MY CREED

NOW, this is the simple, living faith of a humble heart and mind,

Drunk up from the storm-brewed Western streams, breathed in with the prairie wind.

My paints are crude and my pictures rude, but if some worth they show

Which those may see who have thoughts as free, the rest may let them go.

I hold that the things which make earth good may work most harm in use

If the wit of men heed not the line 'twixt temperance and abuse,

For speech or mood, or drink or food may be a curse at will,

Though, rightly weighed, they only aid the cup of life to fill.

I hold that the silent sea and plain, the mountain, wood, and down.

Are better haunts for the feet of men than the streets of the roaring town,

And that those who tread for the price of bread in the thronging hives of toil

Will stronger grow with the more they know of the kiss of the virgin soil.

I hold that our sons should learn to love, not gods of gold and greed,

But the virile men of brain and brawn who served our country's need,

And should more delight in a clean-cut fight, stout blade and courage whole,

That the morbid skill of a critic's drill in the core of a sin-sick soul.

Three stars that shine on the trail of life can make man's pathway bright,

And one is the strength of the living God, that stands in his heart upright,

And one is a noble woman's love, on which his heart may lean,

And one is the sight of his country's flag, to keep his courage keen.

Who knows the balm of the summer's calm or the chords of the blizzard's hymn

And finds not God in blast and breeze, his sense is strangely dim.

For he whose ear is attuned can hear the very planets sing

That the soul of man, by a God-wrought plan, is the heir of creation's King.

Who feels the joy of the golden days with her who shares his mood

In the sun-washed wastes of the prairie hills or the breaks of the tangled wood;

Who has won the fate of a steel-true mate, real comrade, friend and wife,

He tastes the kiss of Elysian bliss in instant, earthly life.

Who sees the gleam of the Stars and Stripes, on land or sea displayed,

Atilt in the reek of the battle-smoke or aloft o'er the marts of trade—

Unless his veins are the sluggish drains for the blood of a craven race.—

He will gain new life for a better strife, whatever the odds he face.

So that is the rede and the homely creed of one who has spelled it forth

In the rivers' sweep and the splendors deep of the stars of the hardy North;

To some, I ween, it may seem but mean; too short, too blunt, too plain,

But if those I touch who have felt as much, it will not have been in vain.

DAKOTA MILITIA

(1862)

NO "scare-heads" in big city papers,

No "puffs" in Department reports,

No pictures by "special staff artists"

Of assaults on impregnable forts;

We are far from the war-vexed Potomac,

Our fights are too small to make news;

We are merely Dakota militia,

Patrolling the frontier for Sioux.

Three hundred-odd "empire builders,"

Gathered in from three hundred-odd claims,

Far scattered across the wide prairies

From Pierre to the mouth of the James.

Perhaps they seemed little or nothing,

Our losses, our toil, and our pain,

The rush of the war ponies, tearing

Through cornfields and yellowing grain;

The whoop of the hostile at midnight,

The glare of the flaming log shacks,

A beacon of hate and destruction

As we fled, with the foe at our backs;

Our women and young driven, weeping,

Exhausted, half-naked, afraid,

To the refugee huts of Vermillion

Or the sun-smitten Yankton stockade.

Small things to a Nation embattled,

But great to the pioneer band

Who are blazing the roads of the future

Through the wastes of a wilderness land.

We plod past the desolate coulées

In the sweltering afternoon heat.

While the far ridges shine in a waving blue line

Where the earth and the brazen sky meet.

No sound save the hoofs of the column

As they swish through the dry prairie grass,

No life anywhere save a hawk, high in air,

Gazing down as we wearily pass.

There is never a foe we may grapple

In the heat of a steel-clashing fray.

For the quarry we hunt is a shadow in front

That flits, and comes never to bay;

A feather of smoke to the zenith,

The print of a hoof in the sod,

A shot from the grass where the far flankers pass

Sending one more poor comrade to God.

Would we rest when the day's work is over

And the stars twinkle out in the sky?

There is double patrol round the lean water-hole

And the picketed horses hard by.

Breast-down in the rain-rutted gully.

With muskets clutched close in our hands,

The hours of night drag their heavy-winged flight

Like Eternity's slow falling sands.

While the Great Dipper, pinned to the Pole Star,

Swings low in the dome of the North

And, faint through the dark, sounds the prairie wolf's bark

Or a snake from the weeds rustles forth.

And the darkness that chokes like a vapor

Is thronged with the visions which come

Of children and wife and the dear things of life

That peopled the lost cabin home.

Till the East flushes red with the morning

And the dawn-wind springs fresh o'er the plain,

And the reveille's note from the bugle's clear throat

Calls us up to our labors again.

We were not in the fight at Antietam,

We never have seen Wilson's Creek,

We were guiding our trains over Iowa's plains

While the shells at Manassas fell thick,

But we're waging a war for a new land

As the East wages war for the old,

That the mountains and plains of the red man's domains

May be brought to Columbia's fold,

And though only a squad of militia

That the armies back East never knew,

We are playing a game which is largely the same

With the truculent, turbulent Sioux.

Original

THE GIRL OF THE YANKTON STOCKADE

YES, it's pretty, this town. And it's always been so;

We pioneers picked it for beauty, you know.

See the far-rolling bluffs; mark the trees, how they hide

All its streets, and, beyond, the Missouri, bank-wide,

Swinging down through the bottoms. Up here on the height

Is the college. Eh, sightly location? You're right!

It has grown, you may guess, since I've been here; but still

It is forty-five years since I looked from this hill

One morning, and saw in the stockade down there

Our women and children all gathered at prayer,

While we, their defenders, with muskets in rest

Lay waiting the Sioux coming out of the West.

They had swept Minnesota with bullet and brand

Till her borders lay waste as a desert of sand,

When we in Dakota awakened to find

That the red flood had risen and left us behind.

Then we rallied to fight them,—Sioux, Sissetons, all

Who had ravaged unchecked to the gates of Saint Paul.

Is it strange, do you think, that the women took fright

That morning, and prayed; that men, even, turned white

When over the ridge where the college now looms

We caught the first glitter of lances and plumes

And heard the dull trample of hoofs drawing nigh,

Like the rumble of thunder low down in the sky?

Such sounds wrench the nerves when there's little to see;

It seemed madness to stay, it was ruin to flee.

But, handsome and fearless as Anthony Wayne,

Our captain, Frank Ziebach, kept hold on the rein,

Like a bugle his voice made us stiffen and thrill—

"Stand steady, boys, steady! And fire to kill!"

So the most of us stayed. But when dangers begin

You will always find some who are yellow within.

We had a few such, who concluded to steer

For the wagon-train, parked in the centre and rear.

They didn't stay long! But you've heard, I dare say,

Of the girl who discouraged their running away.

What, no? Never heard of Miss Edgar? Why, sir,

Dakota went wild with the praises of her!

As sweet as a hollyhock, slender and tall,

And brave as the sturdiest man of us all.

By George, sir, a heroine, that's what she made.

When her spirit blazed out in the Yankton stockade!

The women were sobbing, for every one knew

She must blow out her brains if the redskins broke through,

When into their midst, fairly gasping with fright,

Came the panic-struck hounds who had fled from the fight.

They trampled the weak in their blind, brutal stride,

Made straight for the wagons and vanished inside.

Then up rose Miss Edgar in anger and haste

And grasped the revolver that hung at her waist;

She walked to the wagon which nearest her lay,

She wrenched at the back-flap and tore it away,

Then aiming her gun at the fellow beneath

She held it point-blank to his chattering teeth.

"Go back to your duty," she cried, "with the men!

Go back, or you'll never see sunrise again!

Do you think, because only the women are here,

You can skulk behind skirts with your dastardly fear?

Get out on the ground. Take your gun. About, face!

And don't look around till you're back in your place!"

Well, he minded; what's more, all the others did, too.

That girl cleared the camp of the whole scurvy crew,

For a pistol-point, hovering under his nose,

Was an argument none of them cared to oppose.

Yet so modest she was that she colored with shame

When the boys on the line began cheering her name!

Well, that's all; just an echo of old border strife

When the sights on your gun were the guide-posts of life.

Harsh times breed strong souls, by eternal decree,

Who can breast them and win—but it's always struck me

That the Lord did an extra good job when He made

Miss Edgar, the girl of the Yankton stockade.

Original

Original

THE BALLAD OF SERGEANT ROSS

THE south wind's up at the break of dawn

From the dun Missouri's breast,

It has tossed the grass of the Council Hill

And wakened the flames on its crest;

The flames of the sentry fires bright,

Ablaze on the prairies pale,

Where sixty men of the Frontier Corps

Are guarding the Government Trail.

A rattle of hoofs from the northern hills,

A steed with a sweat-wrung hide

And Olaf Draim, of the Peska Claim,

Swings off at the captain's side.

A limb of the sturdy Swedes is he,

Marauders in days of old,

But the swart of his face is stricken white

And the grip of his hand is cold.

"Now, hark ye, men of the Frontier Corps,

I ride from the Beaver Creek,

Where I saw a sight at the grim midnight

That might turn a strong man weak.

"Chief Black Bear's out from the Crow Creek lands,

The buzzards his track have showed;

Last eve he pillaged at Old Fort James,

To-day on the Firesteel road,

"And Corporal Stowe, of the Frontier Corps,

On furlough to reap his grain,

At the Peska stage-house lieth dead

With his wife and his children twain."

Then up and spoke First Sergeant Ross,

Who had bunked with Corporal Stowe:

"By the glory of God, they shall pay in blood

The debt of that dastard blow!

"Ye know the path to the Crow Creek lands;

It is sown with this spawn of hell,

And there's deep ravine and there's plum-hedge green

To shelter a foeman well.

"Now, who of my comrades mounts with me

For a murdered mess-mate's wrong,

That the Sioux who rides with those scalps at his side

May swing from a hempen thong?"

Of three-score men there were only ten

Would gird for that chase of death.

Quoth Ross: "As ye please. For the cur, his fleas,

But men for the rifle's breath."

They have tightened cinches and passed the lines

Ere the lowland mists have flown;

The men are astride of the squadron's best,

And Ross, of the Captain's roan.

They ride till the crickets have sought the shade;

They ride till the sun-motes glance;

And they have espied on a far hillside

The whirl of the Sioux scalp-dance.

Then it's up past the smouldering stage-house barn

And out by the well-curb's marge;

The Sioux are a-leap for the tether-ropes:—

"Revolvers! Guide centre! Charge!"

The Sioux, they flee like a wild wolf-pack

At the flick of the shot-tossed sod,

Six braves have lurched to the fore fetlocks

And two of the Sergeant's squad.

But Ross has tightened his sabre-belt

And given the roan his head,

And set his pace for a single chase,

A furlong's length ahead.

He has set his pace for the chief, Black Bear,

Who shrinks from a strong man's strife

But flaunts in the air the long, brown hair

Of the scalp of the Corporal's wife.

The eight, they follow like swirled snow-spume,

A-drive o'er an ice-bound bar,

But the redskin's track is the dim cloud-wrack

That streams in the sky afar.

They ride till the hearts of their steeds are dead

And they gallop with lolling tongues,

And the tramp of their feet is a rhythmic beat

To the sob of their panting lungs.

And two are down in a prairie draw

And three on a chalk-stone ledge.

And three have won to the Bon Homme Run

And stuck in the marsh-land sedge.

But Black Bear's horse still holds the course,

Though her breath is a thick-drawn moan,

And a length behind is the straining stride

Of the Captain's steel-limbed roan.

The Sergeant rides with a loose-thrown rein,

Nor sabre nor shoot will he

Till the pony has pitched at a gopher mound

And flung her rider free;

And Ross has wrenched the knife from his hand

And smitten him to the ground;—

"Did ye think to win to the Bijou Hills,

Ye whelp of a Blackfoot hound?

"I had riddled your carcass this six miles back

And left ye to rot on the plain,

Had the blood of the slaughtered not called on me

That I hail ye to Peska again,

"To point this lesson to all your tribe.

That the price of a white man's soul

No longer goes, in the mart of death,

Unpaid to its last dark goal.

"Wherefore, that your tribesmen may see and feel

The cost of a white man's wrong,

And to sweeten the rest of my mess-mate's kin,

Ye shall swing from a hempen thong."

He has slung the chief to the saddle-bow,

Triced up in his own raw-hide,

And has borne him back to the stage-house yard,

All bleak on the green hillside.

And they swung him at dawn from a scaffold stout,

As a warning to all his kind,

To fatten the birds and to scare the herds

And to sport with the prairie wind.

Original

THE SPRINGFIELD CALIBRE FIFTY

WAS wrought of walnut blocks and rolled rod steel,

I was hammered, lathed, and mandrelled, stock and plate,

I was gauged and tested, bayonet to heel,

Then shipped for service, twenty in a crate.

For I was the calibre fifty,

Hi!—dough-boys, you haven't forgot

The click of my tumblers shifty

And the kick of the butt when I shot?

I was nothing too light on your shoulder,

You were glad when you stacked me o' nights,

But I'd drill an Apach'

From the thousand-yard scratch

If you'd only hold straight on the sights—old sights!

My trusty old Buffington sights!

In oil-soaked chests at Watervliet I've laid,

I have rusted in Vancouver through the rains,

I have scorched on Fort Mohave's baked parade,

And caked with sand at Sedgwick on the plains.

For I led every march on the border,

And I taught every rookie to fight;

Though he'd curse me in close marching order,

Lord!—he'd hug me on picket at night

As he thought of the herd-guard at Buford

When Sitting Bull swooped within reach,

And 'twas every man's life,

It was bullet and knife

Had my cartridges jammed in the breech—lock breech!

In my solid block, hammer-lock breech!

It was I who lashed the Modocs from their lair

With Wheaton in the Tule Lava Bed;

It was I who drove Chief Joseph to despair

When I streaked the slopes of Bear Paw with his dead.

For I was a proof most impressive—

The Springfield the infantry bore—

To redskins with spirits aggressive

That peace is more healthful than war;

I showed them on Musselshell River

And again, yet more plain, at Slim Butte;

They were plucky as sin

But they had to come in

When they found how the Springfield could shoot—

Shoot, shoot!

How my blue-bottle barrel could shoot!

I was Vengeance when, with Miles through trackless snow,

The "fighting Fifth" took toll for Custer's fall;

I was Justice when we flayed Geronimo;

I was Mercy to the famished horde of Gall.

Oh, I was slow-plodding and steady;

Not hot, like the carbine, to raid,

But when he found trouble too ready

He was glad of his big brother's aid;

For sometimes he'd scatter the outposts,

Then wait, if the foe proved too stout,

Till, at "Front into line!"

It was business of mine

While the infantry volleyed the rout—rout, rout!

While I cleared out the village in rout!

But those years have sped; long silent are my lips;

Now my sturdy grandson rules the host I knew,

And a drab-clad army trusts his five-shell clips

As of old the blue-clad held my one shot true.

Still, my dotage takes solace of glory

From my turbulent youth and its scenes.

As vivid with valorous story

As the isles of the far Philippines.

Though the steel-jacket smokeless is sovereign

And I'm proud of my name on his crest,

It was black smoke and lead

When the skirmish lines spread

With the Springfield that conquered the West—West,

West!

With the hard-fighting arm of the West!

Original

A GARRISON CHRISTMAS

NOW, all you homesick rookies who are blue on Christmas Day,

Though bunked in pleasant barracks, come listen to my lay!

When you're stationed snug at Flagler, Leavenworth, or Hampton Roads,

Where the postman three times daily brings your Christmas cheer in loads,

What ground have you for kicking? You would glorify your fate

If you'd been in old Fort Buford on Christmas, '68!

Just a bunch of squatty cabins built of cottonwoods and clay

With roofs of sod and sedge-grass and windows stuffed with hay,

And when the winter blizzards came howling overhead

And we couldn't reach the timber, we burned our bunks, instead,

While, camped around the gullies, lay five hundred Sioux in wait;

That's how we stood at Buford on Christmas, '68!

We were out beyond the border a thousand miles or more,

A wilderness of drifting snows behind us and before;

Just a bunch of U. S. doughboys, hollow-eyed from march and fight,

For you bet we all kept busy with Sitting Bull in sight,

And our old buzz-saw he'd captured never let us sleep too late

When he used it as a war-drum around Christmas, '68!

I remember well that morning, it was twenty-four below,

With a bright sun striking crystals from the endless fields of snow.

We had finished with our breakfast of beans and bacon-fat,

When someone cried, "Look yonder, along the bluffs! What's that?"

We looked, then cheered like demons. The mail-guard, sure as fate!

A welcome sight, I tell you, on Christmas, '68!

They ploughed in through the snow-drifts across the barrack-yard,

Their fur caps rimmed with hoar-frost, their horses breathing hard.

They bore orders from headquarters, but we soldiers bade them hail

Because they'd brought us, also, our sacks of Christmas mail.

We had never hoped till springtime to have that precious freight;

Was it strange it raised our spirits on Christmas, '68?

We crowded in a corner around old Sergeant "Jack"—

A Santa Claus in chevrons with a mail-bag for his pack—

And with horse-play, yells, and laughter we greeted every flight

As he called the names and fired them their bundles left and right.

For some there came no tokens, but they kept their faces straight

And smiled at others' fortune on Christmas, '68.

"Tom Flint!" A woollen muffler from his sister back in Maine.

"James Bruce!" His father'd sent him a silver watch and chain.

"Hans Goetz!" A flute and song-book from the far-off Baltic's shore.

"George Kent!" A velvet album from his folks in Baltimore.

And how we cheered the pictures from the girls in every State

To their sweethearts in the army, on Christmas, '68!

"Fred Gray!" A sudden silence fell on that noisy place.

Poor Fred lay in the foot-hills with the snow above his face.

But his bunkie loosed the package of its wrappings, one by one—

'Twas a Bible from his mother, with a blessing for her son.

And the hardest heart was softened as we thought of our deadmate

And that lonely, stricken mother on Christmas, '68.

But the Sergeant raised the shadow as he shouted, "Jerry Clegg!"

In hospital was Jerry with a bullet through his leg—

The gayest lad in Buford—-and we plunged out through the drifts

To take his package to him, forgetting our own gifts.

'Twas a green silk vest from Dublin, and, bedad, it sure was great

To hear old Jerry chuckle on Christmas, '68!

Thus it went, with joke and banter—what a romping time we had!

The redskins in the coulées must have thought we'd gone clean mad,

For they started popping bullets at the sentinels on guard

And we had to stop our nonsense, and sortie good and hard.

But that was daily routine—always got it, soon or late—

If we hadn't, we'd felt lonely on Christmas, '68.

So I'm here to tell you rookies who are kicking on your lot

That you don't know service hardship as we got it, served up hot,

For the Philippines are easy and Hawaii is a snap

When compared to fighting Injins over all the Western map,