The History of Minnesota and Tales of the FrontierFlandrau, Charles E. (Charles Eugene)
History
The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier
Flandrau, Charles E. (Charles Eugene)
Frontier and pioneer life -- Minnesota; Minnesota -- History
Garvie and I had gotten quietly settled in our shanty on the prairie,
when one excessively cold night an Indian boy, about thirteen years of
age, saw our light, and came to the door, giving us to understand that
his people were encamped about four or five miles up the river, and that
he was afraid to go any further lest he should freeze to death. He was
mounted on a pony, had a pack of furs with him, and asked us to take him
in for the night. We of course did so, and made him as comfortable as we
could by giving him a buffalo robe on the floor. But we had no shelter
for his pony, and all we could do was to hitch him on the lee side of
the shanty, and strap a blanket on him. When morning came he was frozen
to death. We got the poor little boy safely off on the way to his
people's camp, and decided to utilize the carcass of the pony for a wolf
bait.
In order to present an intelligent idea of the situation, I will say
that the river made an immense detour in front of the future town,
having a large extent of bottom land, covered with a dense chaparral,
which was the home of thousands of wolves, and as soon as night came
they would start out in droves in search of prey.
We hauled the dead pony out to the back of the shanty, and left it about
two rods distant from the window. The moment night set in the wolves in
packs would attack the carcass. At first we would step outside and fire
into them with buck shot from double-barrelled shotguns, but we found
they were so wary that the mere movement of opening the door to get out
would frighten them, and we had very limited success for the first few
nights. Another difficulty we encountered was shooting in the dark. If
you have never tried it, and ever do, you will find it exceedingly
difficult to get any kind of an aim, and you have to fire promiscuously
at the sound rather than the object.
We remedied this trouble, however, by taking out a light of glass from
the back window, and building a rest that bore directly on the carcass,
so that we could poke our guns through the opening, settle them on the
rest, and blaze away into the gloom. We brought our bed up to the
window, so that we could shoot without getting out of it, while snugly
wrapped up in our blankets. After this our luck improved, and after each
discharge we would rush out, armed with a tomahawk, dispatch the wounded
wolves, and collect the dead ones, until we had slaughtered forty-two of
them. We skinned them, and sold the pelts to the traders for
seventy-five cents a piece, which money was the first of our earnings.
It was not long before we ceased to depend on wolf hunting for a living,
as immigration soon poured in, and money became plenty. I remember soon
after of having seventeen hundred dollars in gold buried in an oyster
can under the shanty.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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