The U.P. Trail | Page 2

ever westward, up from desert to mountain, up into California,
where the white streams rushed and roared and the stately pines
towered, and seen from craggy heights, deep down, the little blue lakes
gleamed like gems; finally sloping to the great descent, where the
mountain world ceased and where, out beyond the golden land, asleep
and peaceful, stretched the illimitable Pacific, vague and grand beneath
the setting sun.

2
Deep in the Wyoming hills lay a valley watered by a stream that ran
down from Cheyenne Pass; a band of Sioux Indians had an
encampment there. Viewed from the summit of a grassy ridge, the
scene was colorful and idle and quiet, in keeping with the lonely,
beautiful valley. Cottonwoods and willows showed a bright green; the
course of the stream was marked in dark where the water ran, and light
where the sand had bleached; brown and black dots scattered over the
valley were in reality grazing horses; lodge-pole tents gleamed white in
the sun, and tiny bits of red stood out against the white; lazy wreaths of
blue smoke rose upward.
The Wyoming hills were split by many such valleys and many such
bare, grassy ridges sloped up toward the mountains. Upon the side of
one ridge, the highest, there stood a solitary mustang, haltered with a
lasso. He was a ragged, shaggy, wild beast, and there was no saddle or
bridle on him, nothing but the halter. He was not grazing, although the
bleached white grass grew long and thick under his hoofs. He looked
up the slope, in a direction indicated by his pointing ears, and watched
a wavering movement of the long grass.
It was wild up on that ridge, bare of everything except grass, and the
strange wavering had a nameless wildness in its motion. No stealthy

animal accounted for that trembling--that forward undulating quiver. It
wavered on to the summit of the ridge.
What a wide and wonderful prospect opened up to view from this lofty
point! Ridge after ridge sloped up to the Wyoming hills, and these in
turn raised their bleak, dark heads toward the mountains, looming pale
and gray, with caps of snow, in the distance. Out beyond the ridges,
indistinct in the glare, stretched an illimitable expanse, gray and
dull--that was the prairie-land. An eagle, lord of all he surveyed, sailed
round and round in the sky.
Below this grassy summit yawned a valley, narrow and long, losing
itself by turns to distant east and west; and through it ran a faint, white,
winding line which was the old St. Vrain and Laramie Trail.
There came a moment when the wavering in the grass ceased on the
extreme edge of the slope. Then it parted to disclose the hideous visage
of a Sioux Indian in war paint. His dark, piercing, malignant glance
was fixed upon the St. Vrain and Laramie Trail. His half- naked body
rested at ease; a rifle lay under his hand.
There he watched while the hours passed. The sun moved on in its
course until it tipped the peaks with rose. Far down the valley black and
white objects appeared, crawling round the bend. The Indian gave an
almost imperceptible start, but there was no change in his expression.
He watched as before.
These moving objects grew to be oxen and prairie-schooners--a small
caravan traveling east. It wound down the trail and halted in a circle on
the bank of a stream.
The Indian scout slid backward, and the parted grass, slowly closing,
hid from his dark gaze the camp scene below. He wormed his way back
well out of sight; then rising, he ran over the summit of the ridge to
leap upon his mustang and ride wildly down the slope.

3

Bill Horn, leader of that caravan, had a large amount of gold which he
was taking back East. No one in his party, except a girl, knew that he
had the fortune.
Horn had gone West at the beginning of the gold strikes, but it was not
until '53 that any success attended his labors. Later he struck it rich, and
in 1865, as soon as the snow melted on the mountain passes, he got
together a party of men and several women and left Sacramento. He
was a burly miner, bearded and uncouth, of rough speech and taciturn
nature, and absolutely fearless.
At Ogden, Utah, he had been advised not to attempt to cross the
Wyoming hills with so small a party, for the Sioux Indians had gone on
the war-path.
Horn was leading his own caravan and finding for himself the trail that
wound slowly eastward. He did not have a scout or hunter with him.
Eastward-traveling caravans were wont to be small and poorly outfitted,
for only the homesick,