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211
Nation to Oil Springs, Fort Arbuckle to Wild Horse and Washita.
Here we met forty Comanche Indians. Every one of the redskins had a parasol. I asked them where they had been. One spoke up, in fairly good English, and said they had been in on the Arkansas River making a treaty with another tribe.
We went through the Osage Nation, striking the line of Kansas at Caldwell Bluff Creek. At Ninnisquaw we turned to the left up the Ninnisquaw to the Sand Hill, crossing the Arkansas River at Rayman, Kansas, to Great Bend. Out ten miles north, on Walnut Creek, we held the cattle up, cut out all the steers to fatten, leaving about eight hundred cows one, two and three-year-olds. They were taken on to Nebraska and put on a ranch.
Here I left the outfit. Traveled down the Arkansas River about ninety miles to Wichita, Kansas, all alone. Wichita was then about a mile long, one hundred yards wide and an inch thick. Here is where the Long and Shorthorns met and fought it out right. I remained here about ten days, struck an outfit bound for Texas with a bunch of old trail horses and chuck wagon. We traveled slowly back down the trail, easy gait, telling each other our experiences on the trail going up.
My last trail and range work was in 1877, around old Fort Griffin.
I have been a citizen of San Angelo, Texas, for over thirty years. It is not what I might have been, it is what I stand for today. I believe I have made good. I was all wrong at one time in my life. I am all for the right now. My business is dealing in fuel. I have been right here in one place for twenty years, handling coal and wood, and belong to the old M. E. Church South, and I am proud of her record as a church. I am thankful for my own record that I have lived to get right and do something. I know there are hundreds of the early-day trail hitters doing well and living good, clean lives.