now residing in Kansas City, who was a
driver and messenger thirty-five years, and had many adventures, told me
the following incidents:

I have crossed the plains sixty-five times by wagon and
coach. In July, 1861, I was employed by Barnum, Vickery,
and Neal to drive over what was known as the Long Route,
that is, from Fort Larned to Fort Lyon, two hundred and
forty miles, with no station between. We drove one set of
mules the whole distance, camped out, and made the journey,
in good weather, in four or five days. In winter we
generally encountered a great deal of snow, and very cold
air on the bleak and wind-swept desert of the Upper Arkansas,
but we employees got used to that; only the passengers did
any kicking. We had a way of managing them, however,
when they got very obstreperous; all we had to do was to
yell Indians! and that quieted them quicker than forty-rod
whiskey does a man.

We gathered buffalo-chips, to boil our coffee and cook our
buffalo and antelope steak, smoked for a while around the
smouldering fire until the animals were through grazing,
and then started on our lonely way again.

Sometimes the coach would travel for a hundred miles through
the buffalo herds, never for a moment getting out of sight
of them; often we saw fifty thousand to a hundred thousand
on a single journey out or in. The Indians used to call
them their cattle, and claimed to own them. They did not,
like the white man, take out only the tongue, or hump, and
leave all the rest to dry upon the prairie, but ate every
last morsel, even to the intestines. They said the whites
were welcome to all they could eat or haul away, but they
did not like to see so much meat wasted as was our custom.

The Indians on the plains were not at all hostile in 1861-62;
we could drive into their villages, where there were tens
of thousands of them, and they would always treat us to
music or a war-dance, and set before us the choicest of
their venison and buffalo. In July of the last-mentioned
year, Colonel Leavenworth, Jr., was crossing the Trail in
my coach. He desired to see Satanta, the great