Red Oak House Garden Notes No. 75

Red Oak House Garden Notes No. 75

Peak garden time

More Maps: Not Just Crook

 More Maps: Not Just Crook

Campaigning with Crook Redux

Campaigning with Crook by Captain Charles King (excerpts)

Harper and Brothers, 1890

“At two P.M. we bivouac again, and begin to growl at this will-o'-wisp business. The night, for August [1876], is bitter cold. Ice forms on the shallow pools….and the thermometer was zero at daybreak.

The grandest country in the world for Indian and buffalo now…two years hence it will be the grandest place for cattle.

We move into a dense grove of timber—lofty and corpulent old cottonwoods…a great quantity of Indian pictures and hieroglyphics on the trees. We were camping on a favorite ‘stomping ground’ of theirs, evidently, for the trees were barked in every direction from the ground, and covered with specimens of aboriginal art.

We found ourselves on the crest of a magnificent range, from which we looked down into the beautiful valley of the Beaver to the east, and southward over mile after mile of sharp, conical buttes that were utterly unlike anything we had seen before. We had abundant water and grass, and here we rested two days, while our scouts felt their way towards the Little Missouri.

Our march leads us southeastward up the valley of Davis’s Creek—a valley that grows grandly beautiful as we near its head.

The tepees are nestled about in three shallow ravines or ‘cooleys,’ uniting in the centre of the metropolis…On a point at the confluence of two smaller branches stands a large lodge of painted skins, the residence no doubt of some chief or influential citizen, for it is chock full of robes and furs and plunder of every description.

Mid-July 2023 

350 miles roundtrip

Western Meadowlark

Yellow-breasted Chat

Field Sparrow

American Goldfinch

Vesper Sparrow

Lark Sparrow

Spotted Towhee

Indigo Bunting

Gray Catbird

Mourning Dove

Raven

Least Flycatcher

Turkey Vulture

Rough-winged Swallow

Bobolink

Lazuli Bunting

Pheasant

American Robin

Red-winged Blackbird

Western Kingbird

Northern Harrier

Horned Lark

Swainsons Hawk

Killdeer

Pale Evening Primrose

Northern Beadstraw

Prairie Coneflower

Purple Coneflower

Scoria Lily

Harebells (not Lanceleaf bluebells as on a video)

Yarrow

Dogban

Rocky Mountain Juniper

Prickly Juniper

Creeping Juniper

Pin Cheery

Buffalo Berry

Chokecherry

Blanket flower

Milkweed

Plains cottonwood

Green Ash

Little bluestem

Western wheatgrass

Thread-leaf sedge

Skunkbush sumac

Potentilla

Wild roses (two kinds)

Butte candles

Buckbrush

Buffalobur

Ponderosa pine

Saw one vehicle from 4 p.m. Friday (UPS driving leaving a ranch on the East River Road) until 11 a.m. Saturday when I met two women biking on the Maah Daah Hey trail. Otherwise, no one else until I departed Sunday morning. 

No snakes.

Coyotes singing at dusk.  

Mistakes are all my own.