River Falls journal. [volume] (River Falls, Pierce County, Wis.) 1872-2019, 1877-07-19
1'he Dogs Nobility.

Prom the Cincinnati Commercial
think it was in 80 or 81, when | was
crossing the plains to reach the gold-fields
There was only three of us, and we were
all the time ON the lookout for Indians.
believe the Mormons had only settled at
Salt Lake about four years previous; and
to cross the plains was in those days a
risky undertaking. We rode all day, and
at night one always stood guard.
There was an awful silence in those
plains, and sometimes the silence weighed
down upon us so strangely that we would
ride on for hours without speaking, and
you never heard even the barking Of a
coyote
The air was rare and transparent and
the expanse above us level as a vast sea,
with occasional billowy heaves which
one could see at a distance of wenty
miles. 1t was nearly always the same,
except where the buffalo skulls were very
thickly strewn, or where those queer In
dian graves raised on poles stood out
against the horizon, like odd black in
sects with very long legs.
So we came at last to the head OF the
Sweetwatcr-then nearly thousand
miles from any settlement; and the skulls
Law very thick thcre-thick as powders in
torrent-bed sometimes; and there were
little mounds all over the plain and these
mounds were all graves.
Each grave had great buffalo or elk
skull-all white and bleached and ghast-
ly-looking-at one end of it. | remem-
Der some Of the elk skulls must have
measured five feet between the tips Of the
horns, and the bones was white and dry
as salt. And on every skull that was
placed on mound there had been writ
ten in pencil or scratched in with knife,
the name of the dead man below, such as
" William Rawlins, died 3th May; %
years, Pike county, Missouri
They were nearly ali from Pike county,
Missouri, and we got tired of reading so
many of them. There were other skulls
lying along the road here and there with
little sentences written on them in
pencil, stating that so-and-so and so-and-
so had passed by on such day. We
used to pick up clean skull ourselves,
oEce in a while, and write something OF
this kind on, so that we might have a
sort of clue as to what had become of us,
if we should get killed.
Well as we were stumbling over the
graves and reading the inscriptions on
the skulls, l suddenly saw a great
dog rise from a mound at some
distance and slowly retreat to an
other mound still further off. where he
turned and stared at us. He was one OF
those huge English mastiffs, and must
have belonged to one of the dead men
You could see through him; no starving
wolf could have been gaunter, and his
great protruding eyes had the widest
/! look YOU ever saw. lie seemed to lave
/ lost his voice and his flesh together, and
looked like the very phantom of dog
We called and whistled to him, but he
never barked-only stared at us with the
same wild look Then we went to the
grave he had been lying On. and it was
i nameless-there was no skull except the
the long cofin-shape of the mound.
1--WE tried for ever 50 long TO coax the
+ dog even to come and eat something, but
/ he would not come near us, and would
run off in q weak, shy way if we tried tc
approach him. God knows how long be
/ had been there We remained a whole
afternoon, just to dig little hole for va
ter for the dog; You could strike water
there at four or five feet, right among the
graves. Then we left some crackers aud
dry food for him and rode away west