Scouting with Kit Carson

by Everett T. Tomlinson

“No, and that’s what puzzles me most of all. You see I left him the other side of the Rocky Mountains. It can’t be possible that he made his way all alone through the Rockies, and across the plains and over the Sierras into San Gabriel. Besides, this man looks as if he was either crazy or a fool. There’s something the matter with him anyway. He stared at me as if I was like air and he could look straight through me.”

“I never met a man like that,” said Kit Carson quietly, smiling as he spoke. “I guess it will turn out all right, and, besides, you may have several chances to see him again in the next few days. We’re going to load up our ponies with the furs we have taken, or at least with a part of them, and send them down to Captain White.”

“What is he going to do with them?”

“Take them to New York for us. We shan’t let him have all that we have taken, but it will save a long hard ride if we let him have some of them here, and besides, I think now we shall trap much of the way back to Taos. By the time we get there we ought to have a load that will satisfy every man, to say nothing of our horses.”

In the three weeks that followed, all the ponies of the camp were brought into service. They were heavily loaded with the skins that the trappers had secured and then began their long journey to the Charming Nancy. A careful record was kept, and a division among the trappers of the amount received from the sales of furs was to be made later.

Soon afterward the men returned to their camp and for several days were busily engaged in other tasks. Indeed, they were unusually successful, and the piles of beaver skins steadily mounted higher and higher.

At last when it was decided to break camp the trappers delayed a day in order to make a cache. A long trench was made in an unusually dry bank of earth not far from a stream on which the men had been trapping. A deep hole or excavation was made in this bank until a trench several yards wide and many yards long had been fashioned. All the time the men maintained guards and also took the utmost pains to hide every trace of their labours so that none of the prowling Indians would suspect either the task in which they had been engaged or the place where the skins had been hidden.

The turf was cut with great care and placed on one side of the hole. Much of the top soil then was placed on blankets or buffalo robes. The rest of the dirt which they dug while they were making the excavation was carried in pails by the men to the middle of the stream and there poured into the rushing waters.

At last when the hole was as large as they desired, twigs and dry grasses were cut and with these the trappers carefully lined the hole which they had dug. After all this had been done the furs were tightly packed and stored in the place. Last of all, grass and loose skins were placed over the bundles of furs and pounded with the top soil, which had been saved and had now been brought back from the place in which it had been stored. Then all the ground was watered and the turf was replaced with utmost care. After the task had been accomplished, unless a man had been informed of the work which had been done, it would have been almost impossible for him to discover any signs about the place that the trappers had made a storehouse in which they had concealed their furs.

A little later, when the September days came, it was decided by the trappers that they would start homeward. But it was also agreed that they would trap throughout their journey. They were to escape the hardest part of the ride across the desert because they now planned to follow the Colorado River in its course until they came to the Gila. Then their course again was to be changed and they were to follow that river on their homeward way. In this manner they were confident that they would be able to trap as they journeyed and, if fortune should favour them, they would add many skins to those which they already had taken.