“Mi padre! Mi madre! Ay, mi padre y mi madre! (My father! My mother! Oh, my father and my mother!)”
Fuentes wrapped his head in his serape, thus to mourn.
None in the company wished to stay here, but there was no other camping-spot, and the animals must have water. The lieutenant wrote upon a piece of paper a brief story of the tragedy, and by a cleft stick planted it so that the approaching caravan might know what had befallen their comrades. The Archilette was renamed Hernandez Spring—Agua de Hernandez. It is in extreme Southwestern Nevada.
The march was waxing cruelly severe upon the animals. By water and grass were they grudgingly nourished, but by the rocks of the innumerable ridges were their hoofs cut to the quick. Mule and horse dropped daily. When they died by pain and exhaustion, or must be shot, Fuentes the Mexican quickly cut off mane and tail for hair bridles, saddle-girths, etc.
Amidst increasing hills, abloom with cacti and acacia, and over a low snowy mountain into another skeleton-strewn dry jornada, of almost sixty miles, rode the Frémont and Carson men. By chewing the acid sour dock, and by sucking at the pulpy bisnaga cactus known to Fuentes the Mexican, they moistened their thirst; until at midnight the California mules, breaking into a run, gave warning of water scented more than a mile before. This was the Rio de los Angeles, or River of the Angels, tributary to the Virgin River which itself flows south into the canyoned Colorado.
Upon the bluffy bank of the Rio de los Angeles, to-day styled only the Muddy River, must camp be pitched. At daybreak Indians swarmed down. With the first sight of them, frightened Pablo and his little dog ran to hide in a tent and Fuentes the man exclaimed, in furious Spanish:
“There they are! The murderers! The same people who killed at the Archilette! Curses on them!”
A bare-footed, bare-skinned, under-sized tribe they were, ill-looking, their hair tied in a knot atop their sharp, restless-eyed faces. Many of them carried hooked sticks, with which they hauled out lizards and other vermin from holes, to cook them and eat them. All the men bore the long, stout desert bow, and wore a quiver bristling with thirty or forty arrows fitted to points of volcanic glass, or obsidian.
Every Indian who would enter the lines of the camp was told to leave his bow and arrows outside; but defying the orders an old chief and several companions forced their way in, bow in one hand, two or three arrows ready in the other, and quiver at back.
“Vamose! Puk-a-chee! Get out! Outside!” were volleyed at him the cries; and he impudently put his fingers in his ears, as sign that he could not hear.