Woodville Republican. (Woodville, Miss.) 185?-current, 1889-12-07
A NARROW ESCAPE.
In the Front Of a Stampede of
Buffaloes.

Jean Darblaye, who is now a Mon
tana ranchman, is a modest man, and
seldom recounts any adventures in which
he bore prominent part; but he was
lately persuaded to tell the story of one
of his experiences, which deserves wider
currency than it has yet had.
Jean was the son of French-Canadian
parents, but was born at frontier post
in Northern Minnesota. At seven years
of age he was sent to st. Louis to school,
envy OF ot. PHILIPPE, but returned every
spring by boat to spend the summer
with his father at the post.
His time while at home was occupied
in athletic sports and, as he grew old
er, in hunting His comrades were In
dian boys, young Sioux, who taught him
to shoot with bow and arrow, to ride
their stoclly and often stubborn little
ponies, and to play at lacrosse. He used
also to paint his face, and join them in
their mimic war dances, in which he
could yell as loudly as any of his COM
panions. When Jean was fifteen years of
age, his father moved westward and es-
tablished trading post on the Upper
Missouri, near the Belted Buttes Here
he bought furs in connection with the
Northwest Fur Company.
Jean left school, and for the next four
years assisted his father in buying and
trading ''Indian goods for furs, and in
caring for the great bales in the store
room, which had to be ''camphored" and
"tobaccoed" to protect them from damp
ness and moths. When he was nine
teen years old, his father died of a
wound received from a drunken Man
dan. Mr.. Darblaye's business affairs
were not in prosperous condition at
this time, and when his accounts with
the Fur Company were settled there
were but a few hundred dollars re-
naming for Jean.
Left to shift for himself, the young
frontiersman set to work at once
with an enterprise characteristic of
his race. Feeling that he had n ot
the means nor the experience to enable
him to successfully compete with tho
agents of the Northwest Fur Company,
he went to st. Louis, and there made ar
engagements for the sale of buffalo hides,
tongues and hump steak" He
engaged a boat to make regular
fall and spring trips to the Belt
cd Buttes region for the loads of hides
and meat which he proposed to furnish
to the st. Louis market.
Having purchased some improved
guns and other articles needful for his
undertaking, he went back to the Great
Bend of the Missouri, hired three half
breeds and their squaws as assistants,
and turned buffalo-hunter.
The young hunters first season was a
prosperous one. He kept two yoke of
oxen, wagon and driver busy for six
weeks in hauling hides and meat to the
to be cured and stored.
Jean sent two boat-loads down the
river the first autumn, two the next
spring, and cleared about three hundred
dollars off each cargo. This amount he
as fair return for his labor
and investment, as risks were scarcely
counted in that region.
The months of September and October
and of May and June were the periods
in which the great herds migrated be-
tween their summer. pastures on the
high prairies of the British possessions
md their winter feeding-grounds along
the Niobrara and the Platte. At these
times the country about jeans head
quarters swarmed with buffalo
Almost daily throughout these months
great herds of buffalo crossed the river
above and below the young traders
1lock-house, and his most profitable
method of hunting was to shoot them
rom a boat as they swan above his post.
The dead bodies were fioated down to
within few rods Of the post stockade,
md hauled out upon the bank, where
hey were skinned, and the tongues and
lump steaks cut from them. In this
manner buffaloes we're killed and
irought down from points twenty, and
ven thirty, miles distant