Brief description:
Memories by Brander Mathews
When Christmas broke over the fort in the far Northwest where Lieutenant Robert Douglas, U.S.A., was stationed, the wind was blowing gently from the southeast. There had been a light snowfall during the night, and as the sun arose there was a faint suggestion of warmth in the beams that glistened across the crystalline flakes. It seemed as though the cold had loosened its grip for a while.
All through the morning the weather was mild for the season and for the place, and by noon there was even a vague hint of a possible thaw. The mail-rider who brought the weekly bag of letters and newspapers had trotted his bronco into the quadrangle little before one o'clock, exactly on time. No railroad and no telegraph line linked Fort Roosevelt with the rest of the world, and only once in seven days did the soldiers who were stationed on the outpost of civilization get news from its headquarters.
Time was when the troopers quartered there had fought the Indians of the border; but the rotting stockade had been torn down long since, and Fort Roosevelt was now a fort in name only. Its narrow, low buildings, made of logs, shacked sometimes, and sometimes squared and more regularly joined, still sheltered brave men, but they no longer needed to do battle with redskins; they had to confront a white enemy only, and they found cold winter a fiercer foe and more unrelenting than the Sioux. Its assault was harder to withstand, for, although the Indian is now armed with the repeating rifle his armory is not exhaustless -- and' nature's is. Outside of the government reservation there was no house within fifty miles, save the tumble-down cabin of a Missouri squatter four or five furlongs away at the bend of the river. No friendly smoke curling hospitably upward comforted the eye that might interrogate the horizon.
When Christmas broke over the fort in the far Northwest where Lieutenant Robert Douglas, U.S.A., was stationed, the wind was blowing gently from the southeast. There had been a light snowfall during the night, and as the sun arose there was a faint suggestion of warmth in the beams that glistened across the crystalline flakes. It seemed as though the cold had loosened its grip for a while.
All through the morning the weather was mild for the season and for the place, and by noon there was even a vague hint of a possible thaw. The mail-rider who brought the weekly bag of letters and newspapers had trotted his bronco into the quadrangle little before one o'clock, exactly on time. No railroad and no telegraph line linked Fort Roosevelt with the rest of the world, and only once in seven days did the soldiers who were stationed on the outpost of civilization get news from its headquarters.
Time was when the troopers quartered there had fought the Indians of the border; but the rotting stockade had been torn down long since, and Fort Roosevelt was now a fort in name only. Its narrow, low buildings, made of logs, shacked sometimes, and sometimes squared and more regularly joined, still sheltered brave men, but they no longer needed to do battle with redskins; they had to confront a white enemy only, and they found cold winter a fiercer foe and more unrelenting than the Sioux. Its assault was harder to withstand, for, although the Indian is now armed with the repeating rifle his armory is not exhaustless -- and' nature's is. Outside of the government reservation there was no house within fifty miles, save the tumble-down cabin of a Missouri squatter four or five furlongs away at the bend of the river. No friendly smoke curling hospitably upward comforted the eye that might interrogate the horizon.
Publication
Charles Scribner's Sons, (1894) 1st,Hdbk,,,Poor