Ellen Meriwether was a
Virginia girl with Western experience, and it goes without saying that
she rode well--of course in the cavalry saddle and with the cross seat.
Her costume still was composed of the somewhat shriveled and wrinkled
buckskins which had been so thoroughly wetted in crossing the river. I
noticed that she had now even discarded her shoes, and wore the
aboriginal costume almost in full, moccasins and all, her gloves and hat
alone remaining to distinguish her in appearance at a distance from a
native woman of the Plains. The voluminous and beruffled skirts of the
period, and that feminine monstrosity of the day, the wide spreading
crinoline, she had left far behind her at the Missouri River. Again the
long curls, which civilization at that time decreed, had been forgotten.
Her hair at the front and sides half-waved naturally, but now, instead
of neck curls or the low dressing of the hair which in those days partly
covered the fashionable forehead, she had, like a native woman, arranged
her hair in two long braids. Her hat, no longer the flat straw or the
flaring, rose-laden bonnet of the city, was now simply a man's cavalry
hat, and almost her only mark of coquetry was the rakish cockade which
confined it at one side.
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