In the corral, groups of leather-clad mountaineers, with decks of euchre and seven up, gamble away their hard-earned peltries. The employes— mostly St. Louis Frenchmen and Canadian voyageurs—are pressing packs of buffalo-skins, beating robes, or engaged in other duties of a trading-fort. Indian squaws, the wives of mountaineers, strut about in all the pride of beads and "fofar-raw," jingling with bells and bugles, and happy as paint can make them. Hunters drop in with animals packed with deer or buffalo meat to supply the fort; Indian dogs look anxiously in at the gateway, fearing to enter and encounter their natural enemies, the whites; and outside the fort, at any hour of the day or night, one may safely wager to see a dozen cayeutes or prairie wolves loping round, or seated on their haunches, and looking gravely, on, waiting patiently for some chance offal to be cast outside. Against the walls, groups of Indians too proud to enter without an invitation, lean, wrapped in their buffalo-robes, sulky and evidently ill at ease to be so near the whites without a chance of fingering their scalp-locks; their white lodges shining in the sun, at a little distance from the riverbanks—their horses feeding in the plain beyond.
The appearance of the fort is very striking, standing as it does hundreds of miles from any settlement, on the vast and lifeless prairie, surrounded by hordes of hostile Indians, and far out of reach of intercourse with civilized man; its mud-built walls inclosing a little garrison of a dozen hardy men, sufficient to hold in check the numerous tribes of savages ever thirsting for their blood. Yet the solitary stranger passing this lone fort feels proudly secure when he comes within sight of the Stars and Stripes which float above the walls.
CHAPTER VIII
AGAIN we must take a jump with La Bonté over a space of several months, when we find him in company of half-a-dozen trappers, amongst them his inseparable companero Killbuck, camped on the Greenhorn Creek, en route to the settlements of New Mexico. They have a few mules packed with beaver for the Taos market; but this expedition has been planned more for pleasure than profit—a journey to Taos valley being the only civilized relaxation coveted by the mountaineers. Not a few of the present band are bound thither with matrimonial intentions; the belles of Nuevo Mejico being to them the ne plus ultra of female perfection, uniting most conspicuous personal charms (although coated with cosmetic alegria—an herb, with the juice of which the women of Mexico hideously bedaub their faces) with all the hard-working industry of Indian squaws. The ladies, on their part, do not hesitate to leave the paternal abodes, and eternal tortilla-making, to share the perils and privations of the American mountaineers in the distant wilderness. Utterly despising their own countrymen, whom they are used to contrast with the dashing white hunters who swagger in all the pride of fringe and leather through their towns, they, as is but natural, gladly accept husbands from the latter class: preferring the stranger, who possesses the heart and strong right arm to defend them, to the miserable cowardly "pelâdos," who hold what little they have on sufferance of savage Indians, but one degree superior to themselves.
Certainly no band of hunters that ever appeared in the Vale of Taos numbered in its ranks a properer lot of lads than those now camped on Greenhorn, intent on matrimonial foray into the settlements of New Mexico. There was young Dick Wooton, * who was "some" for his inches, being six feet six, and as straight and strong as the barrel of his long rifle.
* Still living about 1898 in Colorado. (Ed.)
Shoulder to shoulder with this "boy" stood Rube Herring, and not a hair's-breadth difference in height or size was there between them. Killbuck, though mountain winters had sprinkled a few snow-flakes on his head, looked up to neither; and La Bonté held his own with any mountaineer who ever set a trap in sight of Long's Peak or the Snowy Range. Marcelline—who, though a Mexican, despised his people and abjured his blood, having been all his life in the mountains with the white hunters—looked down easily upon six feet and odd inches. In form a Hercules, he had the symmetry of an Apollo; with strikingly handsome features, and masses of long black hair hanging from his slouching beaver over the shoulders of his buckskin hunting-shirt. He, as he was wont to say, was "no dam Spaniard, but mountainee man, wagh!" Chabonard, a half-breed, was not lost in the crowd;—and, the last in height, but the first in every quality which constitutes excellence in a mountaineer, whether of indomitable courage or perfect indifference to death or danger—with an iron frame capable of withstanding hunger, thirst, heat, cold, fatigue, and hardships of every kind—of wonderful presence of mind and endless resources in times of peril—with the instinct of an animal and the moral courage of a man,—who was "taller" for his inches than Kit Carson, paragon of mountaineers? * Small in stature, and slenderly limbed, but with muscles of wire, with a fair complexion and quiet intelligent features, to look at Kit none would suppose that the mild-looking being before him was an incarnate devil in Indian fight, and had raised more hair from head of Redskins than any two men in the western country; and yet, thirty winters had scarcely planted a line or furrow on his clean-shaven face. No name, however, was better known in the mountains—from Yellow Stone to Spanish Peaks, from Missouri to Columbia River—than that of Kit Carson, raised in Boonlick, Missouri State, and a credit to the "diggins" that gave him birth.
* Since the time of which we speak, Kit Carson has
distinguished himself in guiding the several U. S. exploring
expeditions under Frémont across the Rocky Mountains, and to
all parts of Oregon and California; and for his services,
the President of the United States presented the gallant
mountaineer with the commission of lieutenant in a newly-
raised regiment of mounted riflemen, of which his old leader
Frémont is appointed colonel. (Author's note.)