fire as an answering signal. Half an
hour later a body of wild horsemen came towards them at full speed, and
among them were their two couriers, Gaillard and Quesnel, waving a
French flag. The strangers were eighty Comanche warriors, with the grand
chief of the tribe at their head. They dashed up to Bourgmont's bivouac
and leaped from their horses, when a general shaking of hands ensued,
after which white men and red seated themselves on the ground and smoked
the pipe of peace. Then all rode together to the Comanche camp, three
leagues distant.[379]

Bourgmont pitched his tents at a pistol-shot from the Comanche lodges,
whence a crowd of warriors presently came to visit him. They spread
buffalo-robes on the ground, placed upon them the French commander, his
officers, and his young son; then lifted each, with its honored load,
and carried them all, with yells of joy and gratulation, to the lodge of
the Great Chief, where there was a feast of ceremony lasting till
nightfall.

On the next day Bourgmont displayed to his hosts the marvellous store of
gifts he had brought for them,--guns, swords, hatchets, kettles,
gunpowder, bullets, red cloth, blue cloth, hand-mirrors, knives, shirts,
awls, scissors, needles, hawks' bells, vermilion, beads, and other
enviable commodities, of the like of which they had never dreamed. Two
hundred savages gathered before the French tents, where Bourgmont, with
the gifts spread on the ground before him, stood with a French flag in
his hand, surrounded by his officers and the Indian chiefs of his party,
and harangued the admiring auditors.

He told them that he had come to bring them a message from the King, his
master, who was the Great Chief of all the nations of the earth, and
whose will it was that the Comanches should live in peace with his other
children,--the Missouris, Osages, Kansas, Otoes, Omahas, and
Pawnees,--with whom they had long been at war; that the chiefs of these
tribes were now present, ready to renounce their old enmities; that the
Comanches should henceforth regard them as friends, share with them the
blessing of alliance and trade with the French, and give to these last
free passage through their country to trade with the Spaniards of New
Mexico. Bourgmont then gave the French flag to the Great Chief, to be
kept forever as a pledge of that day's compact. The chief took the flag,
and promised in behalf of his people to keep peace inviolate with the
Indian children of the