es and their adherents arrived at the Colorado, where their
horses were stampeded by the tribe living at the mouth of the Gila,
the "Umeas." They were left without a single animal, a most serious
predicament in a wild country. The elder Pattie counselled pursuit on
foot to recapture the horses or die in the attempt. But the effort was
fruitless. They then made their way back to their camp, devoured their
last morsel of meat, placed their guns on a raft, and swam the river
to annihilate the village they saw on the opposite bank. The Yumas,
however, had anticipated this move, and the trappers found there only
one poor old man, whom they spared. Setting fire to every hut in the
village, except that of the old man, they had the small satisfaction of
watching them burn. There was now no hope either of regaining the horses
or of fighting the Yumas, so they devoted their attention, to building
canoes for the purpose of escaping by descending the Colorado. For this
they possessed tools, trappers often having occasion to use a canoe in
the prosecution of their work. They soon had finished eight, dugouts
undoubtedly, though Pattie does not say so, and they already had one
which Pattie had made on the Gila. Uniting these by platforms in pairs
they embarked upon them with all their furs and traps, leaving their
saddles hidden on the bank.

On the 9th of December (1827)* they started, probably the first
navigators of this part of the river since Alarcon, 287 years before.
That night they set forty traps and were rewarded with thirty-six
beaver. Such good luck decided them to travel slowly with the current,
about four miles an hour, "and trap the river clear." The stream was
about two hundred to three hundred yards wide, with bottoms extending
back from six to ten miles, giving good camp-grounds all along. With
abundance of fat beaver meat and so many pelts added to their store
they forgot their misfortunes and began to count on reaching the Spanish
settlements they thought existed near the mouth of the river. Sometimes
their traps yielded as many as sixty beaver in a night, and finally they
were obliged to halt and make another canoe. So they went slowly down,
occasionally killing a couple of hostile natives, or deer, panthers,
foxes, or wild-cats. One animal is described as like an African leopard,
the first they had ever seen. At length they came to a tribe much
shorter of stature than the Yumas, and friendly. These were probably