CARSON GOES AHEAD WITH THE PARTY.
His men stood around him, each with his rifle resting in the hollow of the arm, ready to be dropped to deadly aim on the sign from their young commander. Carson addressed the old chief in Spanish, (for he had betrayed his knowledge of that language,) and warned him that though they were few, they were determined to sell their lives dearly. The Indians awed, it would seem, by the bold and defiant language of Carson, and finding that any plunder they might acquire, would be purchased at a heavy sacrifice, sullenly withdrew, and left the party to pursue their journey unmolested.
Any appearance of fear would have cost the lives of Carson and probably of the whole party, but the Indian warriors were too chary of their lives to rush into death's door unprovoked, even for the sake of the rich plunder they might hope to secure. Carson's cool bravery saved the trappers and all their effects; and this first command in an Indian engagement is but a picture of his conduct in a hundred others, when the battles were with weapons other than the tongue. The intention of the Indians had been to drive away the animals, first causing a stampede, when they would become lawful plunder, but they dared not undertake it.
The wily craftiness of the Indians induced the necessity for constant vigilance against them, and in the school this youth had been in all his life, he had shown himself an apt scholar.
[CHAPTER VIII.]
While on the Colorado, Young's party discovered a company of Indians, (with whom they had had a previous skirmish,) as they were coming out from Los Angelos, and charging suddenly among them, succeeded in taking a large herd of cattle from them in the Indians' own style. The same week an Indian party came past their camp in the night, with a drove of a hundred horses, evidently just stolen from a Mexican town in Sonora. The trappers, with their guns for their pillows, were ready in an instant for the onslaught, and captured these horses also, the Indians hurrying away for fear of the deadly rifle. The next day they selected such as they wanted from the herd, choosing of course the finest, and turning the rest loose, to be taken again by the Indians, or to become the wild mustangs that roamed the plains of Northern Mexico, in droves of tens of thousands, and which could be captured and tamed only by the use of the lasso.
Mr. Young and his party trapped down the Colorado and up the Gila with success, then crossed to the vicinity of the New Mexican copper mines, where they left their furs and went to Santa Fe. Having procured there license to trade with the Indians about the copper mines, they returned thither for their furs, went back to Santa Fe and disposed of them to great advantage. The party disbanded with several hundred dollars apiece, which most of them expended as sailors do their earnings when they come into port. Of course Carson was hail fellow well met with them for a time. He had not hitherto taken the lesson that all have to learn, viz., that the ways of pleasure are deceitful paths; and to resist temptation needs a large amount of courage—larger perhaps than to encounter any physical danger; at least the moral courage it requires is of a higher tone than the physical courage which would carry one through a fight with a grizzly bear triumphantly; that the latter assists the former; indeed that the highest moral courage must be aided by physical bravery, but that the latter may exist entirely independently of the former.
Carson learned during this season of hilarity the necessity of saying No! and he did so persistently, knowing that if he failed in this he would be lost to himself and to everything dear in life. He was now twenty-one, and though the terrible ordeal of poverty had been nobly borne, and he had conquered, the latter ordeal of temptation from the sudden possession of what was to him a large sum of money, had proved for once, too much. And it is well for him perhaps it was so; as it enabled him to sow his wild oats in early youth.