6 Bird - Lore
consisted of eighty wagons laden with commissary. quartermaster and ordnance stores, and twelve luggage wagons which carried the company and troop property, a herd of three hundred beef cattle and eight hundred head of sheep. To draw these ninety-two wagons, and furnish mounts for wagon masters, herders and other train men. took five hundred and sixty mules. Add to these the one hundred and sixty-three horses of the cavalry and officers, and it will be seen what constant vigilance against surprise was required through an almost unknown region, over desert and fertile plains, through barren and forest—clad defiles, or along the cottonwood fringed banks of running streams.
On the evening of the 15th day of June, at the mess table of the officers of the expedition, I first saw Doctor Elliott Coues. He was at that time still some months short of being twenty-two years old, and had but recently been commissioned an assistant surgeon in the army. He was a man of good features and figure, a little above medium height, with light brown hair and no beard or moustache, and of a complexion bronzed in his calling of field ornithologist. In his conversation through— out the meal we gathered that he had served as a medical cadet in the "Army of the Potomac ’7 for some time before he was advanced to his present rank, and that he had hunted and collected birds in Labrador. He also remarked, with pardonable pride. that he had been sent as surgeon in charge of our column at the request of the Smithsonian Institution, that he might "shoot up the country between the Rio Grande and the Rio Colorado,” and that as soon as he should report he had done so he was to be relieved and ordered to Washington. He also showed the commanding ofl-icer and myself an order from the quartermaster-general, requiring us to furnish free transportation at all times to the collections he should make. '
Ornithology was the Doctor’s special cult, but he was also prepared to make collections in other branches of natural history. For creeping, crawling and wriggling things he had brought along a five—gallon keg of alcohol. But the reptilian branch of his researches failed utterly in the early stage of the march, for the soldiers, in unloading and loading the wagon, had caught the scent of the preservative fluid, and, although it already contained a considerable number of snakes, lizards, horned toads, etc., the stuff, diluted from their canteens, did not prove objectionable to the chronic bibulants. Some of them, however, did look decidedly pale about the gills when the head of the empty keg was smashed in and the pickled contents exposed to view. They had really supposed they had been drinking chemically pure alcohol.
From the beginning of the march on the 16th day of June until its CIOSe, on the 29th day of July, Doctor Coues never ceased, except for a brief interval, making excursions along the flanks of the column and
