Warrior Gap | Page 4

to defeat the
enterprise. And then when the whistling engines passed the forks of the
Platte and began to climb up the long slope of the Rockies to Cheyenne
and Sherman Pass, the trouble and disaffection spread to tribes far more
numerous and powerful further to the north and northwest; and there
rose above the hordes of warriors a chief whose name became the
synonym for deep rooted and determined hostility to the
whites--Machpealota (Red Cloud)--and old John Folsom, he whom the
Indians loved and trusted, grew anxious and troubled, and went from
post to post with words of warning on his tongue.
"Gentlemen," he said to the commissioners who came to treat with the
Sioux whose hunting grounds adjoined the line of the railway, "it's all
very well to have peace with these people here. It is wise to cultivate
the friendship of such chiefs as Spotted Tail and
Old-Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses but there are irreconcilables beyond
them, far more numerous and powerful, who are planning, preaching
war this minute. Watch Red Cloud, Red Dog, Little Big Man. Double,
treble your garrisons at the posts along the Big Horn; get your women
and children out of them, or else abandon the forts entirely. I know
those warriors well. They outnumber you twenty to one. Reinforce your
garrisons without delay or get out of that country, one of the two. Draw

everything south of the Platte while yet there is time."
But wiseacres at Washington said the Indians were peaceable, and all
that was needed was a new post and another little garrison at Warrior
Gap, in the eastward foothills of the range. Eight hundred thousand
dollars would build it, "provided the labor of the troops was utilized,"
and leave a good margin for the contractors and "the Bureau." And it
was to escort the quartermaster and engineer officer and an
aide-de-camp on preliminary survey that "C" Troop of the cavalry,
Captain Brooks commanding, had been sent on the march from the
North Platte at Frayne to the headwaters of the Powder River in the
Hills, and with it went its new first lieutenant, Marshall Dean.
CHAPTER II.
Promotion was rapid in the cavalry in those days, so soon after the war.
Indians contributed largely to the general move, but there were other
causes, too. Dean had served little over a year as second lieutenant in a
troop doing duty along the lower Platte, when vacancies occurring gave
him speedy and unlooked-for lift. He had met Mr. Folsom only once.
The veteran trader had embarked much of his capital in business at
Gate City beyond the Rockies, but officers from Fort Emory, close to
the new frontier town, occasionally told him he had won a stanch friend
in that solid citizen.
"You ought to get transferred to Emory," they said. "Here's the band,
half a dozen pretty girls, hops twice a week, hunts and picnics all
through the spring and summer in the mountains, fishing ad libitum,
and lots of fun all the year around." But Dean's ears were oddly deaf. A
classmate let fall the observation that it was because of a New York girl
who had jilted him that Dean had forsworn society and stuck to a troop
in the field: but men who knew and served with the young fellow found
him an enthusiast in his profession, passionately fond of cavalry life in
the open, a bold rider, a keen shot and a born hunter. Up with the dawn
day after day, in saddle long hours, scouting the divides and ridges,
stalking antelope and black-tail deer, chasing buffalo, he lived a life
that hardened every muscle, bronzed the skin, cleared the eye and brain,

and gave to even monotonous existence a "verve" and zest the dawdlers
in those old-time garrisons never knew.
All the long summer of the year after his graduation, from mid-April
until November, he never once slept beneath a wooden roof, and more
often than not the sky was his only canopy. That summer, too, Jessie
spent at home, Pappoose with her most of the time, and one year more
would finish them at the reliable old Ohio school. By that time
Folsom's handsome new home would be in readiness to receive his
daughter at Gate City. By that time, too, Marshall might hope to have a
leave and come in to Illinois to welcome his sister and gladden his
mother's eyes. But until then, the boy had said to himself, he'd stick to
the field, and the troop that had the roughest work to do was the one
that best suited him, and so it had happened that by the second spring
of his service in the regiment no subaltern was held in higher esteem by
senior officers or regarded with more envy by the lazy ones