Then and now Author:Robert Vaughn Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE JAMES STUART PROSPECTING PARTY. This expedition had the most desperate experience of any party of men in the Rocky mountains. They were chased by hostile ... more »Indians for hundreds of miles, endured untold privations, perils and hunger, some being killed; and during all this time they .were in an unexplored region where assistance could not be obtained. The first part of the history of this expedition has been given in the foregoing letter. The day the Fairweather party discovered Alder gulch the James Stuart party was. being chased by Indians. The following are extracts from Captain Stuart's diary, which he kept on that eventful prospecting trip in the "Yellowstone Country" in the spring of 1863. "April 28, 18(J3.—We have traveled twenty miles today. About an hour before sundown, while lying around catop resting from the fatigues of the day, we were startled by hearing several guns fired from a clump of cottonwoods across the river, and immediately afterwards we saw about thirty Indians fording across. They came on a run, vociferating 'How- dye-do,' and 'Up-sar-o-ka,' which latter means 'Crow Indians,' in their language. By the time they were fairly in camp we had our horses all tied up, and every man prepared for emei gencies. They first inquired who was our captain. I told them, and asked which was their captain. They showed me three, one big and two little ones. The large chief told me to have my men put all our things in the tents, and keep a sharp lookout or we would lose them. I then gave him a small piece of tobacco to have a grand smoke, and I also found thftt one of them, a very large man with a big belly, could talkthe Snake Indian language, and he was at once installed as interpreter. They (the interpreter and chiefs) sat down in a circle and requested the pleas...« less