Ottumwa semi-weekly courier. [volume] (Ottumwa, Iowa) 1899-1903, 1900-09-11
CHAPTER vi.

The quartermaster's depot at Gate
City was little more than big corral,
with double row of low wooden sheds
for the storing of clothing, camp and
garrison e9uipage. There was black
smith and wagon repair shop, and a
brick Office building. Some cottage
quarters for the officer in charge and
his clerks, corral master, etc., stood
close at hand, while most of the en-
ployes lived in town outside the gates.
A single-track spur connected the de-
pot with the main line of the Union
Pacific, only 500 yards away, and the
command at Fort Emory, on the bluff
above the rapid stream. furnished,
much to its disgust, the necessary
guard. A much bigger plant was in
contemplation near a larger post and
town ON the east side of the great di-
vide, and neither Fort Emory nor its
charge-the quartermaster's depot
was considered worth keeping in re-
pair, except such as could be accom-
plished ''by the labor of troops" which
was why, when he wasn't fighting In
dams, the frontier soldier of that day
was mainly occupied in doing the odd
jobs of day laborer. without the rec
ompense of one, or HIS privilege of quit
ting if he didn't like the job. That he
should know little of drill and less of
parade was, therefore, not to be won
dered at.
But what he didn't know about guard
duty was hardly worth knowing. He
had prisoners and property of every
conceivable kind - Indians, horse
thieves, thugs and deserters, maya
Zines and medicines, mules and NUM-
tons of war. Everything had to be
guarded. The fort lay a mile to the
west of and 200 feet higher than the
railway hotel in the heart of the town.
1t looked down upon the self-styled
city, and most CT it's womenkind did
the same on the citizens, who were, it
must be owned, a rather mixed'lot. The
sudden discovery of gold in the neigh
boring foothills, the fact that it prom
ised to be the site of the division car
shops and roundhouse, that the trails
to the Upper Platte, the Sweetwater,
the park country to the south and the
rich game regions of the Medicine Bow
all centered there, and that stages left
no less than twice week for some Of
those points, and the whole land was
alive with explorers for hundred
miles around-all had tended to give
Gate City remarkable boom. Chey-
enne and Laramie, thriving frontier
towns, with coroners' offices in full
blast from one weeks end to the other,
and double force on duty Sundays,
confessed to and exhibited pardbna BILE
Jealousy. Yet there was wisdom in the
warning of an old friend and fellow
frontiersman, who said to Folsom:
"You are throwing yourself and your
money away. John. There's nothing
In those gold stories, there's nothing in
that yawp about the machine shops;
all those yarns We're started by U. P.
fellows with corner lots to sell. The
bottom will drop out of that place in
tide of year and leave you stranded"
All the same had Folsom bought big
blocks and built his home there. Itwas
the nearest town of promise to Hal
Folsom's wild but beautiful home in
the hills, and, almost as he loved Nell,
his bonny daughter, did the old trader
love his stalwart son. Born wild
swesterner, reared among the Sioux
with only Indians or army boys for.
playmates, and precious little choice
in point of sayagery between them,
Hal had grown up natural horseman
with love for and knowledge of the
animal that is accorded to few. His
ambition in life was to own stock
farm. All the education he had had in
the world he owed to the kindness of
loving-hearted army women at Lara
mic, women who befriended him when
5well-nigh broken-hearted by his
mothers death. Early he had pitched
his tent on the very spot for ranch
mans homestead, early he had fallen
in love with an army girl, who married
the strapping frontiersman and was
now the proud mistress of the promis-
ing stock farm Nesting in the valley of