heir rifles, took their scalps, and retired before the caravan
had reached the brook, which had been agreed upon as the place of
rendezvous. When the traders arrived, one of the victims still
breathed. They carried him to the Cimaron, where he expired and was
buried according to the prairie fashion.

Scarcely had the ceremony been terminated, when upon a neighbouring hill
appeared four Indians, apparently ignorant of what had happened. The
exasperated merchants invited them into their camp, and murdered all
except one, who, although wounded, succeeded in making his escape.

This cruel retaliation brought down heavy punishment. Indeed from that
period the Indians vowed an eternal war--a war to the knife, "in the
forests and the prairies, in the middle of rivers and lakes, and even
among the mountains covered with eternal snows."

Shortly after this event another caravan was fallen in with and attacked
by the savages, who carried off with them thirty-five scalps, two
hundred and fifty mules, and goods to the amount of thirty thousand
dollars.

These terrible dramas were constantly re-acted in these vast western
solitudes, and the fate of the unfortunate traders would be unknown
until some day, perchance, a living skeleton, a famished being covered
with blood, dust, and mire, would arrive at one of the military posts on
the borders, and relate an awful and bloody tragedy, from which he alone
had escaped.

In 1831, Mr Sublette and his company crossed the prairies with
twenty-five waggons. He and his company were old pioneers among the
Rocky Mountains, whom the thirst of gold had transformed into merchants.
They went without guides, and no one among them had ever performed the
trip. All that they knew was that they were going from such to such a
degree of longitude. They reached the Arkansas river, but from thence
to the Cimaron there is no road, except the numerous paths of the
buffaloes, which, intersecting the prairie, very often deceive the
travellers.

When the caravan entered this desert the earth was entirely dry, and,
the pioneers mistaking their road, wandered during several days exposed
to all the horrors of a febrile thirst, under a burning sun. Often they
were seduced by the deceitful appearance of a buffalo path, and in this
perilous situation Captain Smith, one of the owners of the caravan,
resolved to follow one of these paths, which he considered would
indubitably lead him to some spring of wat