Stalled in a Storm
Most days I shuffle over to this clouded window and spend a lot of time sitting and remembering. In years past I sat with friends and spent hours talking about the old days while we played a few hands of cards. I am the last one, though and know I will soon join them in silence, but I want my family to know my story. I have experienced many things, some still play in my head, but mostly I dwell on the war and my freighting days. Considering my age I am lucky to be alive since either one could have been the end of me, and it is only my fellow companions on those journeys who knew and understood what we went through. So much has been written about the war but nothing about that time we got stranded in a three day blizzard with our wagons and oxen. At the time the location had no name on a map; it was just the place south of the big bend of the Sheyenne River in what is now North Dakota. I want to start there.
…
We had to stop; the wind drove the snow with brisk gales and wrapped us in a small, white world from which we could not see beyond to the next wagon. Our usual task of parking the wagons proved impossible since we could not see or hear the wagon boss, and by the time he rode back within earshot hollering and screaming, the train sat in muddled disarray. The oxen needed attention, we unhitched them but kept them yoked together. Feed and water had to wait. We tethered them to the wagons so they would not drift across the prairie with the wind at their tails.
Hunkering down for the night we tried to light cook fires, but every time someone's shaking hands struck a match, the stiff wind snuffed it out. More than anything I wanted to wrap my cold fingers around a cup of hot coffee, but tonight there would be none. I chewed on hardtack and tried to think of other places and better times. By morning we would roll again so all any of us could do was try to get some sleep, a wish not realized since our bed rolls did little to chase the chill. We huddled there all night listening to the wind drum the wagon canvas against the bows.
Caught on a high plain was not the place we wanted to be when a December blizzard roared in and piled snow so deep that our train mired in the drifts. The storm caught us with 45 wagons and as many yokes of oxen on open ground. The wagon master, taken sick with high fever in Fort Ransom, stayed back, but curiously he put a man with little experience in charge of the train to lead us the sixty miles back to Fort Abercrombie. Most of us would have felt a lot more comfortable taking orders from one other man, but he and the boss never saw eye to eye. For reasons known only to him, the new man directed us to take the longer route around the bend of the river where we now sat stalled instead of the shorter low water trail where the river needed crossing only twice, at the Brunton ford and the Shin ford. With jobs hard to get, the men kept quiet and did as they were told, although quiet is maybe not the best word, this was a profane bunch who cursed and grumbled first thing in the morning when they opened their mouths and the last thing before rolling up in their blankets.
Donald Stevenson, a Scotchman, from Osakis, Minnesota owned the ox and wagon outfit and held the freighting contract to supply Fort Ransom, an outpost established just six months previously in June of 1867. He was not traveling with us on this trip. An ambitious sort, he worked on other pursuits, too, but planned to meet us somewhere along the trail as we returned to Fort Abercrombie.
Before coming out here I wore the uniform of the Union Army; now along with many another veteran of the war, I found myself drifting westward on the cusp of new country. I hired on as a teamster in St. Cloud and was sent to the depot to pitch in and help load the freight wagons. A day later we started out on a westerly bearing to Fort Abercrombie, then on to Fort Ransom where that isolated garrison heartily welcomed our arrival. After unloading we turned the oxen out to rest and graze on the prairie for a couple of days while we busied ourselves greasing wagon wheels and fixing worn or broken gear.
This place was on the edge of everything we called civilization. West of here Indians hostile to our presence still roamed about, though we kept a sharp eye out for them on our trail,too. The fort seemed to be on constant alert and sentries watched around the clock for signs of an Indian attack. This was not a training exercise for the soldiers. Just the year before a company of men stationed at Fort Phil Kearney died in a battle when they rode to provide escort for a wood-chopping crew. Earlier their commander William Fetterman had said he could defeat the whole Indian nation with eighty men. Well, that is how many he led and that is how many died on the day known as the Fetterman Massacre. Then in August, just five months before we got here in Fort Ransom, Red Cloud's warriors again attacked a wood crew out of Fort Kearney. This time they and their escort of soldiers fared better when they arranged their wagon boxes to fight behind. New and fast-firing breech loading rifles evened out the odds, too, and they drove the Indians away.
