The Coconino weekly sun., 1894-01-25
JUMPED BY THE SIOUX.
Hard Luck of an Exploring Party in the Yellowstone.

in the Yellowstone.
 My story begins back at Bozeman in ''64," said James Gourley at the Montana club to New York Sun reporter. "Boze- man was then a town where things went on a run--a regular bird with the feathers on. It was a day all night in the night time, as the poet, CyWarman, wrote about Creede. The streets were filled with bull teams, fighting freight CTS, stampeders and strangers from every corner of the country. The gambling houses never stopped to clean the bark from the floor, and on every corner you would see groups of men listening to some orator who had dis covered a new gulch. Every body had money and blew it, because he expected to have loads of it before spring.
 Well, one day in the gold exchange l happened to save a young fellow named Wiseman from a row, and we struck up an acquaintance. He had been sent out by the government to ex- plore an unknown region now known as the Yellowstone park and had come to Bozeman to start the expedition. He wanted me to make the outfit, agreeing to pay for everything and let me boss the train at a salary of five hundred dollars in gold a month. I put up the figure because I knew we were going to have trouble with the Sioux. Then I picked out three good men-all devil-may-care fellows who would fight to the line There was Henry Maloney, a young fellow who had gone wild in the east and whose 'people paid him a salary to keep away from home; a freighter called Right Side Jack, because when drunk he
 was always claiming to be right side up, and Brule who had come down the spring before from the Red river country and was rattling good cook
 I've fitted out two wagons, loaded with the best of everything that Uncle Sam money would buy, calculating to live we'll anyhow, even if nobody got back alive. We weren't thinking much about that, but l knew it was risky business. The boys gave us good send off at the Gold Exchange corner, and off we started, going down the val ley toward the Yellowstone, which we expected to follow south until we reached the geyser country. Nobody in the crowd knew much about these ,geysers then. Two years before trap per said he came from there after hay ing fight with Indians, but so far as we knew he was the only white man that had ever been there. I recollect his telling that these geysers were big streams that come from hell, and, ac- scording to what the Sioux Indians said, the water boiled only when the devil was getting ready to cook the Chey- .ennes. Then he said, besides, that there was big hole where he looked down and saw big bars of gold Ill stamped, but we thought he was crazy or lying and didn't pay much attention to him I remember Wiseman-we called him. the professor-saying that it wouldn't surprise him much to find gold, seeing that the country had been sort of torn to pieces by earthquakes, and of course that set us all on an edge and kept us thinking how we would go back home and cut figure with Vanderbilt and dhe rest of them.
 Nothing occurred much to disturb sas for the first week out. The weather was fine, for it was in the fall of the year and the travelling was good for a country where there were no trails
 We found good game along the Yellow stone, which we struck and followed down. There were plenty of fine an stelopes, which were mighty shy. And there was no end of black-tailed deer, mountain trout and birds. We didn't see any Indian signs for ten days, or in fact until we got along about where Cinnabar now stands for the entrance to the park Then one morning when I got up early to catch mess of trout for breakfast looked over across the range which lay to the west of us about twenty miles, and see long line of blue smoke curling up into the air in funnel shape. The air was cool and clear. and l could see the smoke lined out as clear cut as knife.
 This settled the question about h. dians, and after breakfast l told the boys we must be on the dead open watch They all said they didn't care .much and tried to get some fun out of the Brule by telling him that when the Indians there got hold of half breed -.hey cooked him alive the same as they ! would a fish This joke turned out to have more truth than poetry.
 "We travelled along during the day at slow rate, Right Side Jack riding ahead of the train quarter of mile