Thirty six hours after our arrival in Miles City our outfit was complete, and we crossed the Yellowstone and started up the Sunday Creek trail. We had from Fort Keogh a six-mule team, an escort of four men, in charge of Sergeant Bayliss, and an old veteran of more than twenty years' service, from the Fifth Infantry, Private Patrick McCanna, who was detailed to act as cook and camp-guard for our party during our stay in the field. On September 29 we reached Tow's ranch, the =HV=, on Big Dry Creek (erroneously called Big Timber Creek on most maps of Montana), at the mouth of Sand Creek, which here flows into it from the southwest. This point is said to be 90 miles from Miles City. Here we received our freight from the six-mule wagon, loaded it with bleached skeletons and skulls of buffalo, and started it back to the post. One member of the escort, Private C. S. West, who was then on two months' furlough, elected to join our party for the hunt, and accordingly remained with us to its close. Leaving half of our freight stored at the =HV= ranch, we loaded the remainder upon our own wagon, and started up Sand Creek. [Illustration: SKETCH MAP OF THE HUNT FOR BUFFALO. MONTANA 1886.] At this point the hunt began. As the wagon and extra horses proceeded up the Sand Creek trail in the care of W. Harvey Brown, the three cowboys and I paired off, and while two hunted through the country along the south side of the creek, the others took the north. The whole of the country bordering Sand Creek, quite up to its source, consists of rugged hills and ridges, which sometimes rise to considerable height, cut between by great yawning ravines and hollows, such as persecuted game loves to seek shelter in. Inasmuch as the buffalo we were in search of had been seen hiding in those ravines, it became necessary to search through them with systematic thoroughness; a proceeding which was very wearing upon our horses. Along the south side of Sand Creek, near its source, the divide between it and Little Dry Creek culminates in a chain of high, flat-topped buttes, whose summits bear a scanty growth of stunted pines, which serve to make them conspicuous landmarks. On some maps these insignificant little buttes are shown as mountains, under the name of "Piny Buttes."