we must come down from the hilltop road in the end for a long flat stretch & this is where they descend upon us every day to harry our woodtrain so that every day we lose men & mules & horses & wagons.
So I say to you Sir as I sit here in this bitter hell of a freezing winter Guardhouse that this is a cursed spot to spite its beauty. Bridger & the scouts knew it well from the start & now Carrington The Carpenter must know it too but we have come too far for turning.
That very 1st evening we set up camp here in this Valley you would not believe it but on the grassy rise we now call Pilot Hill 2 or 3 Indians on horseback set up watching us as we did corral the wagons & picket the horses & roll out the canvas under which we would live until we raised up proper barracks of logs. Well them Indians just sat there watching us stake a claim to the fine long grass where their buffalo once grazed & they were like harbingers of death coming I tell you. Betimes I wonder now did we seem harbingers of something terrible for them too our band of wandering white faces like the first fat drops of rain to the fore of a coming storm.
But mostly I do think now that if Col. Carrington was a more bloody minded type of up & at them officer & had of loaded up the Mountain Howizter that 1st night & fired a hell of canister at them Indians on Pilot Hill well maybe Red Cloud & his Braves would imagine us to be a hot & terrible consort of soldiery & think to keep a safe distance from us. They maybe would of thought us not worth the loss of Indian blood for a mere patch of land or safe passage on a trail. But Carrington is not such a man & still has no notion of our true business here in the Valley at all & for this indecision the common soldier Bill does suffer greatly. Is it to protect the Bozeman Trail for travellers to the gold fields in Virginia City he wonders as he frets over his building plans? Establish a forceful presence in the territory we hear other officers say? Pacify the savages? Distract the Indians while the railroad is rammed through farther South? All this is thought by the soldiers but I wonder could even Carrington tell you the truth. He could not tell you is my best guess.
The one thing Carrington did know is that he was to build his great Ft. in the wilderness his City Of Logs as the Sioux call it & start this we did the very day after arriving. For to be fair to him a finer man for getting forts built you will not meet. He is a great man for the planning & building & constructing of things but he is just not a fighting man when a fighting man is what is needed for a War such as we do find ourselves in.
So we set to building our home in this Valley. Well I do not need to tell you it was fatigue details from the cock crow. It was clearing & levelling the ground & chambermaiding the horses & livestock & standing picket over them for though the Indians did nothing as yet their reputation for coveting beef cattle & horse flesh did well proceed them.
And we did scout some Tom & myself (which does be another fine advantage to being a horse soldier) even riding out with Jim Bridger once or twice. Though he is a reknowned man I will say that we saw him to be some fierce kind of a blowhard & canard spinner as we rode the valleys & forests at the foothills of the Big Horns at his side. Up & down the Tongue River we rode too searching for sign of Indian camps or war parties in our cabbage patch. We found none of this though later we would do when it was too late to be any good to us which did not much recommend Mr. Bridger as a scout. But Lord Save Us that fellow could talk the meat from a chicken bone he could. A blatherer I tell you though not a bad sort he was more clown than cat as is the saying but