I told him it certainly looked very much like it. I then asked him to explain to the Comanche the magnetic telegraph. He looked at me earnestly, and said,
"What you call that magnetic telegraph?"
I said, "you have heard of New York and New Orleans?"
"Oh yes," he replied.
"Very well; we have a wire connecting these two cities, which are about a thousand miles apart, and it would take a man thirty days to ride it upon a good horse. Now a man stands at one end of this wire in New York, and by touching it a few times he inquires of his friend in New Orleans what he had for breakfast. His friend in New Orleans touches the other end of the wire, and in ten minutes the answer comes back—ham and eggs. Tell him that, Beaver."
His countenance assumed a most comical expression, but he made no remark until I again requested him to repeat what I had said to the Comanche, when he observed,
"No, captain, I not tell him that, for I don't b'lieve that myself."
Upon my assuring him that such was the fact, and that I had seen it myself, he said,
"Injun not very smart; sometimes he's big fool, but he holler pretty loud; you hear him maybe half a mile; you say 'Merican man he talk thousand miles. I 'spect you try to fool me now, captain; maybe so you lie."
The Indians living between the outer white settlements and the nomadic tribes of the Plains form intermediate social links in the chain of civilization.