Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet

by Frederick Marryat

In the spring of 1820, a company from Franklin, in the west of Missouri, had already proceeded to Santa Fé, with twelve mules loaded with goods. They crossed prairies where no white man had ever penetrated, having no guides but the stars of Heaven, the morning breeze from the mountains, and perhaps a pocket compass. Daily they had to pass through hostile nations; but spite of many other difficulties, such as ignorance of the passes and want of water, they arrived at Santa Fé.

The adventurers returned to Missouri during the fall; their profit had been immense, although the capital they had employed had been very small. Their favourable reports produced a deep sensation, and in the spring of the next year, Colonel Cooper and some associates, to the number of twenty-two, started with fourteen mules well loaded. This time the trip was a prompt and a fortunate one; and the merchants of St. Louis getting bolder and bolder, formed, in 1822, a caravan of seventy men, who carried with them goods to the amount of forty thousand dollars.

Thus began the Santa Fé trade, which assumed a more regular character. Companies started in the spring to return in the fall, with incredible benefits, and the trade increasing, the merchants reduced the number of their guards, till, eventually, repeated attacks from the savages obliged them to unite together, in order to travel with safety.

At first the Indians appeared disposed to let them pass without any kind of interruption; but during the summer of 1826 they began to steal the mules and the horses of the travellers; but they killed nobody till 1828. Then a little caravan, returning from Santa Fé, followed the stream of the north fork of the Canadian river. Two of the traders, having preceded the company in search of game, fell asleep on the edge of a brook. These were espied by a band of Indians, who surprised them, seized their rifles, took their scalps, and retired before the caravan had reached the brook, which had been agreed upon as the place of rendezvous. When the traders arrived, one of the victims still breathed. They carried him to the Cimaron, where he expired and was buried according to the prairie fashion.

Scarcely had the ceremony been terminated, when upon a neighbouring hill appeared four Indians, apparently ignorant of what had happened. The exasperated merchants invited them into their camp, and murdered all except one, who, although wounded, succeeded in making his escape.

This cruel retaliation brought down heavy punishment. Indeed from that period the Indians vowed an eternal war—a war to the knife, “in the forests and the prairies, in the middle of rivers and lakes, and even among the mountains covered with eternal snows.”

Shortly after this event another caravan was fallen in with and attacked by the savages, who carried off with them thirty-five scalps, two hundred and fifty mules, and goods to the amount of thirty thousand dollars.

These terrible dramas were constantly re-acted in these vast western solitudes, and the fate of the unfortunate traders would be unknown until some day, perchance, a living skeleton, a famished being covered with blood, dust, and mire, would arrive at one of the military posts on the borders, and relate an awful and bloody tragedy, from which he alone had escaped.

In 1831, Mr Sublette and his company crossed the prairies with twenty-five waggons. He and his company were old pioneers among the Rocky Mountains, whom the thirst of gold had transformed into merchants. They went without guides, and no one among them had ever performed the trip. All that they knew was that they were going from such to such a degree of longitude. They reached the Arkansas river, but from thence to the Cimaron there is no road, except the numerous paths of the buffaloes, which, intersecting the prairie, very often deceive the travellers.

When the caravan entered this desert the earth was entirely dry, and, the pioneers mistaking their road, wandered during several days exposed to all the horrors of a febrile thirst, under a burning sun. Often they were seduced by the deceitful appearance of a buffalo path, and in this perilous situation Captain Smith, one of the owners of the caravan, resolved to follow one of these paths, which he considered would indubitably lead him to some spring of water or to a marsh.