquiring friends. Speaking of hostile Indians, reminds me of a question related by one of our men: at a party, in a Missouri frontier settlement, a lady asked a mountaineer, fresh from the Platte, ‘if hostile Indians are as savage as those who serve on foot!’
“Returning to camp the prairie was black with the herds; and, a good chance presenting itself, I struck spurs into Paint, directing him toward fourteen or fifteen of the nearest, distant eight or nine hundred yards. We (Paint and I) soon neared them, giving me a flying view of their unwieldy proportions, and, when within fifteen feet of the nearest I raised my rifle half way to the face and fired. Reloading, still in hot pursuit (tough work to load on a full run), I followed, though without catching up. One feels a delightfully wild sensation when in pursuit of a band of buffalo, on a fleet horse, with a good rifle, and without a hat, the winds playing around the flushed brow, when with hair streaming, the rider nears the frightened herd, and, with a shout of exultation, discharges his rifle. I returned to the party highly gratified with my first, though unsuccessful, chase, but Mr. St. Vrain put a slight damper to my ardor, by simply remarking--
“‘The next time you “run meat” don’t let the horse go in a trot and yourself in a gallop’ (I had, in my eagerness, leaned forward in the saddle, and a stumble of the horse would have pitched me over his head); by which well-timed and laconic advice, I afterward profited.”
From this time on there was much chasing of buffalo, but little killing of them, except by the old hands. The young ones, of course, neither knew how to shoot nor where to shoot, and our author naïvely remarks, after one of his chases: “To look at a buffalo, one would think that they could not run with such rapidity; but, let him try to follow with an ordinary horse, and he is soon undeceived.”
During the efforts of the greenhorns to kill buffalo this incident occurred: “Mr. Chadwick (of St. Louis, on his first trip, like several of us, for pleasure), seeing a partially blind bull, concluded to ‘make meat’ of him; crawling up close, the buffalo scented him and pitched about every way, too blind to travel straight or fast. Chad fired; the mad animal, directed by the rifle report, charged. How they did ‘lick it’ over the ground! He pursued, yelling, half in excitement, half in fear, till they were close to the wagons, where the pursuer changed tack, only to be shot by one of the teamsters with a nor’-west fusil.”