previous next

[477]

On June 17th we were on St. Frederick's Sound. It appeared like an inland lake, as smooth as a mill pond, and surrounded by hills large and small and mountains covered with snow. It being Bunker Hill Day, we fired a salute with our single cannon. Near evening I gave to the passengers the story of Gettysburg, using some red chalk on an improvised blackboard. At ten o'clock at night I was still talking to the people while the sun was considerably above the horizon. That night we noticed that there was but little space from twilight to dawn, not more than an hour. It was difficult for Mrs. Howard to persuade the children to go to bed when the sun was shining.

After our return, October, 1875, I received word that a British general was moving along our border between Canada and the United States to make inspections, and that he would be in the vicinity of Fort Walla Walla before many days. Taking my staff with me, I went up to meet him, October 12th. Just as we were setting out from the fort, mounted, my aiddecamp, Captain J. A. Sladen, undertook to ride a horse that had not been recently used. The horse had only a snaffle bit, and the captain, who was a good rider, had hardly reached the saddle before the animal sprang forward and leaped a newly opened ditch, just grazing a tree against which Captain Sladen was thrown. With a leg badly fractured he could see the bottom of his foot, and as he lay on the ground he cried out in prayer: “O Lord, help me 1” Just as I reached him he looked into my face and smiled, saying: “We always do so when we get into trouble.”

I remember that I answered: “Sladen, sometimes the trouble is permitted for that reason!”

Thq captain's leg had to be amputated and he was

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Walla Walla (Washington, United States) (1)
United States (United States) (1)
Canada (Canada) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
J. A. Sladen (2)
Joseph A. Sladen (1)
Guy Howard (1)
hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
October, 1875 AD (1)
October 12th (1)
June 17th (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: