up
the Rio Negro. This is a distance of between two and three hundred
miles, through a country completely unknown. What other troops in
the world are so independent? With the sun for their guide, mare's
flesh for food, their saddle-cloths for beds,--as long as there is
a little water, these men would penetrate to the end of the world.

A few days afterwards I saw another troop of these banditti-like
soldiers start on an expedition against a tribe of Indians at the
small Salinas, who had been betrayed by a prisoner cacique. The
Spaniard who brought the orders for this expedition was a very
intelligent man. He gave me an account of the last engagement at
which he was present. Some Indians, who had been taken prisoners,
gave information of a tribe living north of the Colorado. Two
hundred soldiers were sent; and they first discovered the Indians
by a cloud of dust from their horses' feet as they chanced to be
travelling. The country was mountainous and wild, and it must have
been far in the interior, for the Cordillera were in sight. The
Indians, men, women, and children, were about one hundred and ten
in number, and they were nearly all taken or killed, for the
soldiers sabre every man. The Indians are now so terrified that
they offer no resistance in a body, but each flies, neglecting even
his wife and children; but when overtaken, like wild animals, they
fight against any number to the last moment. One dying Indian
seized with his teeth the thumb of his adversary, and allowed his
own eye to be forced out sooner than relinquish his hold. Another,
who was wounded, feigned death, keeping a knife ready to strike one
more fatal blow. My informer said, when he was pursuing an Indian,
the man cried out for mercy, at the same time that he was covertly
loosing the bolas from his waist, meaning to whirl it round his
head and so strike his pursuer. "I however struck him with my sabre
to the ground, and then got off my horse, and cut his throat with
my knife." This is a dark picture; but how much more shocking is
the unquestionable fact, that all the women who appear above twenty
years old are massacred in cold blood? When I exclaimed that this
appeared rather inhuman, he answered, "Why, what can be done? they
breed so!"

Every one here is fully convinced that this is the most just war,
because it is against barbarians. Who would believe in this age
that such atrocities could be committed in a Christian civilised
country? The