It was a desert country, of whity-yellow sand and sharp bare hills, with the Rocky Mountains distant in the west, and the only green that of the trees and brush along the water-courses. Nevertheless it was a very good kind of country.
It had plenty of buffalo. The timber and the streams supplied winter shelter. The wagon-road of the white merchants, between the Missouri River and Santa Fe of New Mexico, ran through the middle of it and furnished much plunder. In the south, where lay Comanche land and Apache land, there were Mexican settlements that furnished horses.
With the Comanches and Apaches, and with the Cheyennes and Arapahos north, the Kiowas were friends. To the Pawnees they were enemies, and their name carried dread through many years of fighting.
Now in the summer of 1839, twenty Kiowa warriors left their village near the Arkansas River in present southern Kansas, to go down across Comanche country and get horses and mules from the Pasunke, or the Mexicans of El Paso, which is on the Rio Grande River border between northwestern Texas and Mexico. However, in those days all that region was Mexico.
The head chief of the party was old Do-has-an, or Bluff. But he did not command. Gua-da-lon-te, or Painted-red, was the war chief. Dohasan would take command only in case Gua-da-lon-te was killed. Among the warriors there were Dagoi, and Kon-a-te, whose name means "Black-tripe."
After several days' travel horseback clear across New Mexico they came to El Paso town, where many goods were stored on the way between New Mexico and Old Mexico, and where the people got rich by trading and by making wine from grapes. But they could see soldiers guarding El Paso; so they did not dare to charge in and gather horses and mules from the frightened Pasunke.
Dohasan, who was wise as well as brave, advised against it.
"Another time," he said. "We are too few, and we are a long way from home. Let us go, and come again. Maybe on the way tip we will meet with luck among the other villages."
They rested only the one night, and turned back, thinking that they had not been discovered. At the end of a day's journey through a bad, waterless land, they halted and camped by a spring, of which they knew.
It was a big rock-sink or round, deep basin, with, a pool of water at the bottom, and a cave that extended under a shelf.