After a furlough of some years, I returned in 1840 to the west, and after reporting for duty to the headquarters of the department, was ordered to join a squadron of my regiment then stationed on the Red River. The navigation of the western rivers was then most uncertain, and I was ordered to cross the intermediate country by land instead of trusting to the tortuous navigation of the Arkansas, emphatically one of those streams of which John Randolph said, “they were dry in summer and choked up with ice during the winter.”
The old officers of the post told me I might easily have my orders changed by applying to the general, and advised me to do so, as my route lay through a peculiarly wild and desolate country. They told me what they had heard of the Ozark Mountains, of the precipices and torrents, the almost impassable _resacas_, _etc._ I was, however, an old _coureur des bois_, and all this but stimulated me to attempt the passage. Fort Gibson lay at the head of navigation at that time, though steamboats have since passed far above the Cape Farewell of 1840. Similarly situated was Fort Towson, on the Red River; between the two lay the country of the Cherokees, Chactas, and Chichasas, and many formidable rivers, such as the Canadienne, the Verdigris, and the whole of the southern tributaries of the Arkansas. To cross this country with all its difficulties on the first Wednesday in April, 1810, I left Fort Gibson, with no equipage, or what Cæsar calls _impedimenta_, other than one pack mule, loaded with provisions, and a servant, like myself, mounted, who rejoiced in the name of Barny. I often wonder what has become of him, and whether, like Latour d’Auvergne, first grenadier of France, he may not have “died on the field of glory,” during the Mexican war.
As my orders contained no recommendation to make the journey with peculiar rapidity, and as I was aware that nothing awaited me at Fort Towson but the monotonous existence of a subaltern, I loitered along the road systematically, as a veteran colonel _en route_ to reinforce a militia general, and on Sunday lay by on the banks of a picturesque stream, whiling away time with my rod and angle, which Isack Walton recommends as “fosterers of meditation, and gratitude to God for having made so many fine fish for man’s especial benefit,” and which I was too old a soldier to be without in the North American wilderness. Monday broke upon me cold and chill, and wearied even by my voluntary halt, I set out to continue my journey. There had been during the night a mist and sleet, so that the prairie, which on the day before had looked like a garden covered with periwinkles, the beautiful wild indigo, and the sensitive-plant, was now become a glacier. I rode on, therefore, wrapped in the cape of my dragoon cloak, and scarcely noticing what passed around me. Few persons except half-breeds had ever crossed the prairie in this direction before, and having to depend merely on general direction for my course, it is not surprising that I became lost. Any one ever lost in the north-western prairie is aware that when once astray, every attempt at correction makes matters worse, and what with the uniformity of the whole face of the country, at nightfall I was utterly bewildered. I was forced to encamp on the bald prairie, sacrificing to my comfort the solitary tree which I afterward learned was a land-mark. It made a very bad fire, being filled with sap, but sufficed to broil a rasher of bacon which, with a cup of coffee transformed into what the Spaniards call a _gloria_ by a glass of “old corn,” constituted my supper. The sleet had by this time disappeared, and the cattle hobbled and allowed to wander at will, fared better than I, on the young prairie grass, which they relished not a little after their dry provender at Fort Gibson. Tuesday came fair and bright, and far in the distance I saw one of the Ozark’s peaks rising tall and solitary in just the direction I had not been marching on the day before. To it I directed my course.
