Harbin to Chita: Buryats and Cossacks

The 29th we were back in the Gobi desert. Here we saw large herds of Camles that were herded by Buriats or Mongolians. On this part of the desert there are a few Caravan Trails leading to Peking, Udga, and Canton, China. At night we arrived in Manchuria, this is the border town of Mongolia, China, and Siberia. This town has a population of forty thousand, most all Mongolians and Chinese.

Buryats circa 1900 via Wikipedia

Here we got the news that General Semenov would not leave us go into Siberia, as he said he could take care of it himself, and our Colonel told him to go to hell. We left Manchuria City at midnight into Siberia again and had breakfast at Karimskaya* Junction, this line has not been running for two years as every train they did try to run was blowed off the track.At Blagovestchench in 1914 the Cossacks drove 2400 Chinese Boxers into the Amur River and drowned the whole bunch of them.

Cossack Lancers from George's Collection

In this part of Siberia the woods are very fine, we would ride for a whole day and hardly see a break in the woods. From this Junction there is double track all the way to Omsk, 3500 miles clear into Europe. We followed the Amur River for over a hundred miles and it was very beautiful along this river. Here they only have about four months of warm weather and at times in the winter it gets as low as 65 below zero.
------------------------------------

From General Graves book on the Siberian Expedition,

Two hundred and thirty-five miles from Manchuria is Karimskaya, the nearest town to the junction point between the Chinese Eastern and the Amur railway, an all Siberian railway line, which runs northeast and north of the Amur River to Habarovsk and thence south to Vladivostok.From Nikolsk to Karimskaya the railroad is only a single track but, from this point west, it is double tracked.