![]() ![]() behind the sled were fifty or sixty mixed-breed cattle browsing on the hay, a few horses and mules among them. In the snow-covered meadow below the settlement a tall black man and a teenaged boy tossed hay from a large sled drawn by two draft horses. From the peak of the tipi and from two rear chimneys of the main building, smoke drifted away to disperse in the winds that occasionally gusted a plume of snow from the long front porch of the big house. Closer to the creek, standing against the woods, was a tipi of northern plains design, painted in the style of the Sioux. ![]() ![]() Behind the building stood a large barn, a chicken coop and a pigpen, and a scattering of sheds and outbuildings. ![]() Up against the wooded foothills at the north end of the valley the wagon road ended among the buildings of a small settlement dominated by a two-story log building that for more than twenty years had been the largest private dwelling and public house between the Black Hills to the east and South Pass far to the west, at the foot of the. In a sheltered upland valley, circled by ridges and accessible in winter only through a cut in the hills where the river flowed between a low cliff on one side and a wagon track cut into a steep hillside on the other, the smell of woodsmoke hung in the air. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |