South Branch Intelligencer

A Battle With Buffaloes.
Herd of four Thousand Driven into a Torrent.

An officer of the regular army, who left Fort Keogh, Montana, ten days ago, arrived in the city on Thursday evening and is the guest of friends living on Prairie Avenue. The officer traveled by "buckboard" from the Yellowstone River to the end of the Northern Pacific Railroad, near the little Missouri, and thence eastward by rail. Couriers had arrived at the post before his departure bringing the latest intelligence from the Crow Indians, who were then absent from camp, or agency, upon a grand buffalo hunt. The news brought in by the couriers was very exciting. They related that after riding over mountains for two days the Crows came upon a fine herd of buffaloes in a narrow valley near the Yellowstone.- There were four hundred Indians and four thousand buffaloes. The Crows had been forced by fear and starvation to take to the chase, and the keen hunger they were suffering only sharpened their eagerness for a tilt with their old fellow-nomads, the noble bison. The game stampeded down the valley in the direction of the Yellowstone. The chase was hotly followed, half a hundred buffaloes biting the dust before the river was reached. One of the most vehement of the pursuers, who had distinguished himself for bravery in two or three fights with the Sioux, fell from his pony in the midst of the flying herd and was trampled to death by the frantic beasts. The Yellowstone, a roaring, rushing river, even at the lowest tide, was booming the regular summer freshet, the outpour of the melting snows in the high mountains. When the river was reached the game made a bold stand, and for a time it seemed doubtful which held the mastery, but the incessant fusilade from four hundred rifles, together with the desperate proximity of the formidable battalion, drove the herd in dismay into the roaring torrent. Beside themselves with the excitement of the moment the Indians urged their ponies into the stream, unwilling that even a flood should spoil their frenzied sport or cut them off from their game. The terrible current, made tumultuous from the huge pile of rocks here and there in the channel, whirled buffaloes, ponies and Indians along at a bewildering velocity, until the thousands of beasts were rolling and writhing in inextricable confusion. In the dizzy evolutions of horses and riders the latter were left to struggle for themselves in the water, and to be jammed to death between the surging masses of drowning beasts. Some who foresaw the danger in time and turned shoreward, found safety on terra firma: but those who ventured far enough to be embraced in the sweeping, resistless tide, and to become involved in the tangle of struggling animals, were all drowned. The story brought to the post was that thirty Indians and fifty ponies were drowned, beside five hundred or a thousand buffaloes.--Chicago Times, October 7.