s
early as 1840, or not later than 1842, and, as one authority asserts, by
George Simpson and his associates, Barclay and Doyle. Beckwourth claims
to have been the original projector of the fort, and to have given the
general plan and its name, in which I am inclined to believe that he is
correct; perhaps Barclay, Doyle, and Simpson were connected with him, as
he states that there were other trappers, though he mentions no names.
It was a square fort of adobe, with circular bastions at the corners, no
part of the walls being more than eight feet high. Around the inside of
the plaza, or corral, were half a dozen small rooms inhabited by as many
Indian traders and mountain-men.

One of the earlier Indian agents, Mr. Fitzpatrick, in writing from
Bent's Fort in 1847, thus describes the old Pueblo:--

About seventy-five miles above this place, and immediately
on the Arkansas River, there is a small settlement, chiefly
composed of old trappers and hunters; the male part of it
are mostly Americans (Missourians), French Canadians, and
Mexicans. It numbers about one hundred and fifty, and of
this number about sixty men have wives, and some have two.
These wives are of various Indian tribes, as follows; viz.
Blackfeet, Assiniboines, Sioux, Arapahoes, Cheyennes,
Snakes, and Comanches. The American women are Mormons,
a party of Mormons having wintered there, and then departed
for California.

The old trappers and hunters of the Pueblo fort lived entirely upon
game, and a greater part of the year without bread. As soon as their
supply of meat was exhausted, they started to the mountains with two
or three pack-animals, and brought back in two or three days loads of
venison and buffalo.

The Arkansas at the Pueblo is a clear, rapid river about a hundred yards
wide. The bottom, which is enclosed on each side by high bluffs, is
about a quarter of a mile across. In the early days of which I write,
the margin of the stream was heavily timbered with cottonwood, and the
tourist to-day may see the remnant of the primitive great woods, in the
huge isolated trees scattered around the bottom in the vicinity of the
Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad station of the charming mountain
city.

On each side vast rolling prairies stretch away for hundreds of miles,
gradually ascending on the side towards the mountains, where the
h