This land of high bare plains and snow-tipped, rock-ribbed, pine-clad mountains was very different from the forests of the Ohio region; but he had learned a great deal during his two years' trip. He was no greenhorn. He could take care of himself—he had been farther than Hancock and Dickson, felt no more fear of the Western Indians than he did of the Eastern Indians. After all, an Indian was an Indian, although these plains Indians like the Sioux and Blackfeet numbered thousands and seemed to think themselves much better than the white man.

In the fall his partners went "out," to take their furs to St. Louis. He remained in, and spent the winter alone, up the Yellowstone River of Montana, which was Blackfoot country. Captain Lewis had had trouble with the Blackfeet. They had tried to rob him, and two had been killed. But the Blackfoot head chief announced that this had served his young men right, and that the other Blackfeet bore the Americans no ill will.

Therefore Trapper Colter passed the winter in peace. The Crows, who also claimed the Yellowstone, did not molest him, either. In the spring he was taking the lone trail for St. Louis, when he met a company of American and French fur-hunters under Manuel Lisa, a swarthy Spaniard. They were coming in to build a trading post among the Blackfeet or Crows.

Trapper Colter had reached the mouth of the Platte River, in Nebraska—was almost "home," to the States, after an absence of three years; but he cared little. Trader Lisa wished him to be their scout to the Yellowstone and help them with the Indians; so he promptly turned around and took the back trail. He loved the trapper's life.

They built the post, named Manuel's Fort, beside the Yellowstone at the mouth of the Big Horn River in southeastern Montana. Trader Lisa found out that the Blackfeet were friendly; but their trade was not enough for him. He coveted the furs of the Crows and other Indians. John Colter was the man to carry the word that a trading post had been "brought" to the Yellowstone, and that all Indians were invited to visit it. He set out with the news.

This part of the Yellowstone was really Crow country; they ranged in southern Montana, the Blackfeet ranged in northern Montana, but they fought each other whenever they met in south or north, or in the mountains west. The Blackfeet were the stronger; they were eating the Crows, year after year. Trader Lisa should have known better than to invite them both to trade with him.

John Colter shouldered a pack of thirty pounds weight, containing presents, and with his rifle and ammunition started to hunt the Crows in the southwest. He paddled his canoe up the Big Horn into northern Wyoming, and finally discovered the Crows in their summer quarters of the Wind River Valley, to the westward.

With them he traveled westward still, across the Wind River Mountains and the Teton Mountains into northeastern Idaho. For the first time the eyes of a white American saw this wild and grandly beautiful scenery of a hunter's paradise.

He had traveled by canoe and foot and horse about five hundred miles. Here he met the Flathead Indians, with whom he had made friends when with Captain Lewis and Lieutenant Clark. Here he met the Blackfeet, too—fifteen hundred of them on a horse-stealing expedition. But he met them in battle. He was with the Crows and Flatheads, and of course had to aid his own party. It was do or die, because the Crows and Flatheads numbered only eight hundred.

He showed them how a white man could fight; he was wounded in the leg, the Blackfeet were driven off, they had seen him as a leader in the ranks of their enemies, they refused to forget, and ever after that they were the sworn foes of the whites.

There was no use now in his trying to talk with the Blackfeet. If they caught him they'd kill him. He'd better avoid them. The Crows were afraid to guide him far, and he struck out alone for Manuel's Fort, and made his own trail. Possibly the Crows had told him of a "big-medicine" country—a region of bad and good spirits, lying between him and the Big Horn, and into which few Indians ventured. It promised to be a safe trail, he was not afraid of "spirits"—preferred "spirits" to the Blackfeet; he struck out, and plunged into the wonders of the Yellowstone Park.

He arrived at Lisa's Fort (which was another of its names) without trouble, and full of stories about hot geysers and boiling mud and strange colorings. For many years nobody believed his stories; they were only "trapper yarns;" but there he had been, in this year 1807, and had had the place all to himself.

Trader Lisa was not satisfied. He wished furs, and more furs; he wished the Blackfeet furs, as well as the Crow and Flathead and Sioux furs. In the spring of the next year he sent Trapper Colter out again, to seek the Blackfeet, make peace with them, and urge them to come in Fort Manuel. By this time they probably would have forgiven the one white man who had been in a tight fix and obliged to fight whether or no.

John Potts agreed to go with John Colter. They were comrades of old. John Potts was another of the Lewis and Clark men: had served as a soldier enlisted at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, by Captain Lewis himself. He had joined the Trader Lisa company at St. Louis, a year ago, and on the way up-river had been glad to meet John Colter. It was a reunion.

Now from Lisa's Fort they paddled up the Yellowstone again, down which they had come in 1806 with Lieutenant Clark, and crossed westward over the divide between the Yellowstone and the heads of the Missouri. This was the Three Forks country, of present southwestern Montana, where the Missouri split into three branches named by Captain Lewis the Madison, the Gallatin and the Jefferson. They knew it well; had they not worked hard here, when bound for the Columbia in the summer of 1805?

Likely enough they were not at all anxious to find the Blackfeet or to have the Blackfeet find them. The Blackfeet sometimes roamed here; so did the timid Snakes, descending from the mountains to hunt buffalo on the Missouri River plains in the east; so did the Crows. While spying around, they two built a canoe apiece and trapped beaver in the Jefferson River, over toward the mountains.

The beaver were as abundant as ever. To keep out of sight of Indians, they set their traps after dusk, ran them very early in the morning, and lay hidden all day. It certainly was not pleasant, to live like 'coons and owls, but so many furs were worth the trouble.

One early morning they were in their canoes, deep between the high banks, down toward the mouth of the river where it united with the Madison, when they heard a dull tramping in the valley.

"Harkee!" spoke John. "D'ye hear, Jack? That sounds like Injuns. We'd better drop our traps an' cache (hide) ourselves."

"Injuns nothin'!" John Potts laughed. "Them's buff'ler. Seems like every time the wind blows you're thinkin' 'Injuns.' Can't you tell buff'ler from reds? Or are you gettin' skeered out!"

"Jest as you say, then," the other John replied. "But if anything happens, don't blame me. I've a notion we ought to climb up an' spy 'round."

"If they're Injuns, our heads would give us away. We'll keep where we are, snug under the banks, an' they'll pass us by. But those are buff'ler, I tell you."

They worked along, lifting their beaver traps. The dull tramping increased, as if the buffalo were about to cross the river. Suddenly, above them, on the edge of the east bank, there appeared dark figures, with blankets and feathered crowns and guns and bows.

"Blackfeet!" John Colter gasped. "Watch out. Stop paddling. Drop your traps." His own he let slide over the side of his canoe farthest from the Indians.

The Blackfeet instantly covered the two canoes with bended bows and leveled muskets. The whole bank was bristling with their fierce array, so that the narrow river seemed shadowed.

A chief called sternly, and gestured, bidding the two canoes to land where the bank had washed in a little cove.

"We're in for it," remarked John Colter. "Come on, and I'll talk with 'em."

"Not I," the other John growled. "Let's talk from here."

"That's pure folly." And knowing Indians better than his comrade did, John Colter paddled in with a few strokes.

One of the Blackfoot warriors seized his canoe at once; hands rudely hauled him out, and upon the bank, wrenched his gun from him and tore off all his clothes. It was an alarming welcome.

John Potts was still in his own canoe, in mid-stream. The Indians again called to him, and the chief beckoned.

"Come ashore, or they'll kill you where you are," urged John Colter. There were eight hundred of them!

But Trapper Potts shook his head.

"I'll not. I might as well be killed here and now, as be robbed and beaten first. You—"

A bow twanged angrily. Down he fell, in the bottom of his canoe. John Colter could scarcely see, by reason of the dancing, shouting Blackfeet. Then he heard.

"Colter! They've got me! I'm wounded!"

"Bad hurt?"

Trapper Potts was standing, rifle in hand and an arrow jutting from his hip.

"Yes. I can't make off. Get away if you can. I meant to kill one at least."

He aimed and fired; shot a Blackfoot dead. That was his last act. The smoke had no more than cleared the muzzle of his gun, ere a hundred arrows and bullets "made a riddle of him." Thus he died, also; a brave no-surrender man.

Yelling furiously, the Blackfeet, in a jostling mob, rushed into the stream, pulled the canoe ashore, dragged the body out upon the bank, and hacked it to pieces. They threw the pieces into John Colter's face, the slain warrior's relatives fought to get at him with their tomahawks, while the other Blackfeet formed about him and thrust them aside.

It was a doubtful moment. The air quivered to threat and insult. Trapper Colter expected to be killed at once. His friend had sealed the doom of both of them; had destroyed the one chance, for if no blood had been shed the Blackfeet might only have robbed them and let them go.

The tumult gradually lessened. The chiefs squatted in a circle, and while all scowled at the prisoner a council was held. The only point to be discussed was, how should he die?

They appeared to have decided. The head chief arose, and stalking to John motioned to him to go farther out into the open.

"Go! Go away!" he ordered, in the Crow tongue. Evidently they recognized John Colter as the white man who had fought against them among the Crows. That made matters worse.

John guessed that they were using him for a practice target. As soon as he was out a little way, they would shoot at him—see how many times they could hit him before killing him. That would be great sport as well as good practice. He slowly walked, to the east, upon the open plain, expecting with every step to feel the first arrow or bullet. This was a nervous stroll for a naked man. He heartily wished that he never had seen the Crows, or John Potts either.

He was not moving fast enough to suit the Blackfeet. An old fellow commenced to shout at him, and motion for him to go faster. But he didn't wish to go faster; the ground was thickly grown to prickly-pear cactus, and he had to pick his path amidst the spines.

Then the old Indian scuttled after him, very impatient. Told him to go faster yet—hurry, hurry! Even gave him a shove, or two.

From about one hundred yards out he looked again, and saw that the younger warriors were casting off their blankets and leggins; were stripping as if for a race!

What! A race it was to be, with his scalp the prize? A wave of hope and determination surged into his throat, and his heart beat madly. After all, the Blackfeet were treating him like a man. He was one among eight hundred; they had given him a chance!

He drew long breath. He was in his prime, aged about thirty-five; was five feet ten inches in height, stout-limbed, broad chested—strongly built after the Daniel Boone type of hunter. And he was a swift runner; few men that he knew were his equal.

With a leap, he launched himself full-speed across the bare plain, aiming for the Madison River, five miles before. A burst of yells and whoops reached his ears. He glanced behind and saw some one hundred young braves, naked, the most of them, to their breech-clouts, careering after with spears.

He had made good time in other races, but he never had run like this. His strength and stride astonished him. The ground fairly whizzed from under him, the wind whined in his ears, almost drowning the cries of the pursuit. He wasted no moments now in picking his way through the prickly-pears; had to step on them with his bare soles, whether or no; and he gathered the stinging spines as a pin-cushion gathers pins.

He wasted no moments, either, in looking back. He bent all his energy upon reaching the Madison River. Soon he had run a mile, without slackening; could hear no feet except his own, had felt no lunge of spear. He kept on for another mile, and had not dared to relax. His lungs were sore, his throat dry, his breath wheezed, and his eyes were dizzy. But he was half way to the Madison. Was he going to escape? He did not know. The yells were fainter.

But what was that? Blood began to gush from his nose, choking him. He had burst a blood-vessel. It frightened him and weakened him, and he rather despaired. For the first time he glanced over his shoulder, to measure distance. Hurrah! He had dropped all the Blackfeet except one; but that one was overhauling him, and was within the hundred yards: a tall, fast young warrior, with a spear in his right hand and his blanket streaming from his left arm and shoulder.

Exhausted, Trapper Colter about decided to give up. He had done his best. So he ran more slowly; and when he thought that the Indian was about to spear him he turned abruptly, and spread both his arms, in surrender, and gasped, in Crow language:

"Do not kill."

He took the Indian quite by surprise, for a gory, frightful sight he was. But the Indian's-mind had been made up. He saw the scalp, his hard-won prize; and poising his spear in both hands he charged on, to lunge. He, too, was wellnigh all in, and stumbled as he tried to thrust. John managed to grab the spear near the head, and hold it off, and they swayed and tugged. The spear broke, and the Indian fell flat. Trapper Colter stabbed him with the point, snatched the blanket, and leaving him lying there was away again.

A tremendous yell echoed from the Indians who had been watching; but now filled with hope once more he ran, he said, "as if he had not run a mile." Ahorse and afoot the whole Blackfoot band were tearing after.

He reached the Madison in the lead. He had run his five miles, but he had not won his life. There was to be no mercy for him, now that he had killed a warrior. Would the Madison save him? Beyond, there was only another open stretch, to be crossed, and a high mountain to be climbed.

He did not know exactly what to do, as he crashed through the willows bordering the little river. Then he saw a very large beaver-house, like a small haystack rising ten feet above the water, in a dammed pond. He plunged for it, and commenced to swim. If he might manage to get into that beaver-house before he was sighted—! He had quick wit, did John Colter.

The water was some ten feet deep, at the house. He held his breath and took a deep, deep dive. Luck was with him, to reward him. He groped, near the bottom, and struck the entrance; got his head through, and his body, and wriggled on—perhaps to stick fast inside and drown! No! As he had wildly hoped, the house was of two stories and big enough for him. The second floor was high and dry, for the beavers to lie upon; and the hole up through it was wide enough so that he could support his shoulders and breathe. Here he panted and waited, in the darkness.

Presently he could hear the Blackfeet, plashing about, and talking. In a moment or so they were upon the beaver-house itself. Their moccasins crunched the brittle sticks and mud; they thrust with their spears, and seemed uncertain what to do, themselves.

Another fear thrilled him. Supposing they guessed that he was under them, and set the house on fire! It would burn; the fire would eat down, and he would be roasted or smothered. He listened intently, for the crackling; even fancied that he could smell the smoke; let himself down as far as he might, so as to dodge the spear points.

After a long, long time the voices and the plashing grew less, as the Blackfeet appeared to be giving up the search. Then they all collected again. Then they went away. Then they came back. Would they never quit? He was chilled stiff, soaked with the icy water. But he hung on.

Finally silence reigned. They had gone; or hadn't they? Maybe they were hidden, near, waiting for him. He grimly waited, too. At last he could stand the place no more. By the blackness, and the feel of the air, night had arrived. He drew another breath, let go, and dived from under. He cautiously rose to the surface; all was darkness. So he swam upstream and landed on the east side.

He did not dare to linger, though. A mountain range enclosed the valley, and he had to make it before daylight. He traveled on as fast as possible, with his blistered feet and his sodden blanket and his spearhead, for thirty miles, to a pass that he knew of.

However, the Blackfeet doubtless were before him, to cut him off in the pass. There was nothing for him, but to climb the mountain here instead of taking to the regular trail. Up he climbed, in the dark, by such a steep route that he had to haul himself by grasping at the rocks and brush and branches. Soon he was into snow. And when, at dawn, he gained the crest of the ridge, he could go no farther. He might yet be seen, and captured.

He lay here all day, aching and shivering and starved, with his wet blanket wrapped around his naked shoulders; managed to chew on some sappy bark, and swallow some tender tips; but that was poor fare. At dusk he started down, to try for Manuel's Fort, northeast three hundred miles across the open plain again.

That was a terrible journey, for a man in his shape. He had nothing except his blanket and his spear-head; so he had to eat roots and bark. He found enough pommes blanches (white apples) or Indian turnips to keep him alive. They were starchy, and ought to be cooked, but he ate them raw.

When, on the eleventh day, he staggered into the fort, he was so thin and haggard in face and body, and his legs and feet were so puffed, that he scarcely looked like a man, and nobody recognized him. But he was a man indeed, and had out-matched the Blackfeet and the rigors of mountain and plain.

After all, the white American is a hard fighter to down.

While getting away from the Blackfeet, Trapper Colter had vowed that if he escaped this time he'd go straight to St. Louis. He had had enough. When he grew strong at Fort Lisa, he changed his mind; he thought he'd better stay through another season; go back for his beaver-traps, at any rate. First-class beaver-traps cost fifteen dollars apiece.

It took him until winter to grow strong. Then he set out alone, to find his traps in the Jefferson River. He hoped that the Blackfeet would be in their winter villages, and not ranging about.

Well, he crossed the same mountain, into the valley, and was in camp, at night, in the Three Forks country not far from where he had run his race—yes, was not far from the very beaver-house in which he had hidden, when while cooking his supper of buffalo-meat he heard the cracking of brush behind him. He pricked up his ears, and did not stir. But when he heard the sharp click of gun-locks, out there in the darkness, at one jump he had leaped over his fire and dived for safety.

A volley scattered the fire and spurted the sod under his flying feet. He had been none too prompt. Away he ran, as before, only this time he was better clothed. Again he climbed straight up the mountain; again he lay on top; and again he traveled by night for the Manuel Lisa post. And again he declared that if he might only escape, he surely would quit such a region forever.

Did he do it? Not he. Early in April, 1810, he was once more at the perilous Three Forks, but now with a company of other trappers. The deadly Blackfeet attacked, on the Jefferson, killed or captured five—and John Colter roundly asserted:

"That's three times for me, boys. I daren't risk a fourth time. I'm going to pull out for the States. Goodby."

He arrived in St. Louis in thirty days, having traveled three thousand miles, mainly by canoe. His stories of his fights and of the marvels he had discovered in the Yellowstone Park caused much talk in the newspapers and among the people. His fights were believed, but not his Yellowstone "yarns." He married, the next winter, and settled at Dundee, on the Missouri River in Franklin County, west of St. Louis. It was a tame life.

When the fur-traders and the beaver-trappers passed up, bound for the plains and mountains and the Blackfeet country, he eyed their "fixin's" wistfully, and longed to go. But he would not leave his wife. He postponed his next hunt until in November, 1813, he died of the jaundice while still an able-bodied man with his thoughts turned westward to the land of the fierce Blackfeet.



CHAPTER XIV

HUGH GLASS AND THE GRIZZLY BEAR (1823)

"AS SLICK AS A PEELED ONION"

The Blackfeet remained firm enemies of the invading trappers and fur-hunters. John Colter's adventures were the beginning of a long and bitter war. The Crows made friends with the white men, and only stole their horses and traps and other "plunder;" but to a Crow this was no crime. The Sioux and Cheyennes and Arapahos and Utes frequently declared that their hearts were good. The Blackfeet never softened. They were many in number, and proud and scornful, and did not stoop even to pretend friendship.

The Three Forks region became known as one of the most dangerous places in the beaver country. All the Upper Missouri River, from the Yellowstone River on, was dangerous by reason of the widely roaming Blackfeet.

Of course, the American trapper and trader did not stay away, on this account. Manuel Lisa and others had formed the Missouri Fur Company, in 1809. In 1822 the Rocky Mountain Fur Company was organized, at St. Louis, and advertised for "one hundred young men to ascend the Missouri River to its source, there to be employed for one, two, or three years," trapping.

It proved to be a famous company. It had on its rolls Jim Bridger, Kit Carson, Jedediah Smith the Knight in Buckskin, the Sublette brothers, Jim Beckwourth the French mulatto who lived with the Crows as chief, and scores of others, mainly young men, genuine Americans of both French and Anglo-Saxon blood. Its career did not cease until the summer of 1834.

The two men who organized the company were General William Henry Ashley of the Missouri militia, and first lieutenant-governor of the State; and Major Andrew Henry who had helped to found the Missouri Fur Company and now was mining for lead in Washington County southwest of St. Louis.

Major Henry already had served in the Blackfeet country. He was there at the Three Forks in the spring of 1810, when five trappers had been killed or captured and John Colter had decided to pull out. Next, George Drouillard, who had been a hunter with the Lewis and Clark party (another of John Colter's old companions), and whose father Pierre Drouillard had rescued Simon Kenton from the Shawnees, was killed while fighting bravely. Finally the Blackfeet had driven all the trappers from that region. Major Henry led his remaining men west across the mountains, to the Snake River in Idaho. There on Henry Fork he built a trading-post. It was the first American post west of the Rocky Mountains.

Major Henry returned to St. Louis in 1811. He had met with bad luck in the fur-hunt business, so he went into mining. But the beaver country kept calling to him. He was not yet beaten by the Indians, the snows, the freshets and the hunger.

Therefore in 1822 he started again, for the mouth of the Yellowstone and the Great Falls of the Missouri, farther up. The Assiniboines stole all his horses. He stayed at the mouth of the Yellowstone until he had traded for more, from the Crows; went on to the Great Falls—and the Blackfeet again smashed him and sent him back down-river, minus four good men.

General Ashley was to follow him, with reinforcements of another one hundred young men. He was met by a courier from his partner, asking for horses, horses, horses. He stopped to trade with the Arikaras, in present South Dakota; they suddenly attacked him, rolled him up, and stopped him completely.

He had to drop back, fortify, and call for volunteers to take word to Major Henry that nothing could be done this season until the way had been opened. Jedediah Smith, aged twenty-five, stepped forward. He was of New York State, and had been in the West only two years; had never been farther from St. Louis than this, into the Indian country. But his voice rang true; he wished to learn. General Ashley gave him a French-Canadian of St. Louis as a scout companion, and together they crossed the six hundred miles of vast lonely plains infested by the Arikaras and Sioux and Assiniboines, to Major Henry at the mouth of the Yellowstone.

Major Henry's party returned with them, to General Ashley at the mouth of the Cheyenne River in South Dakota. From the United States post at the Lewis and Clark's Council Bluffs, western Iowa of to-day, Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Leavenworth (Fort Leavenworth of Kansas is named for him) of the Sixth United States Infantry, hastened up with six companies of regulars, several cannon and three keel-boats. Joshua Pilcher, president of the Missouri Fur Company, joined him; General Ashley and Major Henry met him with other men; four or five hundred Sioux enlisted—the Sioux hated the Arikaras. And all together (except that the Sioux soon quit, disgusted with the way the white soldiers fought) they battered at the Arikara village from a distance until the enemy announced that it was time to make peace.

Now Major Henry took eighty men and once again set out, with horses and packs, for the Yellowstone, to finish the season. He had a fine company—the pick of the rank and file: Jedediah Smith, Jim Bridger, William ("Billy") Sublette whom the Indians were to name "Cut Face" and "Left Hand," Davy Jackson, old "Cut Nose" Edward Rose who was half white, one quarter Cherokee and one quarter negro and had been a chief of the Crows, "old" Hugh Glass, and others.

Major Henry, of the dark hair, blue eyes, and fondness for the violin, had only fair luck on this trip. Trapper Hugh Glass had much worse, at the beginning, although he ended well.

He was from Pennsylvania, but was no greenhorn on the beaver trail, or else they would not have called him "old." The title "old" announced that a man was "beaver wise" and "Injun wise." So "old" Hugh Glass was a leather-faced, leather-clad, whiskered veteran of probably not over forty years but of the right experience as a "hivernan" or "winterer."

The route taken left the Missouri River, to cut across country more to the westward, for the Yellowstone direct. Near evening of the fifth day out they all had turned up the Grand River, still in present South Dakota, and the hunters were riding widely or trudging through the river thickets, looking for meat.

This was elk, deer and buffalo country—also bear country. Those were days when the grizzly bear ranged the plains as far east as the Upper Missouri; and he posed as the monarch of all he surveyed. The Lewis and Clark men had discovered him on their outward trip in 1804-1805; they had brought back astonishing reports of him. He stood almost nine feet tall, on his hind legs; his fore paws were nine inches across; his claws were over four inches long; his tusks were prodigious; his nose as large as that of an ox; and two men could scarcely carry his hide. Eight and ten balls were sometimes required, to kill him; he would run a mile and more, after being shot through the heart; he feared nothing. Captain Lewis declared that he would rather fight two Indians at once, than one "white bear." No such an animal was known in Kentucky.

The great grizzly usually lurked in the willows, wild-plum trees and other brush of the stream courses. Here he made his bed, and from here he charged without warning—afraid not at all of the two-legged enemy and their single-shot, muzzle-loading flint-lock rifles. In spite of his size, he was marvelously quick. Besides, he had a short temper.

Hugh Glass was making his way, this August evening, amidst the tangle of wild plums, berry bushes, and willows along the bank of the Grand. Suddenly he had burst out into a small clearing—a bear's "nest" made by crushing the brush in a circle: and the bear was at home, had heard him coming.

More than that, it was an old she-bear, and a mother bear, lying with her two cubs upon the twigs and sand. Hugh Glass, a careless though a skilled hunter, had met with a surprise. Before he had time to spring back or even to set the hair-trigger of his rifle, she was towering over him: a huge yellowish bulk whose deep-set piggish little eyes glowed greenish with rage, whose white tusks gleamed in a snarling, dripping red mouth, whose stout arms (thicker than his calves) reached for him with their long curved claws.

This alarming sight he saw—and then she grabbed him, with a stroke that nearly scalped him; drew him in to her, lifted him off the ground to hug him, bit him in the throat, and hurling him flat tore a mouthful of flesh from him and gave it to her cubs!

Horrible! Was he to be eaten alive, like a deer? Evidently she looked upon him as a species of animal that might be a tidbit for her family. When she turned to call her cubs and give them the meat she slightly removed her weight from him. With a writhe he scrambled to get away. No use. She was after him at once; so were the cubs, as eager as she. They did not mean that their supper should escape. The whole family commenced to maul him. The mother seized him by the shoulder and straddled him; she bit, the two cubs bit and raked. He was only a toy to them, and being rapidly gashed to ribbons he would have died then and there had not his shouts and the growling of the bears brought help.

First, his hunting partner arrived, hot-foot, with rifle ready. One cub drove him waist deep into the river before a ball finished that young battler. The other men hastened in, summoned by the redoubled cries for help. The old mother grizzly was standing upon Hugh Glass and bellowing defiance. The second cub ran. By several volleys they killed the mother grizzly; then they rolled her off from Trapper Glass and inspected him, to see what they could do.

"Poor old Hugh! He's a goner—he's nigh et up." That was the verdict. He certainly looked like a "goner"—all bloody and mangled, with scarcely an inch of sound skin on his face, body and limbs. He could not see, he was past speaking, he was unable to stand; he only lay and dismally groaned.

They washed him and patched him and bound him as best they might, and took counsel together. They couldn't carry him on; they couldn't send him back; and they couldn't camp here, waiting for him to get well or to die; they had to reach the Henry fort at the mouth of the Yellowstone, with their horses and supplies, before winter.

"If two of you men will stay and nurse Glass, we'll make up a purse to pay for the loss of your fall hunt," Major Henry proposed.

Trapper Fitzgerald, and a seventeen-year-old who is said to have been Jim Bridger, agreed to stay with Hugh Glass and nurse him or bury him. They were given eighty dollars, to cover the beaver fur that they might miss out on. Major Henry left them and the groaning Hugh, and hastened with his other men for the Yellowstone.

It was a dangerous and lonely job. They were two (one of them only seventeen and rather of a greenhorn yet); this was Arikara and Sioux country; the Arikaras had shown bad hearts; they fought the Sioux and all friends of the Sioux, the Sioux fought them and all friends of them; and caught by one band or another, white hunters might fare ill. Forty dollars was small pay for risking one's scalp. As for risking it to save a comrade, of course no pay at all was asked. So the money did not figure.

Old Hugh did not grow better; on the contrary, he seemed to grow worse. He was a frightful sight. The teeth and claws of the bears had poisoned him and he was one mass of gaping wounds; lay moaning and raving until his fever weakened him so that he had no strength—couldn't swallow nourishment to keep alive and the men had to sit beside him constantly to brush away the flies.

On the fifth day they gave him up.

"He'll not live the night."

"No. He's goin' fast. It's a wonder he's held out this long, poor Hugh. I never did see a human bein' hang on like him."

"What'll we do, then?"

"Wall, youngster, thar's only one thing to do. That's to pull out while we kin, 'fore we lose our ha'r. 'Tis a wonder the Injuns ain't diskivvered us already. Glass is as good as dead, now; but we'll wait till dark."

"I don't feel jest right about leavin' him, Tom," young Jim objected. "'Tain't natteral to desart a man, that way, an' we said we'd stay."

"We said we'd stay to nurse him or bury him, but he's past nursin' an' he ain't quite ripe for buryin', son. He will be, by mornin'; but what difference to him whether he's layin' atop the ground or under the ground? An' that's a matter o' twelve hours to us, an' twelve hours counts a heap, on the Injun trail. The Injuns can't do him any harm. They kin harm us a lot. No; it's time we kin light out, an' if we say he's dead we'll not be lyin', for dead he'll be long 'fore we get to t'other end. Two live men are wuth more'n one dead man, in this country; an' we've done our duty to old Hugh, sech as he is. We'd best take his gun an' fixin's, too; he won't need 'em an' you kin be sartin he wouldn't want the Injuns to have 'em."

When they left, that night, Trapper Glass appeared to be scarcely breathing. He could not possibly last through till morning; and by morning they might be well upon their way. They rode off. It was a mean thing to do—not at all like Jim Bridger if that was young Jim Bridger; but he could not stay alone and they neither of them had any idea that Hugh Glass would be otherwise than dead within a few hours.

When, early in a morning several days afterward, Trapper Hugh opened his tired eyes and gazed weakly around him, he saw nothing astir except the birds and rabbits. He heard nothing. He had faint memory of two companions—knew their names, or thought that he did; but where were they? The camp-fire ashes were cold; no breakfast smoke arose. He saw no packs, no bedding; the bones of the she-bear were scattered and white and dry.

He called feebly.

"Tom! Jim! Hello! Whar be ye?"

Nobody answered. He tried to sit up; looked for his rifle, felt for his shot-pouch and powder-horn. His two nurses were gone; so were his gun, horn, pouch that held his knife and flint and steel. He had been abandoned; and such a blaze of wrath surged through him that he determined now to live if only to trail those fellows and kill them.

Yes, by thunder, he'd crawl clear to Fort Henry at the Yellowstone and shoot the two in their tracks!

He was too weak to sit or stand, but he managed to draw himself along and find a spring. There he lay, day and night, picking the fruit from the low wild-cherry and buffalo-berry bushes as far as he might reach, and dozing and bathing his wounds; and he got stronger. The tide of life crept higher and higher. Trapper Hugh knew that he was going to live. But he was scarred redly from head to foot, had lost part of his whiskers and part of his hair; was peeled to the bone, in places. What a face he had, although he could not see it!

In about ten days he was ready to travel. The nearest trading-post that he knew of was fully one hundred miles southeast, on the Missouri. That looked like a long, long distance for a man who could not walk straight and had not even a knife. But he was bound to go, get patched up, and find those two villains who had abandoned him—who had left him as dead when he wasn't dead at all!

He managed to find roots, and more berries. At last, on his staggering, slow way, he sighted a late buffalo-calf surrounded by wolves. The wolves killed the calf. He waited until they had dulled their appetites; then waving his arms and shouting he staggered in upon them. He was enough to put almost anything to flight. The wolves dropped their bushy tails and slunk off; and Hugh Glass thankfully "chawed" the raw, warm meat.

He stayed here a short time. He went on, stronger. He came to a deserted Indian village. A few Indian dogs were prowling around. He was very hungry again. He spent two days in coaxing the dogs to him, in order to get his hands upon one. Then he killed it and partly ate it. Living thus, by his wits, like a wild animal or a wild man, he arrived at the trading post near the mouth of the Teton or Mad River, central South Dakota.

But he did not stay long—not even to get patched up. A party of trappers arrived, in a boat from down-river; they were going above, to the Yellowstone—the very spot for which he hankered and where his revenge waited. He embarked. The Arikaras ambushed the boat and killed all the party except Hugh Glass.

They did not get the scalp of old Hugh; no, indeed. He bore a charmed life. He had left the boat, the day before, to make a short cut to Fort Tilton, which lay around a bend. The Arikaras only chased him into the arms of two Mandans; the Mandans took him into Fort Tilton—and that same night, such was his hurry, he set out alone again, on foot, for the Yellowstone and the Andrew Henry fort at the mouth of the Big Horn in Crow and the Blackfoot country.

He did not fear; he believed that nothing could kill him. Nothing had been able to kill him, yet! Thirty-eight days later, or near the close of October, Trapper Glass strode to the gate of the Henry fort at the mouth of the Big Horn, up the Yellowstone.

The sentry stared, agape.

"Who are you?"

"How, yoreself, young feller. Whoopee! Tell 'em hyar's old Hugh Glass, who war et by a grizzly b'ar an' is slick as a peeled onion; an' he wants his gun an' fixin's. Whar's the rascals that stole all my plunder?"

Hugh Glass! A miracle! But he it was.

"We thought you were dead and buried, man!"

"Wall, I ain't, not by a jugful. An' I wants my plunder an' the scalps o' them two villains."

"They aren't here. They're down at Atkinson."

What? Fort Atkinson was the Council Bluffs, on the lower Missouri one thousand miles away.

"I'll git 'em yit," vowed old Hugh. "If I'd only have knowed! I warn't very fur from Atkinson."

In February he started for Atkinson, with four other men. They traveled across country, through central Wyoming, and struck the Platte; paddled down the Platte in hide boats that they made—and ran right into the Arikaras. By night-fall old Hugh found himself again alone; he had lost all four of his comrades (two had been killed before his eyes), and most of his new outfit. But, he said:

"I felt quite rich when I found my knife and steel in my shot pouch. These little fixin's make a man feel right peart when he is three or four hundred miles away from anybody or anywhere—all alone among the painters (panthers) and the wild varmints."

In the early spring the buffalo calves are young and senseless. He easily caught them, cut them up, made a fire and cooked the meat; and in June he was at Fort Atkinson.

By this time he had forgiven the youngster. He was willing to believe that the "young feller" wasn't used to trapper ways, and hadn't known any better. But he still bore a grudge against Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald was at Atkinson, enlisted in the army. Old Hugh raged and stormed, but did not dare to touch him. They talked it over; Fitz explained why he had left the grizzly bear camp—had stayed five days, at the risk of his own life, until there wasn't any nursing to be done; and when he had gone on Hugh Glass was the same as dead and he ought to have stayed dead. Wasn't that reasonable?

Hugh scratched his scarred head and half agreed. The commanding officer ordered that he be given a brand new outfit; whatever he needed. This squared matters, and Trapper Hugh proceeded to entertain the garrison with his tall stories of how he had been "et by a b'ar," and had been chasin' his plunder for ten months, between the lower Missouri and the Yellowstone.

This bear adventure made "Old Glass" a celebrated figure among the traders and trappers of beaver days on the Upper Missouri. As seemed to him, he had earned the right to live forever, in defiance of Injuns and "varmints." But in the winter of 1832-1833 the Arikaras killed him, on the ice of the Yellowstone River, hard by the mouth of the same Big Horn where he had so astonished the Andrew Henry fort nine years before.



CHAPTER XV

A FRACAS ON THE SANTA FE TRAIL (1829)

AND THE BUILDING OF BENT'S FORT

The United States east of the Upper Mississippi River was opened to the white race by the settlers, who fought to locate their homes in the country of the Shawnees, the Mingos, the Delawares, the Potawatomis, and all.

The newer United States of the vast Louisiana Territory, west of the Upper Mississippi River, was for a long time thought to be of little value as a home land. Its value seemed to lie in furs and in trade with the natives.

After the exploration by Captain Meriwether Lewis and his friend Lieutenant Clark, the fur-hunters were the Americans who opened the trails into the country of the Sioux, the Arikaras, the Blackfeet, the Crows and all. They did not make permanent homes; they built only rude forts, as store-houses, and when outside lived in camps like Indian camps. They did not till the ground. When they left, the country was about the same as before, given up to the wild men and the wild animals.

This, during fifty years, was the principal use made of the Missouri River portion of the Louisiana Territory, in the northwest. And in the southwest portion little more was done, but the American merchants were the ones who opened that.

Young Lieutenant Zebulon Montgomery Pike first explored it, sent out by the commander-in-chief of the army, in 1806, while Lewis and Clark were still homeward bound from the other direction. He traveled up the Arkansas River and into the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, and landed as a prisoner in Santa Fe of New Mexico.

The news that he brought back, of New Mexico and the way to get there (an easier way than his own round-about tour) encouraged the merchants and capitalists of St. Louis to hope that a trading route, back and forth, might be opened with Mexico. Calico, cotton, shoes, tobacco, trinkets and the like were to be sold for gold and silver, or exchanged for buffalo-robes, beaver-furs, blankets, and wool—all at one hundred per cent, profit over the original cost. Mexico manufactured very little, and was eager for American goods.

As the result, through the country of the Kiowas and the Comanches there was opened the great Santa Fe Trail of the merchants and traders. From the Missouri River at the Kansas border it struck out into present central Kansas, headed southwest to the Arkansas River, and passing on across the desert into northeastern New Mexico arrived at old Santa Fe, seven hundred and seventy miles.

The other great national trail, the Oregon Trail of the fur-hunters, was long a pack trail, until the wagons of the emigrants and gold-seekers to California began to throng it. The Santa Fe Trail soon became mainly a wagon trail, for the Santa Fe caravans.

From the Missouri River the traders set out, twenty, thirty, forty wagons in a train—huge canvas-covered Conestogas, thirty feet in length with boxes six feet in depth, carrying three tons of freight and drawn by eight span of oxen or mules. From the lead span's noses to the end-gate of the wagon the length over all was thirty yards. These Santa Fe wagons were not prairie schooners; they were prairie frigates.

Thus they lumbered on, at not better than fifteen miles a day; and during their fifty or sixty days' trips out, loaded, and their forty days' trips back, partly empty, the Kiowas and Comanches, the storms and the hot dry desert, saw to it that they did not have easy sailing.

Among the early Santa Fe traders were the Bent brothers, Charles, William and George, of a large and well-known American family. Their grandfather Silas Bent had been captain of the Boston patriots who in 1773 dumped overboard the English tea on which the Colonists refused to pay a tax; their father Silas Bent, Jr., was first judge of Common Pleas in St. Louis; their younger brother Silas III became a naval officer and discovered and charted the warm-water flow or Japanese Current of the Pacific Ocean; and they themselves aided civilization by building the massive Bent's Fort of the Plains, on the Arkansas River in south-eastern Colorado—for many years the only trading-post and supply depot that could be depended upon, in all the Southwest.

There had been a few traders killed, almost every year, by the Indians; but in 1828 matters grew so bad that the St. Louis merchants asked help from the Government. This year 1828 not only were several traders killed; a party of Comanches who knew nothing of the killings were invited into camp and were shot, except one, out of revenge. The one escaped, to tell his friends. Of course, after this nothing but war could be expected from the southwest Indians, who would be only too glad of an excuse to capture the white man's goods and teams.

William Bent, and perhaps George, already were looking up a site for the fort. They had been attacked, and almost wiped out in a fierce battle. Charles Bent, who was older than they, had made the round trip to Santa Fe. In the spring of 1829 he started again.

The caravan numbered thirty-five wagons and seventy men. He was captain in charge. Under him there were Traders Samuel C. Lamme, William Waldo, and other wagon owners, determined upon making the trip as usual. It would never do to let the Indians close the trail.

Besides, President Andrew Jackson, "Old Rough and Ready," the hero of the battle of New Orleans in 1815, had directed that a soldier escort be furnished as far as the Arkansas River. The Arkansas was the boundary line agreed upon between the United States and Mexico. It was about half way. The Mexican government promised to meet the caravans there, with other soldiers, and escort them the rest of the way, and bring them back to the United States frontier.

That was the arrangement.

Fort Leavenworth, up the Missouri, had been located two years before. Troops were ordered from there, to join the caravan. They were four companies of the Sixth United States Infantry commanded by Captain (brevet Major) Bennet Riley, after whom Fort Riley of Kansas is named. Major Riley had fought as a young officer in the War of 1812. He had just gained his brevet of major for having served as captain for ten years. Promotion was very slow.

The caravan owners and its hunters and adventurers were glad to see the sturdy infantry. Infantry is poor stuff with which to catch Indians quickly; cavalry was more used, in a chase: but after a time the Indians grew to fear the infantry more than the cavalry.

"Pony soldiers run; walk-a-heaps no can run, must fight," they said.

So while the caravan might have preferred dragoons or mounted riflemen, to scour on either side and ride in front and rear, it must have taken comfort in the presence of the plodding solid "walk-a-heaps," the unbeatable dough-boys.

Now for the first time since the Lieutenant Pike expedition of 1806 a detachment of American regular soldiers marched into the Southwest between the Missouri River and the Arkansas.

The march of a Santa Fe caravan was a noble sight: the enormous hooded wagons, flaring like poke bonnets, each drawn by twelve and sixteen oxen or mules, lumbering on in a long double file or sometimes four abreast; the booted teamsters trudging beside the fore-wheels, cracking their eighteen-foot lashes; the armed out-riders guarding the flanks—galloping here and there in quest of Indians and game; the captain and his aides spying the country ahead; and the calallada or herd of loose extra animals bringing up the rear.

The gait was only two or two and a half miles an hour, so the Major Riley infantry easily kept pace.

When the Arkansas River had been reached, at the crossing or ford Major Riley made camp, to wait until the caravan returned. The teams were doubled and trebled—twenty, thirty, forty animals to a wagon; and with them all straining and snorting, a dozen teamsters cracking whips and shouting, and the heavy Conestogas careening to their hubs in the quick-sand, the crossing was won.

No Mexican escort had appeared. Captain Bent boldly led on, into Mexico.

This portion of the Santa Fe Trail was especially perilous. Between the Arkansas River and the Cimarron River (which through most of the year was no river at all) there was no water for fifty and sixty miles, except right after rains. The stretch was called the "water scrape." All the five-gallon kegs hanging under the wagons had to be filled, and the teams were hustled day and night in order to get across as quickly as possible.

It was a hot country, of soft sand hub-deep and of wind-swept tracts so hard that the wagon wheels left no trace. Caravans traveled by compass; and even then were likely to toil and wander miserably, with their mules and oxen dying from thirst. The Indians loved to catch a caravan in here. The Kiowas and Comanches frequently lay in wait among the billowy sand-hills.

Thus it came about that the Bent caravan, this July of 1829, was attacked on the very first day out from the Arkansas. It had marched only nine or ten miles. The going was very bad, in the hot, flowing sand. All around arose the sand-hills, shimmering yellow, with the sun beating down out of a blue sky. The wagons were strung in a long straggling line, while mules and oxen, their tongues hanging, tugged hard. The teamsters, their feet blistering in their cowhide boots, their beards and flannel shirts caked with dust, urged manfully.

The sand-hills, fifty feet high, formed a complete circle around this sandy basin here. The caravan had entered by a narrow passage, and was stringing across, for another narrow passage. Whether the passage opened into the country beyond, nobody knew. Trader Lamme and two companions spurred ahead, to find out: a foolish thing to do.

They disappeared among the hollows; were gone not half an hour, when on a sudden, distant gun-shots soundly thinly, and back into sight galloped two of the men, racing full tilt, bare-headed. Following fast there came a drove of other figures—and as if from the very ground, on right and left of the leading wagons, still more figures up-sprung. A chorus of wild whoops echoed.

Injuns!

All the caravan was in confusion. Horsemen rode, teamsters shouted as they grabbed their guns from the seats and swung their whips. Oxen bellowed and jumbled, mules snorted and balked, the herders of the caballada shrieked for help.

"Close up! Close up!"

"Corral!"

"Charge 'em! Meet the beggars!"

"No! Under yore wagon, everybody!"

"Get out o' my way! Yip! Gee, Buck!"

"Haw, Spot! Haw, Whity! Haw with you!"

"Durn these mules! We'll all be wolf meat."

"Look! There's nigh a thousand of 'em!"

The out-rider guards had lined, on either hand, to stand the enemy off while the wagons bunched. A rear guard sped to protect the caballada. Captain Charles Bent tore back from the advance. He was bare-headed. His long black hair streamed in the breeze that he made. He was mounted on a rangy, raw-boned black mule, with split ears—Comanche brand. No man more fearless ever ranged the plains. A host in himself, was Charles Bent.

His voice fairly thundered as he sped along the struggling line of wagons and teams.

"Bring on those wagons! Corral! Don't lose your senses, men! We're all right. But corral, corral!"

The two fugitives arrived, breathless, their animals sweat-covered and blown. Alas, neither of them was Samuel Lamme, and Samuel Lamme had not appeared.

"We've lost Lamme!" they shouted. "The Injuns got him, first fire."

"Fetch up that cannon. Unlimber," Captain Bent was shouting.

It was a small brass cannon, but had been so wrapped to protect it from the sand that the men could scarcely untie the knots. Away galloped Captain Bent, on his split-ear mule, to encourage the skirmishers' line. He had to be everywhere at once.

Out yonder the rifles and shot-guns were volleying, as the skirmishers, slowly retreating, held the Indians off. The leading wagons had turned broadside to the trail; one by one, or two by two, the other wagons lurched on—they also turning right and left, their teams inside, and their fore wheels almost touching the rear wheels of the wagons already halted. In this way a corral was being formed, in shape of an oval, with an opening at the end, for the caballada to enter.

That was desperate work. Around and around scurried the Indians, lying low upon their ponies' backs or hanging to the farther side, whooping, shaking their blankets, and launching their arrows and balls. They were Kiowas and Comanches both; and had the caravan just about where they wanted it.

The corral was completed; the caballada jostled in; the teamsters crawled here and there, to poke their guns through the wheels; in rode the skirmishers, Captain Bent last. The circling Indians pressed closer; and the cannon piece was yet useless, although the men yanked and slashed.

But the rifles and muskets kept the enemy off. When finally the cannon was unlimbered, aimed, and fired, it only broke the circle. The Indians scattered; and yelling angrily settled down to a siege.

The sun of mid-afternoon was scorching. The wagons on the west end of the corral furnished a little shade, but even in the shade the sand burned the skin. The men, lying flat, shifted wearily. The animals dropped their heads, and panted. The bare yellow hills around quivered. All the little basin was like a furnace. There was not a drop of water except in the casks, and this water would not last long—the air would suck up what men and beasts did not soon drink. The Indians need only wait.

What a fix! The attack could not have been made in a worse place, were it not for the soldiers.

Captain Bent called a council. The Major Riley escort, scarce ten miles back, was the main hope. Some way must be found to summon them.

"But we're in Mexico. It's ag'in the law of nations for soldiers from one country to march in time o' peace into another country."

"Never mind. They're Americans and they'll not stop to figure on boundary lines," Captain Bent answered. "They'll come, I'll wager, even if it brings on war with a dozen nations. Who'll take the back trail? There ought to be enough to make a running fight."

Nine men volunteered. They had a slim chance, but some of them might break loose. They rode away, in the full open. The Indians could not fail to see them.

Rifle-pits had been dug for the out-posts. In the pits and in the corral the merchants, teamsters, and hunters sweltered, while they anxiously gazed. Scattered in squads among the dips and hollows, the Indians uttered never a sound. Then they burst into a yell. They saw the nine horsemen bolting for the north.

Aha! Several of the Indians had swooped in chase. No! They turned again. What did they fear? The cannon? Or a trap? Or didn't they care? They preferred waiting for bigger booty. Evidently they did not know about the soldiers at the river. The nine riders had got away! Now if the Indians only would hold off for a few hours, the caravan was saved. There seemed to be more than a thousand of the Kiowas and Comanches—in one grand charge they could ride right over the corral; but they knew that they would lose many a warrior, and they planned to get the victory more easily.

The Major Riley command were loafing in their tents and in the shade of the few cottonwoods, until the sun should set. Everything was peaceful—and plaguey hot. Then a sentry's musket gave the alarm signal; he shouted and pointed; the sergeant of the guard ran; from the tents officers and soldiers boiled out, or sprang to their feet, in the shade; bathers in the river plashed for their clothes; and the men on herd commenced to gather their oxen, mules and saddle animals.

A squad of horsemen were galloping in from the south; as they approached they called and waved, and pointed backward. They were a part of the traders who had left the camp only a few hours before. Something had happened, and that could be only Indians. Major Riley did not delay to ask.

"Sound the general," he bade, buckling on his saber at the door of his tent; and the chief bugler sent the notes rollicking through the waves of heat.

Officers ran hither-thither; the men ran; the teamsters ran; the herd swung in, for the parked wagons. The "general" was the first signal to form ranks.

The leading horsemen of the nine couriers galloped into the water and surged across. By the time the last had arrived, the second signal, the "assembly," had been sounded; the tents were being struck, baggage tied, and the oxen driven to their yokes. The companies were about to form.

All these preparations took some time. Two hundred men cannot break camp in an instant and march with bag and baggage into Indian country. And when "To the color," as the final call was known, had been sounded, the sun was set, and the first purple was flowing into the hollows of the vast, lonely land.

The major was going, with his whole force. The couriers had reported one thousand Indians, at the least; the sand-hills were full of them; all the Kiowa and Comanche nations were rallied to close the trail. It would not do to leave an unprotected camp, and no men were to be spared.

In the twilight they forded the shallow Arkansas—the army oxen straining in their yokes, a squad of soldiers pushing each wagon. They entered Mexico; all were liable to arrest, but who cared?

The couriers guided into the sand-hills. The major and his staff followed on their mules. The column of footmen and wagons toiled after.

They could hear no sounds of fighting, before. The twilight deepened. They must move cautiously. The Indians had seen the couriers ride out, they might be laying an ambush. A file of skirmishers fringed either flank, well out; scouts examined the country, ahead. Every ear was pricked, every eye searched right and left.

The silence was very mysterious. The couriers had reported that the Indians' circle was wide, to avoid the cannon. When the stars read midnight, the major thought that he surely had arrived at the scene. The word was passed that every wheel and hoof and foot should be muffled as much as possible, and the infantry were halted, to await the baggage train.

They proceeded. About one o'clock their advance struck the wagon corral itself. The Indians had not discovered them; the caravan out-posts had not discovered them: either side might have surprised the other side, evidently, but neither side knew. In fact, they had not been expected before morning. No one had dreamed that Major Riley would risk a night march through the sand-hills, infested with a thousand and more Indians.

Now the corral and the soldiers waited for morning. At first daylight the reveille was sounded in the army camp. This was military regulations, but gave the Indians warning.

The shrill notes pealed far among the slumberous dunes. The Kiowas and Comanches, leaping to their feet, stared amazed. Down there, at the wagon corral, two hundred blue-coated American soldiers had grown over-night! Musket barrels faintly gleamed, two score fresh wagon-tops glimmered, figures hastened to and fro, there was clatter of arms.

Wah! These were no traders. They were warriors—American warriors. That made a different proposition. How had they come, and from where?

"We will go," the chiefs decided. "The Mexican soldiers may be coming, too, and we shall be caught between."

So they all rode away.

Major Riley determined that the whole party must march on. To stay here, in this little basin surrounded by the hills, was dangerous. It was no place in which to fight. He would escort the caravan at least a day's stint farther, into more open country.

First, Trader Lamme's body was found, and buried. He had been arrow-shot and lanced; scalped, stripped, and his head cut off. So he was left under the desert sand, and later his bones were dug up and reburied in St. Louis. Then the long column wended for the narrow pass out. It was reconnoitered and found to be undefended. They hastened through, while occupying the high ground on both flanks, and after a short but hard march halted, to camp.

Major Riley was still game. He agreed to advance another day's stint, in order to see the caravan well started into safer regions. With the rise of the sun, a gale also arose. The wind blew hot and hotter, driving the sand in clouds and almost smothering the men and animals. Therefore little could be done. The mules and oxen had to be unyoked—they stood with tongues out and tails to the gale; the wagon covers lashed and bellied; the men sheltered themselves as best they might from the stinging storm out of a clear sky.

By four o'clock in the afternoon the wind died. Every vestige of a trail had been wiped clean; but in ten miles the column luckily blundered upon sign of water, in a dry creek-bed. Hurrah! The scouts searching about found water itself: a pool, in the midst of an acre or two of grass!

The surface of the pool was covered with dead fish, killed by the heat of the sun. That made no difference. The pool was wet.

Major Riley and his soldiers turned back the next morning. Captain Bent took the caravan on, to Santa Fe.

From here, he and his brothers that fall located their trading post. The place was two hundred and sixty miles north of Santa Fe, on the north bank of the Arkansas River, fourteen miles above the mouth of the Purgatory River, or about half way between the towns of La Junta and Las Animas in present southeastern Colorado.

One branch, the Mountain Branch, of the Santa Fe Trail, led up the Arkansas, to it, and on, to turn south across the Raton Mountain for Santa Fe. The Cheyennes gathered near-by, every fall, for their great winter camp. The Utes from the Rocky Mountains, one hundred and thirty miles west, sometimes came down. A traders' and trappers' trail between Santa Fe and the Platte River passed this way. It was a sort of a cross-roads, in the wilderness.

Bent's Fort, called also Fort William after William Bent, was built of adobe or clay bricks. It was one hundred and fifty feet long and one hundred feet wide. Its walls were eighteen feet high, and six or seven feet thick at the base. The tops formed a parapet or walk. In two diagonally opposite corners were bastions of round towers, thirty feet high, swelling out so as to command the walls. The main gateway was thirty feet wide and closed by a pair of huge plank doors. Over the gateway there was a sentry box, floating the United States flag. The six-pounder brass cannon of the caravan was mounted upon a wall, on a swivel, to fire in all directions; other cannon were added.

Bent's Fort became famous. Soon all the Indians for leagues around knew of it. The Arapahos and the Southern Cheyennes traded in their buffalo robes here; the mountain Utes, and the Red River Comanches of northern Texas came in. At one time, in the late fall and in the winter, twenty thousand Indians would be camped within sight of it.

Trappers from north, west and south made it their market and headquarters. Traders trailed in, from the States and from New Mexico. In 1846 General Stephen Watts Kearny's army from Leavenworth for Santa Fe and California halted here, to refit.

So Bent's Fort prospered. It had the only ice-house on the plains; the pumpkin pies of its negress cook, Charlotte, spread its fame wider; the rank and file of the Indians and the trappers and traders, and the army officers themselves, swore by Bent's Fort.

The Indians called William Bent "Hook-Nose Man" or "Roman Nose." He married a Cheyenne girl. He was the governor of the fort. His brother George helped. Charles Bent was largely at Santa Fe, at Taos, midway, and on the trail, until in 1846 he was appointed first American governor of New Mexico.

The next year the Mexicans and Pueblo Indians revolted against the American government, and killed him at his home in Taos.

Bent's Fort lasted through more than twenty years. Then William Bent offered to sell it to the Government for an army post. He asked $16,000; the Government proposed $12,000. They dickered. Colonel Bent would not yield one penny. He had a short stock of patience in dealing with white men or red men either. So in the summer of 1852 he blew up the fort with powder and marched away, to build another post, for Indian trade, thirty miles down-river.

This became Fort Wise, of the army, but was known to the settlers as "old" Fort Lyon.

Ten years after selling it to the Government, this time at his own price, in 1869 William Bent died, aged sixty, near the ranch that he owned only a few miles from the ruins of his celebrated Bent's Fort.



CHAPTER XVI

A SEARCH FOR A SILVER MINE (1831)

AND THE "BOWIE INDIAN FIGHT"

While the American traders were bent upon opening a trail through the desert country of the Southwest Indians—the Kiowas, Comanches and Apaches—into northern Mexico, American settlers had entered Mexico itself.

Moses Austin, born in Connecticut, but lastly a lead merchant in those same mines of Washington County, Missouri, where Major Andrew Henry the fur-hunter also was working, heard of the rich lands of the Spanish province of Texas. Major Henry thought mainly of beaver-fur—a get-rich-quick business that took what it might out of a country and left little in exchange. Moses Austin was a merchant and a manufacturer—in Missouri he turned his lead into shot, bars and sheets, and shipped his product to New Orleans. Now in 1820 he determined to settle Texas with American farmers.

Toward the close of the year he obtained from the Spanish governor, at San Antonio the capital of Texas, a grant of land. He died before he had removed there, himself; but his son Stephen Fuller Austin led the first settlers, gathered at New Orleans, in December, 1821. They located up the Brazos River in southeastern Texas.

The government of Mexico was glad to have the sturdy Americans upon its frontier, to act as a bulwark against the Indians. All Texas, like the Ohio Valley, was the favorite range of hard-fighting tribes; from the cannibal Karankawas (six feet tall, and wielding long-bows that no white man could draw) on the Gulf coast in the south, to the widely riding Comanches and Apaches in the north, with the Wacos, the Tawakonis, the Caddos, and others, in between.

The Spanish soldiery had made little progress against them. The Mexican settlements were few, the missions built by the Spanish priests had been destroyed; from San Antonio in the west to Nacogdoches in the east the country still belonged to the red warriors.

They began to pillage and kill the Americans. Texas was another Kentucky. But as in Kentucky and the Ohio Valley the Americans pushed on and on. They were not the kind to quit.

Among the early Americans to make their homes in Texas were the Bowie brothers: James, Rezin and Stephen. They were Georgians, but raised in Louisiana. The United States claimed Texas as a part of the Louisiana Territory that had been bought from France. Before ever Moses Austin had obtained his grant of land, parties of American adventurers were constantly invading, to seize the country which as yet seemed to belong to nobody.

In 1819 James Bowie had landed, in just such a company, near Galveston; and although the company was driven out he chose Texas for his home. He traveled through it, lived at old San Antonio, entered into business, at Saltillo, south of the Rio Grande on the present Mexican border, was naturalized as a Mexican citizen, and in 1830 married the daughter of Juan Veramendi, the vice-governor of the State of Coahuila and Texas.

His brother Rezin also was now a Texan; Stephen came in a little later.

The two, Jim and Rezin, were famous for their bowie-knife, as well as for their bold fighting qualities. The knife was an accident. The first one had been invented by Rezin from a finely-tempered blacksmith's file, for a hunting-knife, in Louisiana. When hammered and drawn into shape it had a blade five and one-quarter inches long and one and one-half inches wide; was so nicely balanced that it was proved to be both a useful tool and a terrible weapon.

Rezin gave this first knife to his brother Jim, and ordered another for himself. "Bowie's knife" gained much favor from those who tried it; and speedily the "bowie-knife" was being adopted by the hunters, backwoodsmen, desperadoes and all. Some wore it in their belts; some wore it in their boots.

The Spanish from the south had been in Texas long before the Americans were admitted; the Spanish military post of San Antonio de Bejar was founded in 1718, to protect the Catholic missionaries there. Two hundred miles to the northwest of San Antonio the Spanish priests had started the mission of San Saba, in 1857, among the Lipan Apaches; but that had been destroyed in the spring of the next year by the Comanches, Wichitas, Tawehash, and other Indians who hated the Apaches and the Spaniards both.

They had other reason, than revenge upon the Lipan mission Indians and the Spanish who were helping their enemies. Along the San Saba River there were rich veins of silver which the Tawehash owned. Miners from the mining district of Amalgres, Mexico, came to the mission and worked the veins, and sent the precious metal away. The Indians did not wish to have their silver taken; and they set out to close the mines. This they achieved in one stroke—wiped the mission and the pupils and the miners from the face of the valley.

For almost seventy-five years the "New Amalgres" mines, as they were known, of the San Saba, remained only as a secret to the Indians. No outsider could get near them; no Indian would show them to the stranger: and of course the longer they were hidden from view, the richer they grew in story and guess.

About the time that he was married to the lovely daughter of Vice-Governor Juan Veramendi, Jim Bowie himself, with a party of thirty other fearless bordermen, started from San Antonio to prospect, and discover the storied Amalgres mines, which would make their fortunes.

Before swinging north they traveled one hundred miles west, to the Frio River country; here they came upon an outcrop of silver and sunk a shaft; at the same time they built a rock fort near a spring on a ridge between the forks of the Frio, so as to stand off the Indians.

The Indians found them very promptly; in the early morning drove them from their shaft to the rock fort, and besieged them hotly all the day. These Texans were good shots; they were Texan Ranger stuff—and the Texan Rangers have been unmatched as frontier fighters. But though the Indians could not get in, they themselves were out-numbered and could not get out; could not even get to the spring, and what with the thirst from sun and powder-smoke they at last had drained their canteens.

Doubtless the Indians were counting on this; but they had not reckoned the nerve of the men behind the walls.

Jim Bowie was the commander there. He figured the situation over. They had to have water; already thirst was torturing, and making his men reckless. There were twenty-nine white men, and one negro slave, Jim—his own servant. Jim was the poorest shot and could be the most easily spared. He turned to Jim, by his side.

"See here, Jim. I want you to take the canteens and fetch us water from that spring."

It may be readily believed that Jim's eyes popped.

"Out among dem Injuns! No, sar, Marse Jim! Dem Injuns is layin' dare in dem rocks an' bushes by de t'ousand, an' all dey gotto do is rare up an' kill dis nigger 'foh he could say 'Scat!' at 'em twice! No, sar; I cain't fill dem cainteens. Dey won't let me. No, sar!"

The white Jim looked for a moment at the black Jim, with those steady gray eyes that never wavered even when, six years later, they gazed from a sickbed and waited the attack of a hundred Mexicans in the tragic Alamo.

"Jim!" he said, "Which are you most afraid of: me, or those Indians?"

Black Jim's knees shook, and he scratched his woolly thatch.

"Well, now, Marse Jim, if de boys got to have water 'foh dey kin lick dem Injun, an' you 'sist on me goin,' 'cose den I'll volunteer. Jes' gimme dem cainteens."

"All right, Jim." And white Jim smiled grimly. "You'll be safe. We'll cover every head with our guns and you sha'n't be hurt. The spring's in short range. Just fill the canteens, and come back with them."

Out went Negro Jim, as brave as the bravest. Sure enough, he made the spring and not a shot was fired at him; he filled the canteens, and started back with his load—and no Indian had managed to get sight of him. But the canteens clinked, a warrior peeked and saw, and the whoop of alarm rang.

The Indians' guns spoke; the fort replied briskly; dark forms sprang from shelter, to cut the water-carrier off, and through the whizz of balls black Jim legged for the fort, with the canteens bouncing on his back and shanks.

One warrior gained rapidly on him—tomahawk raised to strike. Jim's voice rose in a panting wail.

"Marse Jim! Oh, Marse Jim! Shoot dis hyar Injun, quick! He's gwine to hurt somebody d'rec'ly!"

That looked likely. Most of the guns in the fort had been emptied, white Jim himself was madly reloading for a shot in time, if possible; the tomahawk was poised over poor black Jim's bobbing wool; when a report sounded smartly, and the "Indian fell back so suddenly his feet flew up in the air."

Negro Jim's voice changed.

"Never mind now, Marse Jim. Marse Bob done knock his heels higher'n his haid. Oh, glory!"

And puffing and sweating he dived into the fort with all the canteens. He had brought the water. But—

"Marse Jim, please, sar, make dis water go fur as possible," he pleaded. "'Twon't take much mo' dat kind o' work 'foh dar'll be one nigger less in dis world. No, sar! If Marse Bob hadn't kep' him load back an' make de bullet come straight dat big Injun'd put his hatchet squar' into my haid! Har! har! He suht'inly did grunt when dat piece ob lead hit him 'kerchug'! But mebbe next time dar wouldn't be no piece ob lead."

Robert Armstrong was the man who had fired the shot. Black Jim had recognized the rifle-crack. He knew all the men well, and they all knew him. Although he ranked as only a slave, they were free to admit that whatever his color he had done well; and Marse Jim Bowie was proud of his faithful servant boy.

This evening the Indians withdrew, discouraged. The Texan treasure-seekers went home while they had the chance. Negro Jim found himself quite a hero in San Antonio; he lived long after his master perished in the historic Alamo fight, there, and was called "Black Jim Bowie" until his own death.

As for the other Jim Bowie, he did not give up his search for the Amalgres mines. They filled his dreams. Almost immediately he left his bride and went out again, into the San Saba country; this time was more successful; discovered an old shaft eight feet deep, and at the bottom chopped out some ore with his hatchet; had it assayed at New Orleans. It tested rich indeed. He decided to take another party in. The result was not wealth, but glory; for "Bowie's Indian Fight" has never been forgotten.

There were eleven in the little company: Jim Bowie and Rezin Bowie, David Buchanan, Robert Armstrong again, Jesse Wallace, Matt Doyle, Tom McCaslin, James Coryell, Caephus Ham, black boy Charles ("Black Jim" stayed at home, this time), and Mexican boy Gonzales. They rode out of old San Antonio on September 2, 1831; everybody knew where: to open up the lost Amalgres silver mines in the San Saba hills. Many a hand had grasped their hands, to bid good luck; but sundry hearts rather doubted whether even the two Bowies could hold the country against the redskins.

"Hang tight to yore scalps, boys, and keep a weather eye out for sign."

"We shore will."

They clattered away. Nothing especial happened on two weeks of trail; by the nineteenth they were almost at the San Saba—the ruins of the ancient mission lay close ahead, and the mines were not far beyond. This noon they sighted Indians bearing down upon them. A fight? No. These were Comanches, and the Comanches had turned friendly; had announced that they did not war with the Texans, but with the Spanish.

Besides, Caephus Ham was a Comanche, himself; that is, he had gone out with a band of Comanches, from San Antonio; had been adopted in a chief's family; and had lived and traded among them for five months. They had treated him well. But Jim Bowie had sent word to him to return; that the Mexicans were preparing to attack the Texas Indians, and in the fighting he might be killed. Twenty-five warriors escorted him back to San Antonio, and he joined the Bowie excursion to the San Saba.

The Comanches who now arrived were sixteen, under a chief, and acted friendly. They brought news. They said that over one hundred and fifty angry Indians—Tawakonis, Wacos and Caddos—were on the same trail, to kill every Texan that they found. No stranger should be permitted in the San Saba country.

"But if you will turn back," added the Comanche chief, "I and my men will go with you and we all will fight them, together."

"No," Jim Bowie replied. "You are our brothers; your hearts are strong; we thank you but we cannot accept. If they are so many, you would only die with us. We do not wish to fight. If we travel fast we shall reach the old mission and the walls will protect us. Adios."

He and his Texans rode one way, the Comanches rode the other.

They had hoped to arrive at the old mission or Spanish fort by night. And they might have done so had the trail not become so rocky that their horses' feet gave out; therefore they made camp in a small prairie island of live-oaks. The clump was bounded on the west by a stream; on the north by a thick growth of mesquite trees and prickly-pear cactus about ten feet high.

"That's where we'll 'fort,' boys, in case we have to hunt a hole," Jim Bowie said.

So they posted a look-out; cut a crooked lane into the midst of the mesquite and cactus; cleared a fighting space there, hobbled their horses among the live-oaks, ate supper, refilled their canteens, and with night guards on watch they rolled in their blankets, until morning. They still had hopes of getting to the San Saba ruins.

That was not to be. They were just cooking breakfast by the first gray of daylight, when the guard called:

"Whoopee! They're a-comin', boys."

"Get your guns and lie low, boys," rapped Jim Bowie, the captain. "See that your horses are tied short."

The guards ran in, to join the line.

"How many?"

"One buck afoot, with his nose to the ground, followin' the trail. But plenty more behind."

The camp had been discovered. A dozen Indians, horseback, had ridden forward, reconnoitering. There were shouts, a shrill chorus of glad whoops; the back trail looked alive with warriors. One hundred, one hundred and fifty—one hundred and sixty-four!

"Well," Captain Bowie remarked, "that's a big mouthful for eleven men. I reckon we'd better try a talk, and see what they want. If we can come to terms, so as to pull out with what we have, all right. Otherwise, we'll fight. Who'll go with me?"

They all trusted Jim Bowie. He was not a large man; he was of medium height, small-boned and wiry. He never blustered; had a quiet way and a soft voice—but it could cut like steel when the case demanded. He was a fighter, in defence of his rights or the rights of others; but his bravery did not depend upon "bowie-knife" or such weapon.

"No; you stay here, Jim, and boss matters. I'll go," spoke his brother Rezin. Rezin Bowie was like him in manner, but of slightly heavier build.

"I'm with you," said Dave Buchanan.

"Go ahead, then. We'll cover you. Give them the peace sign and ask them what they want."

Rezin and Dave stood, and walked boldly out of the live-oaks, into the open; advanced on to within forty yards of the waiting Indians. Rezin could be heard calling to them in Spanish.

"Como 'sta (How are you)? Where is your capitan (chief)! I want to talk."

"How do? How do?" they answered, from all quarters—and drowned their voices with their guns.

Down lurched Dave.

"Got me in the leg," he gasped.

"I'll take you in." Rezin spread two barrels of buck-shot among the howling ranks, hoisted Dave upon his back, and with shot-gun in one hand and pistol in the other staggered for the trees.

There was another volley.

"Got me twice more," Dave gasped. "Drop me if you can't make in."

Rezin Bowie had no thought of dropping him, but eight of the Indians were hot after, with tomahawks. Led by Jim, out charged the Texans, firing; they killed four of the Indians, scattered the others, and rescued Rezin and Dave. Dave was badly hurt, but not fatally. Rezin's hunting-shirt was cut in several places; he himself was unharmed.

The Texans formed a half circle, fronting the enemy. The most of the Indians had disappeared, in the grass and chaparral. For about five minutes there was no shooting. Then, on a sudden, the yells burst forth from a new quarter. A little hill to the northwest, across the creek, was "red with Indians." The Texans shifted front slightly, to meet the attack; the bullets and arrows pelted in and the Texan ball and buck-shot replied.

A chief upon a horse was riding back and forth, urging his warriors to charge. His words sounded plainly.

"Who's loaded?" cried Jim Bowie, as he rammed the powder into his gun, and most of the men seemed to be doing likewise.

"I am." That was Caephus Ham.

"Then shoot that chief yonder."

Caephus drew careful bead, and fired. It was long range, but the chief's pony fell kicking and the chief hopped wildly about on one leg. The ball had passed through his other leg and killed the pony. He tried to cover himself with his shield and his struggling horse; four Texan rifles spoke together—every ball plumped into the shield, he crumpled in a heap, his warriors hustled to bear off his body and other bullets caught some of them, also.

So far the honors of war were with the Bowie men. The Indians scampered to the safe side of the hill. What next? On a sudden, led by another chief, the Indians again swarmed into sight, at the same place. The chief was yelling:

"Forward! Forward! Kill the Texans!"

"I'll stop your gab," muttered Jim Bowie. He aimed, touched trigger, killed this second chief.

That infuriated the Indians. They dared not charge the grove, but they deluged it with lead and arrows; the few white men answered rapidly. Without warning, bullets and shafts spattered in from another angle.

"Look out! They're flanking us!" Captain Bowie shouted. "They're in the creek bed."

So they were; a party of them had gained the banks of the creek, on the west. The men at that end of the line turned, and ran, stooping, to face the attack. Matt Doyle was fatally shot, through the breast. Tom McCaslin, springing to drag him to cover, and get sight of his slayer, if possible, received a ball through the body.

"Into the chaparral," ordered Jim Bowie. "We'll stand 'em off from there. Never mind the horses."

Carrying their wounded, they dived for the lane into the mesquite and cactus. From here they raked the creek bed, and cleared it. That was better. They had good view of the hill and prairie, too. They fought cunningly. The Indians could locate them only by the powder smoke from the gun muzzles; but the instant that they fired, the Texans squirmed aside for six or eight feet, and the answering bullets were wasted.

The Indians were still getting the worst of it. A large number were lying dead or wounded. The sun was high.

"What they up to, next, I wonder?"

"They're goin' to smoke us out! I see a fellow crawlin' through the grass to windward."

"Can't you get him?" demanded Captain Jim.

"No. He's foxy."

"Whereabouts?"

Bob Armstrong's heavy rifle interrupted.

"I fetched him, boys! Plumb through the head. Dead center."

Bob had scored at two hundred and fifty yards, with a snap-shot. He was one of the best rifle-shots on the border.

The grass was fired, nevertheless, in several spots. It was dry, and caught like tinder; the flames crackled and leaped, and raced down upon the thicket. The smoke rose densely. The Indians might be dimly seen, running about in the drifting veil and carrying off their killed and wounded.

Jim Bowie's voice pealed like a trumpet.

"We're not dead yet. Clean away the brush and leaves as far as you can reach, some of you. The rest of us pile up rocks and dirt for a breastworks for the wounded."

They labored madly. The horses tore loose and bolted. The Indians whooped, gleeful, and shot briskly. But the wind changed, into the north, and the fire surged past, just grazing the thicket; the slowly creeping back-fire was easily smothered with blankets.

Had they been saved? No! The Indians started another fire, on the north. The dried grass was even higher here. The flames roared in a front ten feet in air; the pungent smoke drifted chokingly.

"Put the wounded and baggage in the center," were the orders. "Then every man clear his own space. When it comes, lay on with blankets, robes, anything. We may be roasted here, but it's sure death for us outside."

The heat and smoke became terrific. "The Indians," said Rezin Bowie, "fired about twenty shots a minute," riddling the thicket. "The sparks were flying about so thickly that no man could open his powder horn without running the risk of being blown up." If the Indians charged in after the fire, under cover of the smoke, the Texans could only empty their guns and meet the charge with knives and hatchets.

Now the flames were upon them. The branches and the cactus twisted and popped. Cowering and shielding their wounded, the men "lay to" with whatever came to hand—blankets, buffalo robes, bear-skins, coats, shirts—and beat out the ground-fire. Their hair, beards and eye-brows were singed; they could scarcely see. And leaping overhead, or splitting, the storm passed on.

It left the thicket bare to the blackened branches and shriveled cactus-lobes. Every inch fumed with the acrid smoke.

"Raise that breastworks. It's all we've got, boys. We'll have to fight from inside it."

"Dat Jim nigger 'lowed he was in a toler'ble fight, but 'twa'n't nothin' 'side ob dis," chattered boy Charles.

They toiled, piling their rampart ring higher, while they constantly peered right, left, before, behind, expecting a charge.

Bob Armstrong cheered.

"The reds are going! They've had enough!"

That seemed true. The Indians had taken away their dead and wounded; they were commencing to follow, but some of them remained in sight.

The sun set. It had been a short day. In the dusk the Texans got fresh water, at the creek. Soon they were ready for the morrow. All that night the Indian death chants sounded. Morning came. There was silence, while inside their little circle of rocks and sod amidst the scorched brush the five able-bodied white men and two boys waited.

No Indians appeared near. They were somewhere, burying their dead. It was found out afterward that they were in a cave, not far off.

This night Bob Armstrong and Caephus Ham stole away, and examined the other side of the hill.

"Forty-eight blood signs we counted," Bob reported, "where Injuns had been laid."

"I reckon we'd best stay here awhile, just the same," Captain Jim Bowie counseled. "And we've got a man or two who ought not to be moved yet."

On the ninth morning after the fight they started home, with their three wounded and their baggage on horses, but themselves mainly afoot; traveled ten days, and reached San Antonio in early night.

They met with a great reception. The Comanches had been there, to tell of the danger and to say that the Bowie party were surely doomed. Stephen Bowie had heard and had hastened in; was forming a company to set out and avenge Jim, Rezin and the rest. But now a shout arose—

"Here they are! The Bowies are back! The whole party's in!"

Men and women rushed out of the adobe houses, for the plaza. All San Antonio rejoiced. The escape was looked upon as a miracle.

One killed, three wounded, was the list; "but we fought fire as well as Injuns." Of the one hundred and sixty-four Indians over eighty had fallen—fifty-two of them never to rise again.

Such was "Bowie's Indian Fight," in the San Saba country of central Texas, September 20, 1831.

The Bowie brothers did not give up. James was certain that the mine was there, in the San Saba; it only waited to be reclaimed by brave men. He organized another party; they were ready, and feared not, when Texas rebelled against the unjust laws of the Mexican government. For the next three years all was in confusion. On October 2, 1835, the American settlers, collected at Gonzales, east of San Antonio, defied the Mexican troops in the skirmish called the Lexington of Texas.

The noted Sam Houston was appointed commander-in-chief of the Texan army, to fight for State rights. These were not times in which the Bowie brothers or any other true man would search for a mere mine. On March 2, 1836, Texas declared independence, as a republic. On Sunday, March 6, General Santa Anna of the Mexican army stormed the old Alamo mission of San Antonio with two thousand five hundred soldiers supported by cannon.

Colonel Jim Bowie was among the defenders, but sick in bed. Of the one hundred and eighty only three women, a baby, a little girl and a negro boy were spared; and in bed Jim Bowie died, pistols in hand, face to the doorway through which the Mexican soldiers crowded and shot him—they were afraid to use their bayonets.

After the war Rezin Bowie went back to Louisiana. The "Bowie Mine," of the old Amalgres workings in the dangerous San Saba country remained unopened, for the secret of it perished with Jim Bowie himself.



CHAPTER XVII

THROUGH THE ENEMY'S LINES (1846)

THE THREE KIT CARSON COURIERS

On December 8, 1846, one hundred and twenty-five United States dragoons, rangers and scouts were being closely besieged upon a bare hill in Southern California by one hundred and fifty Mexican California cavalry. The place was thirty miles northeast of San Diego, near the Indian village of San Bernardo.

Texas, for which Jim Bowie and many another brave man fought and died, had won independence ten years back. Last year it had been admitted into the United States, and the boundaries of the United States had been extended to the Rio Grande River at last.

To this boundary Mexico objected; she said that it had not been the boundary of the Louisiana Territory nor of Texas. Now she was prepared to hold Texas and the Rio Grande. War neared and in March of 1846 the United States troops under General Zachary Taylor had marched across Texas to the north bank of the river.

An American column from Fort Leavenworth on the Kansas side of the Missouri River had marched eight hundred miles through the southwest desert, and captured Santa Fe and the province of New Mexico. From Santa Fe the First Dragoons had set out upon a desert trail of one thousand miles more, to capture California.

Here they were, less then one hundred of them "fit for service," reinforced by a detachment sent by Commodore Robert Stockton of the navy, who had seized San Diego; all commanded by General Stephen Watts Kearny of the army, and their advance stopped short. The "Horse-Chief of the Long Knives," as the Plains Indians called him, had met with misfortune.

There had been a battle. After their long, toiling march of close to the thousand miles the California irregular cavalry under Captain Andres Pico had attacked them among the California hills; had caught them at disadvantage; killed eighteen, wounded fifteen including General Kearny himself; and driven them to refuge upon this other hill. Indians could not have been more swift and wary than those light-riding Californians armed with lances.

Rain had been falling. The ground, cold and wet, was so rocky and cactus-covered that even the wounded could not be placed comfortably. The morning following the battle had "dawned on the most tattered and ill-fed detachment of men that ever the United States mustered under her colors"—"provisions were exhausted, horses dead, mules on their last legs, men, reduced to one-third of their number, were ragged, worn and emaciated."

On this second day, here upon the hill, there was no water except that which gathered in holes. For the dragoon mules no water at all, and no forage except the stiff brush. The fattest mule was killed, as food, but he proved very tough. The wounded could not be moved save in rude travois or litters of blankets slung between poles, the ends of which dragged along the ground. The hill was open, and exposed to weather and the enemy's view. Although San Diego and Commodore Stockton were only thirty miles distant (yet far out of sight beyond the high, brushy hills), the camp was completely cut off by the nimble riders of Captain Pico, and without doubt reinforcements for him were spurring in.

Altogether, General Kearny was in a fix: a fix both mortifying and perilous. He himself had been lanced twice, and was not a young man.

Commodore Stockton must be notified, to send relief of men, ambulances and food, at once. After the battle, and before the siege, the scout Alexander Godey and three other trappers had set out on foot, using their best skill, to take the word to San Diego; but they had been captured by the Pico videttes, and nobody upon the hill knew whether the Stockton relief was coming. A second try should be made.

With the General Kearny dragoons there was the famous Kit Carson. He had been met by the general at the Rio Grande River in New Mexico south of Santa Fe, and had turned back to act as guide to California. He was a veteran on the long trail: had been traveling mountains and deserts for over twenty years, or ever since he was sixteen.

There was a greenhorn, much younger than he, but just as brave: Acting-Lieutenant Edward Fitzgerald Beale of the navy, aged twenty-four and commissioned midshipman only sixteen months ago. He came of a stanch navy family; his grandfather and his father had been navy officers before him; the spirit of service to his country was in his blood.

The boyish Lieutenant Beale had joined the Kearny column before the battle, with the little force that brought dispatches to the general from San Diego. He was a sailor; had not been trained in scouting upon land; but that made no difference, for when this afternoon General Kearny called a council, to discuss means again of reaching Commodore Stockton, the first scout volunteer was Lieutenant Beale.

He said that he had come out; he thought that he could find his way back. He offered himself and his Indian boy servant, who would be able to guide him. The boy was a native of this country, and knew the trails.

Kit Carson heard, and lost no time in volunteering also. That was good. Everybody had confidence in the bravery of young Lieutenant Beale, but felt more dependence upon the training of Kit Carson. He had performed such trips, through watchful Indians themselves, many a time before.

They three, the scout, the sailor and the California Indian, proceeded to get ready, in order to start at nightfall. Each was supplied with a rifle, a pistol, knife and a canteen; but food seemed a question.

General Kearny had saved a handful of mouldy flour. This was baked into a loaf and given to Lieutenant Beale, with the general's compliments.

"It's the last of everything, sir," said the soldier who brought it. "The general'll have to do without breakfast, but you're welcome to it, sir."

"Take it back to General Kearny," Lieutenant Beale directed. "Tell him that I thank him heartily, and will provide for myself."

So he scraped in the ashes where some baggage had been burned; managed to find a little charred corn and dried peas; stowed that in his pocket. Kit Carson and the Indian provisioned themselves with a small piece, each, of half-cooked mule beef.

Of all Kit Carson's dangerous scouts in enemy country this turned out to be the most ticklish. For young Lieutenant Beale, the tenderfoot, it was hair-raising. Captain Pico had known that the celebrated Kit Carson was with the Americans upon the hill, and feared him. He had placed three lines of mounted patrols around the base of the hill, and instructed them to keep riding so as to leave no intervals.

"Se escapara el lobo (The wolf will escape)," he warned.

And the wolf did escape.

Naturally, Lieutenant Beale let Kit Carson take the lead, for "Kit" knew best what to do. They had to crawl on their hands and knees, and stomachs, through the brush, down the hill, for if they stood up they might be seen against the sky.

"Wait," Kit Carson whispered back. "Take off yore shoes, lieutenant. They make too much noise. Stow them in yore belt."

They tucked their shoes in their belts. Twigs had been cracking alarmingly. Presently their feet, knees and hands were afire with the cactus spines. Now twigs rasped along the canteens. Kit Carson paused and laid his canteen aside. Lieutenant Beale did the same; so did the cautious Indian.

They reached the base of the hill; waited here for a sentinel in the first line to pass; and crawled silently across almost at his horse's heels.

Foot by foot, wellnigh inch by inch, they snaked on, listening and peering for other patrols. Suddenly they encountered a second outpost, and crouched low, flattening themselves, scarcely daring to breathe. A Californian horseman leisurely rode by. Kit instantly squirmed forward, and they crossed this line also.