or the trouble
he cost us. Tete Rouge rather enjoyed being laughed at, for he was an
odd compound of weakness, eccentricity, and good-nature. He made a
figure worthy of a painter as he paced along before us, perched on the
back of his mule, and enveloped in a huge buffalo-robe coat, which some
charitable person had given him at the fort. This extraordinary garment,
which would have contained two men of his size, he chose, for some
reason best known to himself, to wear inside out, and he never took it
off, even in the hottest weather. It was fluttering all over with seams
and tatters, and the hide was so old and rotten that it broke out every
day in a new place. Just at the top of it a large pile of red curls was
visible, with his little cap set jauntily upon one side, to give him a
military air. His seat in the saddle was no less remarkable than his
person and equipment. He pressed one leg close against his mule's side,
and thrust the other out at an angle of 45 deg.. His pantaloons were
decorated with a military red stripe, of which he was extremely vain;
but being much too short, the whole length of his boots was usually
visible below them. His blanket, loosely rolled up into a large bundle,
dangled at the back of his saddle, where he carried it tied with a
string. Four or five times a day it would fall to the ground. Every few
minutes he would drop his pipe, his knife, his flint and steel, or a
piece of tobacco, and have to scramble down to pick them up. In doing
this he would contrive to get in everybody's way; and as the most of the
party were by no means remarkable for a fastidious choice of language, a
storm of anathemas would be showered upon him, half in earnest and half
in jest, until Tete Rouge would declare that there was no comfort in
life, and that he never saw such fellows before.

On the next afternoon, as we moved along the bank of the river, we saw
the white tops of wagons on the horizon. It was some hours before we met
them, when they proved to be a train of clumsy ox-wagons, quite
different from the rakish vehicles of the Santa Fe traders, and loaded
with government stores for the troops. They all stopped, and the
drivers gathered around us in a crowd. I thought that the whole frontier
might have been ransacked in vain to furnish men worse fitted to meet
the dangers of the prairie. Many of them were mere boys, fresh from the
plow, and devoid of knowledge and experience.

Just after leaving the gover