It would be positively
wicked to ruin anything so grand.
We reached Helena before luncheon, and I soon found Miss Duncan, who
was expecting me. We did not start back until the second day, so she
and I visited all the shops and then drove out to Sulphur Spring. The
way everybody and everything have grown and spread out since the
Northern Pacific Railroad has been running cars through Helena is most
amazing. It was so recently a mining town, just "Last Chance Gulch,"
where Chinamen were digging up the streets for gold, almost
undermining the few little buildings, and Chinamen also were raising
delicious celery, where now stand very handsome houses. Now Main
street has many pretentious shops, and pretty residences have been put
up almost to the base of Mount Helena.
The ride back was uneventful, greatly to Miss Duncan's disappointment.
It is her first visit to the West, and she wants to see cowboys and
all sorts of things. I should have said "wanted to see," for I think
that already her interest in brass buttons is so great the cowboys
will never be thought of again. There were two at Rock Creek, but they
were uninteresting - did not wear "chaps," pistols, or even big spurs.
At the Bird-Tail not one sheep was to be seen - every one had been
sheared, and the big band driven back to its range. Miss Duncan is a
pretty girl, and unaffected, and will have a delightful visit at this
Western army post, where young girls from the Eastdo not come every
day. And then we have several charming young bachelors!
FORT SHAW, MONTANA TERRITORY,
December, 1887.
THE excitement is about over. Our guests have returned to their homes,
and now we are settling down to our everyday garrison life. The
wedding was very beautiful and as perfect in every detail as adoring
father and mother and loving friends could make it. It was so strictly
a military wedding, too - at a frontier post where everything is of
necessity "army blue" - the bride a child of the regiment, her father
an officer in the regiment many years, and the groom a recent graduate
from West Point, a lieutenant in the regiment. We see all sorts of
so-called military weddings in the East - some very magnificent church
affairs, others at private houses, and informal, but there are ever
lacking the real army surroundings that made so perfect the little
wedding of Wednesday evening.
The hall was beautifully draped with the greatest number of flags of
all sizes - each one a "regulation," however - and the altar and chancel
rail were thickly covered with ropes and sprays of fragrant Western
cedars and many flowers, and from either side of the reredos hung from
their staffs the beautifully embroidered silken colors of the
regiment. At the rear end of the hall stood two companies of enlisted
men - one on each side of the aisle - in shining full-dress uniforms,
helmets in hand.
