Frozen into placeA Closer LookHistorian Phillip Endicott Osgood wrote: “[M]any times…Bashaw pulled the sleigh to a familiar door and waited for the Bishop to be lifted out because he was so numb with cold he could not unbend at the hips and knees..." This portion of the story is based on an account of Henry Whipple’s adventures in a blizzard. He wrote: "On one of my visits to the Sioux Mission in 1861, I reached New Ulm at noon. The thermometer was thirty-six degrees below zero, and there were indications of a storm… I pulled on my moccasins and started, driving at a rapid speed until well out on the prairie, but suddenly I discovered… I was hopelessly out of the track. The windstorm… had obliterated the road over which I had come…my horses were breast deep in snow…I had to confess myself lost. The Indians have always paid me their highest compliment when they have declared that I could follow a trail and find the points of the compass as well as any Indian. I now kept my horses headed in the direction which I thought to be that of the Agency. I said my prayers, threw the reins over the dashboard, let the horses walk as they would, and curling myself up under the buffaloes [robes], hoped that I might weather the night. Suddenly Bashaw stopped…[He had found] an Indian trail…Bashaw followed it, and when his mate was inclined to turn out he put his teeth into his neck and forced him into the path… When we reached the mission and Bashaw, comfortably stalled, turned his great eyes upon me, his whinny said as plainly as words, ‘We are all right now, master.’” From: Lights and Shadows of a Long Episcopate |
