The daily morning journal and courier., 1902-04-24

almost instantly followed by a crash ot
 thunder which rumbled directly over
 head and slowly died away Big 1 drops of rain came down, and present ! ly it fell in torrents Here and there !, throughout the big bunch of cattle
 could be heard a fierce below ending ir | a vicious snort.
 At last the expected happened when | a blinding flash occurred, simultaneous l ly with report more like cannon. A movement among a number of steers on the edge of the herd began. Another flash of lightning showed forty or fifty leaders running at full speed westward | followed by the entire herd. It was a
 magnificent spectacle The flashes ot | lightning were almost continuous and | the plunging, crazy steers could be l plainly seen as they mady tore across
 the prairie their heads lowered, tongues protruding and their tails nearly erect and sewaying from side to side and the earth trembling beneath their tread. 1 At the first break of the leaders eve ry man had put spurs to his horse and with drawn revolver was in full pursuit of the flying column. As we slowly 1 gained upon them we drew closer to their sides, and the first man abreast of the half dozen steers in the extreme lead began firing at the ground close to their hoofs. The others now drew near and general fusilade commenced. The leaders began to swerve to the right or northward until the course of the frantic animals had been turned all
 most to a right angle from their origi- nal direction and it looked as if further danger from the canon had been passed.
 But we had not included the fool
 Mexican in our calculations. Instead of
 coming with the rest of the party, he
 had evidently become confused and had
 worked around on the opposite and
 wrong side of the leaders, and the first
 thing we were aware of was the crack.
 crack! of his gun somewhere on the
 other side of the leaders. This attack
 on the part of the 'greaser' counterac-
 ted all our previous efforts. The steers
 turned abruptly toward us and straight
 toward the canon. We were utterly
 powerless to stem the tide of the mad
 dened brutes, and it was not thing but
 sheer luck that prevented half a dozen
 of us from being knocked down, horses and all, and trampled to death.
 "As soon as possible we got out of the thickest of the steers and followed them toward the canon, which we knew must be near at hand. The frequent flashes of lightning still continued, and we could see the scanty line of sage brush not twenty rods in front of the swiftly moving sea of surging steers. On they went with fearful momentum, flying resistless mass We refined in our horses, and before they had fully stopped the advance guard of steers had gone over the brink. and disap- peared. Over followed the others by hundreds until it seemed as if the en- tire herd was doomed to destruction. Fortunately, however, the greater bulk of the steers seemed to scent the dan ger ahead and slackened their speed, which gave some of those nearest to the brink of the canon an opportunity to turn. and the remainder of the herd di- vided. part going north, and the re- mainder south along the bank of the canon.
 It was d1l dNLul SlSul u lpDh uppll, and when I saw those steers by the hundreds shooting over the edge of that Deaths Valley like a huge missile fired from a catapult I was forcibly re- minded of Victor Hugo's famous word picture in Les Miserabes of the fatal dash of the French cavalry brigade into the hollow road of Chain at the battle of Waterloo.
 Tn the morning we began rounding up the scattered survivors of our herd, and it was almost four days before we finished the work The young MeXi-. can who caused all the damage va moosed' on the night or early morning of the disaster and was never heard of again Before we left the vicinity of the canon I visited the place where the steers plunged over. The air was fairly black with buzzards, and when I leaned over the brink of the rocky wall of the canon and looked down upon the results of the stampede I could see a strange tumble of hoofs, horns and car casses completely blocking the narrow channel of the stream.
 "A few weeks later we arrived at our destination. and when we had made a careful count of the herd we found a little more than three thousand steers g."-Washington Post.