bare & smooth & fat with muscle their necks hung in beads of every colour their fine horse bowed legs breeched in leather with fringes for to take away the rain from their flanks so they may ride in all weathers. And all of them did pure peacock about the Ft. & its surrounds making our own ugly shower of bluecoats feel small & plain as pea hens.
I tell you some even had rifles to make a sad soldier green with envy. One had a Sharps that our 1st Sgt. reckoned could only of been stolen from a dead coachman or prospector so fine a weapon it was. But all did carry skinning knives & bows slung cross their backs & quivers stuffed with arrows which we did soon see up close. Steel tipped & as fatal as any bullet they can run straight through a man if fired from near up enough. We could only guess at this then but know it well enough by now God Bless Us.
But them Braves were not there for scalping or fighting no more than ourselves wanting only for to slake the thirst of a long journey & to fill their bellies full of pies & boilt sweets from the post stores selling them. Most of all they was there to wager what they had on shooting & racing & wrestling or rodeo. Anything by Jove them Braves would bet on. 2 pissing flies I tell you & a wager on which would finish 1st making them much the same as your common soldier Bill. I have heard it said by some English & American boys that the Irish soldier is little better in his manners than the Indian & I have come to blows over this but both the Irishman & the Indian love wagering & fighting & supping so there is some common strain between us I will confess though now I hate the red b_______ as much as the English or more even.
But I did not feel this bitter hatred then & so we did wager agin them & they agin us & ourselves agin ourselves & them agin themselves. Well the bets did fly like winter geese over the two days of rest & recreation & in the betting we did learn a thing or 2 about them Braves.
Every soul in the country has heard of the Sioux & his horse but to see it up close is a wonder I shall thank God or the Devil some day for letting me see it. I lost 25¢ right off on Tom riding a race versus a Cheyanne fellow the 2 of them at speed having to lean off their mounts to snatch horse shoes from atop a barrel & hook them round spears stuck in the ground 200 yds. apart & my brother nearly took it I tell you but he was pipped at the post by that Brave on his short legged Paint. 1/2 a nag that Paint looked but a goer & it swung round them staked lances fast as a wife may change her mind. The Indian paints do not show much of beauty or might when put beside a white man’s Quarterhorse but they do go like lightning for the steeple & cover the miles without feed or water as no horse has the right to & no horse of ours can surely. I do imagine them Braves will rare up a finer strain of horse still from all the stock they thieved from us here in the past months & soon there will be no catching them.
But this was of no mind to us then for we saw what they could do & they saw what we could do & it comes to me now that we did not much impress them. Instead they perhaps became much boldened by our poor showing in the games of martial skill between us.
Did you ever see Sir them boys fire their bows? For most men who see it it is the last thing ever they see but there in Laramie we did wager some Braves a buck between 5 of us if 1 of their number could put a quiver full of arrows into a target on a tree from a 100 yds. away. Well in the setting of the wager with one of the Braves speaking between English & Sioux there did arise some confusion & the Indian to do the shooting understood he was to