ted chief, a
relative of the wife of the hospitable trapper, and generally made his
home there. Absent when Captain Williams arrived, he came into the room
at a very late hour, and went to the bed he usually occupied. No one
on the claim knew of his being there until he was discovered, in a
dreadfully mangled condition. He was removed to other quarters, and
Williams, who was not to be frightened out of a night's rest, soon sunk
into sound repose.

Williams reached the agency by the time the Kansas Indians arrived
there, and, as he suspected, found that the wily old chief had brought
all his belongings, which he claimed, and the agent made the savages
give up the stolen property before he would pay them a cent of their
annuities. He took his furs down to St. Louis, sold them there at a good
price, and then started back to the Rocky Mountains on another trapping
tour.

CHAPTER III. EARLY TRADERS.

In 1812 a Captain Becknell, who had been on a trading expedition to the
country of the Comanches in the summer of 1811, and had done remarkably
well, determined the next season to change his objective point to Santa
Fe, and instead of the tedious process of bartering with the Indians,
to sell out his stock to the New Mexicans. Successful in this, his first
venture, he returned to the Missouri River with a well-filled purse,
and intensely enthusiastic over the result of his excursion to the newly
found market.

Excited listeners to his tales of enormous profits were not lacking,
who, inspired by the inducement he held out to them, cheerfully invested
five thousand dollars in merchandise suited to the demands of the trade,
and were eager to attempt with him the passage of the great plains. In
this expedition there were thirty men, and the amount of money in the
undertaking was the largest that had yet been ventured. The progress of
the little caravan was without extraordinary incident, until it arrived
at "The Caches" on the Upper Arkansas. There Becknell, who was in
reality a man of the then "Frontier," bold, plucky, and endowed with
excellent sense, conceived the ridiculous idea of striking directly
across the country for Santa Fe through a region absolutely unexplored;
his excuse for this rash movement being that he desired to avoid the
rough and circuitous mountain route he had travelled on his first trip
to Taos.

His temerity in abandoning the known for the unknown was severely
punished, and his brave men su