me lay an uninhabited country, unless I veered from my course and went through the Chickasaw Nation.  For the sake of securing grain for the horses, this tack was made, following the old Chisholm trail for nearly one hundred miles.  The country was in the grip of winter, sleet and snow covering the ground, with succor for man and horse far apart.  Mumford Johnson’s ranch on the Washita River was reached late the second night, and by daybreak the next morning I was on the trail, making Quartermaster Creek by one o’clock that day.  Fortunately no storms were encountered en route, but King Winter ruled the range with an iron hand, fully six inches of snow covering the pasture, over which was a crusted sleet capable of carrying the weight of a beef.  The foreman and his men were working night and day to succor the cattle.  Between storms, two crews of the boys drifted everything back from the south line of fence, while others cut ice and opened the water to the perishing animals.  Scarcity of food was the most serious matter; being unable to reach the grass under its coat of sleet and snow, the cattle had eaten the willows down to the ground.  When a boy in Virginia I had often helped cut down basswood and maple trees in the spring for the cattle to browse upon, and, sending to the agency for new axes, I armed every man on the ranch with one, and we began felling the cottonwood and other edible timber along the creeks and rivers in the pasture.  The cattle followed the axemen like sheep, eating the tender branches of the softer woods to the size of a man’s wrist, the crash of a falling tree bringing them by the dozens to browse and stay their hunger.  I swung an axe with the men, and never did slaves under the eye of a task-master work as faithfully or as long as we did in cutting ice and falling timber in succoring our holding of cattle.  Several times the sun shone warm for a few days, melting the snow off the southern slopes, when we took to our saddles, breaking the crust with long poles, the cattle following to where the range was bared that they might get a bit of grass.  Had it not been for a few such sunny days, our loss would have been double what it was; but as it was, with the general range in the clutches of sleet and snow for over fifty days, about twenty per cent, of our holdings were winter-killed, principally of through cattle.

Our saddle stock, outside of what was stabled and grain-fed, braved the winter, pawing away the snow and sleet in foraging for their subsistence.  A few weeks of fine balmy weather in January and February followed the distressing season of wintry storms, the cattle taking to the short buffalo-grass and rapidly recuperating.  But just when we felt that the worst was over, simultaneously half a dozen prairie fires broke out in different portions of the pasture, calling every man to a fight that lasted three days.  Our enemies, not content with havoc wrought by the elements, were again in the saddle, striking in the