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settlement. He had ridden west to tour the forts in his vast command that stretched from the Rio Grande to Canada and west from Chicago. Corrine was a wide-open gentile shantytown amidst Brigham Young’s Mormon-controlled Utah. The Golden Spike had been sunk only a year before, linking America’s eastern and western shores by railroad. Corrine was the junction between the railroad and the Montana Road, which ran to the mining boomtowns of Bannack, Virginia City, and Helena, Montana. Sheridan’s ride west had been by rail and in relative comfort up to now. He even got hold of a newspaper from back east that reported the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. The old warrior reacted to the news like a Dalmatian hearing a fire alarm. He started making plans for a trip to Europe to observe the first big war since his own glory days. But first he had commitments in Montana that could not be ignored. Sheridan’s five-hundred-mile journey carried him over the Cache Mountains, through Idaho’s sagebrush desert, atop the high mountain passes of the Continental Divide, and finally through deep river canyons to Helena. Scenic as it was, a trip by stage in 1870 was arduous beyond any traveler’s experience today. The six-horse teams pulled the two-seated, springless carriages ten to twelve miles per hour at top speed over rough, rocky roads. In the spring the dust turned to mud, and tiny stream crossings turned into mud wallows. Sheridan stopped late in the second day at the Pleasant Valley stage station—as it would turn out, just thirty miles west of today’s Yellowstone National Park. His party stayed only long enough for the driver to change the horses and check out the wheels and harnesses. Normally the stage drove straight through, a sixty-six-hour journey that could bust the strongest of kidneys. Sheridan wanted none of that. The bachelor general knew he would have full days and nights when he arrived in Helena, and he wanted a good night’s sleep before his arrival. His staff negotiated a deal that allowed them to commandeer the stage for Sheridan and his entourage so he could insist on an overnight stop. Late on the third day, the stage stopped for the night at a station near Parsons Bridge on the Jefferson River in Montana. There Sheridan and his road-weary crew met “an old mountaineer” named Atkinson,