Great American Horse Stories

by Sharon B. Smith

  “About three o’clock in the afternoon a change came over Gulnare. I had fallen asleep upon the straw, and she had come and awakened me with a touch of her nose. The moment I started up I saw that something was the matter. Her eyes were dull and heavy. Never before had I seen the light go out of them. The rocking of the car as it went jumping and vibrating along seemed to irritate her. She began to rub her head against the side of the car. Touching it, I found that the skin over the brain was hot as fire. Her breathing grew rapidly louder and louder. Each breath was drawn with a kind of gasping effort. The lids with their silken fringe drooped wearily over the lusterless eyes. The head sank lower and lower, until the nose almost touched the floor. The ears, naturally so lively and erect, hung limp and widely apart. The body was cold and senseless. A pinch elicited no motion. Even my voice was at last unheeded. To word and touch there came, for the first time in all our intercourse, no response.

  “I knew as the symptoms spread what was the matter. The signs bore all one way. She was in the first stages of phrenitis, or inflammation of the brain. In other words, my beautiful mare was going mad.

  “I was well versed in the anatomy of the horse. Loving horses from my very childhood, there was little in veterinary practice with which I was not familiar. Instinctively, as soon as the symptoms had developed themselves, and I saw under what frightful disorder Gulnare was laboring, I put my hand into my pocket for my knife, in order to open a vein. There was no knife there. Friends, I have met with many surprises. More than once in battle and scout have I been nigh death; but never did my blood desert my veins and settle so around the heart, never did such a sickening sensation possess me, as when, standing in that car with my beautiful mare before me marked with those horrible symptoms, I made that discovery.

  “My knife, my sword, my pistols even, were with my suit in the care of my friend, two hundred miles away. Hastily, and with trembling fingers, I searched my clothes, the lunch basket, my linen; not even a pin could I find. I shoved open the sliding door, and swung my hat and shouted, hoping to attract some brakeman’s attention. The train was thundering along at full speed, and none saw or heard me. I knew her stupor would not last long. A slight quivering of the lip, an occasional spasm running through the frame, told me too plainly that the stage of frenzy would soon begin.

  “‘My God,’ I exclaimed in despair, as I shut the door and turned toward her, ‘must I see you die, Gulnare, when the opening of a vein would save you? Have you borne me, my pet, through all these years of peril, the icy chill of winter, the heat and torment of summer, and all the thronging dangers of a hundred bloody battles, only to die torn by fierce agonies, when so near a peaceful home?’

  “But little time was given me to mourn. My life was soon to be in peril, and I must summon up the utmost power of eye and limb to escape the violence of my frenzied mare. Did you ever see a mad horse when his madness is on him? Take your stand with me in that car, and you shall see what suffering a dumb creature can endure before it dies. In no malady does a horse suffer more than in phrenitis, or inflammation of the brain. Possibly in severe cases of colic, probably in rabies in its fiercest form, the pain is equally intense. These three are the most agonizing of all the diseases to which the noblest of animals is exposed.

  “Had my pistols been with me, I should then and there, with whatever strength Heaven granted, have taken my companion’s life, that she might be spared the suffering which was so soon to rack and wring her sensitive frame. A horse laboring under an attack of phrenitis is as violent as a horse can be. He is not ferocious as is one in a fit of rabies. He may kill his master, but he does it without design. There is in him no desire of mischief for its own sake, no cruel cunning, no stratagem and malice. A rabid horse is conscious in every act and motion. He recognizes the man he destroys. There is in him an insane desire to kill. Not so with the phrenetic horse. He is unconscious in his violence. He sees and recognizes no one. There is no method or purpose in his madness. He kills without knowing it.

  “I knew what was coming. I could not jump out, that would be certain death. I must abide in the car, and take my chance of life. The car was fortunately high, long, and roomy. I took my position in front of my horse, watchful, and ready to spring. Suddenly her lids, which had been closed, came open with a snap, as if an electric shock had passed through her, and the eyes, wild in their brightness, stared directly at me. And what eyes they were! The membrane grew red and redder until it was of the color of blood, standing out in frightful contrast with the transparency of the cornea. The pupil gradually dilated until it seemed about to burst out of the socket. The nostrils, which had been sunken and motionless, quivered, swelled, and glowed. The respiration became short, quick and gasping. The limp and dripping ears stiffened and stood erect, pricked sharply forward, as if to catch the slightest sound. Spasms, as the car swerved and vibrated, ran along her frame. More horrid than all, the lips slowly contracted, and the white, sharp-edged teeth stood uncovered, giving an indescribable look of ferocity to the partially opened mouth.

  “The car suddenly reeled as it dashed around a curve, swaying her almost off her feet, and, as a contortion shook her, she recovered herself, and rearing upward as high as the car permitted, plunged directly at me. I was expecting the movement, and dodged. Then followed exhibitions of pain, which I pray God I may never see again. Time and again did she dash herself upon the floor, and roll over and over, lashing out with her feet in all directions. Pausing a moment, she would stretch her body to its extreme length, and, lying upon her side, pound the floor with her head as if it were a maul. Then like a flash she would leap to her feet, and whirl round and round until from very giddiness she would stagger and fall. She would lay hold of the straw with her teeth, and shake it as a dog shakes a struggling woodchuck; then dashing it from her mouth, she would seize hold of her own sides, and rend herself. Springing up, she would rush against the end of the car, falling all in a heap from the violence of the concussion.

  “For some fifteen minutes without intermission the frenzy lasted. I was nearly exhausted. My efforts to avoid her mad rushes, the terrible tension of my nervous system produced by the spectacle of such exquisite and prolonged suffering, were weakening me beyond what I should have thought it possible an hour before for anything to weaken me. In fact, I felt my strength leaving me. A terror such as I had never yet felt was taking possession of my mind. I sickened at the sight before me, and at the thought of agonies yet to come.

  ‘“My God,’ I exclaimed, ‘must I be killed by my own horse in this miserable car!’ Even as I spoke the end came. The mare raised herself until her shoulders touched the roof, then dashed her body upon the floor with a violence which threatened the stout frame beneath her. I leaned, panting and exhausted, against the side of the car. Gulnare did not stir. She lay motionless, her breath coming and going in lessening respirations. I tottered toward her, and, as I stood above her, my ear detected a low gurgling sound. I cannot describe the feeling that followed. Joy and grief contended within me. I knew the meaning of that sound.

  “Gulnare, in her frenzied violence, had broken a blood vessel, and was bleeding internally. Pain and life were passing away together. I knelt down by her side. I laid my head upon her shoulders, and sobbed aloud. Her body moved a little beneath me, as if she would be nearer me, looked once more with her clear eyes into my face, breathed a long breath, straightened her shapely limbs, and died. And there, holding the head of my dead mare in my lap, while the great warm tears fell one after another down my cheeks, I sat until the sun went down, the shadows darkened in the car, and night drew her mantle, colored like my grief, over the world.”

  12

  How Comanche Came Into Camp

  by Elbridge Streeter Brooks

  As both an editor and writer, Elbridge Streeter Brooks specialized in books for young readers. His works included biographies of famous Americans, from the Founding Fathers to Civil War generals on b
oth sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. Most of Brooks’s work was nonfiction, but his handful of novels often involved a teenage boy in the midst of an extraordinary event in American history. Such was Master of the Strong Hearts: A Story of Custer’s Last Rally, published in 1898, twenty-two years after Custer’s death on the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory.

  It’s the story of sixteen-year-old Jack Huntingdon, who in 1875 joins his uncle on a government expedition to the Dakota and Wyoming territories. While exploring on his own, Jack is captured by a band of Sioux. He meets a white man named Red Top, an adoptive member of the band, who introduces him to the renowned Sitting Bull. The legendary Lakota chief sends Jack home to the East to carry the message that the Sioux will never sell their lands.

  In Washington Jack meets George Armstrong Custer, who offers him a chance to return to the West. Jack, hoping to meet Red Top again, agrees to go with Custer on a campaign against Sitting Bull. The story reaches its climax in June of 1876 when Custer, after dividing his force into three sections, is soundly defeated by Sitting Bull at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Custer and more than two hundred soldiers and civilians, everyone in his personal command, die in and around what is now called Last Stand Hill.

  Also dead are all the horses of Custer’s unit, or so Jack and the survivors in the other sections of the regiment believe. Jack and the soldiers are burying the Seventh Cavalry dead when they discover that there was indeed one living creature left on the battlefield.

  Jack turned sadly away from the spot in which lay his friend the renegade. After that day’s crowding experience the light-hearted lad could never more be unfamiliar with death. The Valley of the Little Big Horn had indeed been to him a veritable valley of death.

  He found the troopers still at their sad yet brotherly task; but he managed to get the trumpeter apart so that he might tell him what he wished. Briefly he recited Po-to-sha-sha’s story and told of the repentant renegade’s last wish.

  “Wore the flag next to his heart, did he?” said the trumpeter. “Well, by George! such a deserter as that is worth forgiving. I reckon he got more punishment than the service could ever have given him. And turned Indian, too! Well, Jack, drive ahead. You can count me in on this. I reckon we can respect his last wishes, even if he did turn redskin.”

  And so it came to pass that Red Top the renegade had a Christian burial. For Jack and the trumpeter dug a grave for the squaw man beside that of his faithful Indian wife; over it they planted the stars and stripes, and above it, when all was over, the trumpeter played taps, and Po-to-sha-sha the deserter slept in a soldier’s grave.

  Jack rode back to the camp in the upper valley that night feeling that, on that day indeed, he had “supped full of horrors.” But “out of sight” is very soon “out of mind” with a healthy, happy-go-lucky boy, even if he be strong enough of character and stout enough of heart to never forget, though he may soon stop thinking, about the sights and scenes of so memorable a season as that disastrous campaign of the Little Big Horn in 1876.

  Jack found plenty of things to divert his thoughts as he joined the camp; but that night, after mess, as the men sat around the bivouac fire smoking and discussing the events that have now become historic in that fatal incident of Custer’s last rally, he found himself listening intently as the troopers talked the matter over and freely gave their opinion for or against the general’s conduct, and the apparently needless slaughter of more than two hundred gallant men.

  Opinions were widely divided. Some declared that the movement was all wrong from the start.

  “The general oughtn’t to have divided up,” said one critic. “If he’d kept the command together and gone in with us all in a bunch he’d ’a’ licked ’em, sure as shootin’!”

  “That’s so,” chimed in another; “that’s just the way it came out over yonder”—he jerked his head in the direction of that fatal field still known as Custer’s Hill. “Didn’t you see how they lay around there in three or four little piles? They were too much divided. I tell you, there’s nothing an Indian’s so afraid of as massing. He likes to get the outfit separated and go for each part.”

  “I don’t see that,” said a corporal, long in the Seventh; “that’s just the way the general did the thing before, and it never failed till now. If he could have got at ’em early enough, I know it would have been all right, but you see we were a little too late in the day to give them the surprise party we reckoned on.”

  “Anyway,” said one of the self-constituted critics, “the general was too fresh. He was rash, I say—mighty rash. Why didn’t he back out when he saw what he’d got to handle, and wait for the rest of us to come up? I don’t suppose he thought he was going to fight all the Indians in Christendom. Ten to one is bigger odds than even Custer ought to face. Seems to me he should have known that and pulled back in time.”

  “They do say,” observed another of the critics—one who counted himself well posted on the news of the day—“they do say that the general and old man Grant had a set-to over somethin’ or other, down to Washington, and that the President give it to the general hot and heavy. That set him up to make a record for himself out here in the Indian country, and he was just bound to go in and win—the bigger the victory with the smallest outfit, so much the better. And that’s how comes it he’s layin’ out there where he is, and two hundred good fellows alongside of him, instead of legging it after the Indians with us at his heels. Sounds kind of likely now, doesn’t it?”

  “No, sir, I’ll be hanged if it does,” exclaimed Jack’s friend, the trumpeter. “Say, did you see who was out there on that field? There was the general, and Cap’n Tom, his brother, and Mr. Boston Custer, his other brother, and Cap’n Calhoun, his brother-in-law, and that young Autie Reed, his nephew, to say nothing of those officers who were his closest friends, Keogh and Yates and Cook. Does it stan’ to reason that the general would ’a’ gone in, selfish-like and just out o’ spite, and used up his whole family and his friends, only to make a show? No, sir, it don’t. You fellows know such a lot, you make me just sick with your ideas.”

  But the critics were not silenced by this outburst.

  “Well, p’r’aps that ain’t so,” was the response from one of the most pronounced of them; “but I tell you, the general’s tactics were wrong. Why didn’t he go slow when he struck that trail that brought us over here? How do we know that he followed orders in hurrying up his fight? General Terry’s got a cool head, and just as like as not he told Custer to hold on and wait for him and Gibbon’s column as soon as he’d struck the trail.”

  “Lot you know,” said the trumpeter. “Why, I was right by the general’s horse ready to sound the advance when General Terry was bidding him good-bye—up there on the Rosebud, you know. And General Terry said to him—I heard him—says he, ‘Use your own judgment, Custer; if you do strike a big trail, just you do what you think best.’ All he cautioned him was to hold on to his wounded. ‘Whatever you do, Custer,’ he says, ‘hold on to your wounded.’ I heard him say that.”

  “Well, he held on to ’em, sure enough, didn’t he?” remarked one of the troopers. “I reckon none of ’em got away. They were all there.”

  “Right you are, Jimmy,” responded a chorus of comrades, and one remarked, “Say, boys, did you see old Butler—sergeant of Cap’n Tom Custer’s troop? Did you see where he was? I tell you, he put in his best licks ’fore he threw up the sponge. There he lay, all by his lonesome, down toward the ford, and I’ll bet I picked up a pint o’ empty ca’tridge shells under him. How he must have laid them Indians out! He was always a rattling good shot, the sergeant was.”

  “Empty shells!” growled another trooper. “H’m! that don’t say much. I tell you, boys, it was the ca’tridges that whipped us. Nine out of ten of them were defective. They were dirty, and they corroded the ejectors so’s you couldn’t get the empty shells out of the chambers without using your knife to pick ’em
out. That’s what ailed our guns t’ other day. And I tell you it just killed the general’s men. How much you going to do when you’ve got to stop between shots to dig the shells out ’n the ejectors—’specially when the Indians have got better and newer guns than you have? And where did they get them? At the agencies. Government guns, too. What do you say to that? I call it manslaughter, I do. What redress have poor chaps like us got when the government sends us out here to lick the Indians, and then turns round and sells the Indians guns to kill us with—better guns than ours, too?”

  “It’s all dirty politics and favoritism and lettin’ the Indian agents have a chance to make some money, no matter who’s hurt, that does that business,” remarked an indignant comrade. “And we get the worst end of the shoddy contracts and the no-account guns—and that does our business.”

  Whereupon the discussion drifted off into a general arraignment of all in authority over them, as is always the case with all subordinates in warlike or peaceful surroundings, and always has been the case since ever the first man in the world hired another to serve him. Grumbling is the subordinate’s privilege, even if it is not his prerogative.

  But even criticism and grumbling must end in time, and good humor return, as it did in this case around the glimmering bivouac fires on the bluffs of the Little Big Horn. For, notwithstanding the somber nature of their surroundings, their duties of that ghastly day—the same duties for which they would be detailed on the morrow—the troopers must have their relaxation as certainly as their fault-finding. So before long—before taps were sounded and the weary troopers tumbled into bed—they were all skylarking about their quarters; or, dropping into an absurd step, paraded about the fire, singing that good-humored travesty upon themselves just then a favorite in New York music-halls: