fort on Christmas
morning, professing the greatest friendship, and asking permission to be
allowed to come inside and hold a peace conference. All who were in
the fort at the time were Mexicans, and as their cupidity led them to
believe that they could do some advantageous trading with the Indians,
they foolishly permitted the whole band to enter. The result was that
a wholesale massacre followed. There were seventeen persons in all
quartered there, only one of whom escaped death--the old man referred
to--and a woman and her two children, who were carried off as captives;
but even she was killed before the savages had gone a mile from the
place. What became of the children was never known; they probably met
the same fate.

CHAPTER XV. UNCLE JOHN SMITH.

Many of the men of the border were blunt in manners, rude in speech,
driven to the absolute liberty of the far West with better natures
shattered and hopes blasted, to seek in the exciting life of the
plainsman and mountaineer oblivion of some incidents of their youthful
days, which were better forgotten. Yet these aliens from society, these
strangers to the refinements of civilization, who would tear off a
bloody scalp even with grim smiles of satisfaction, were fine fellows,
full of the milk of human kindness, and would share their last slapjack
with a hungry stranger.

Uncle John Smith, as he was known to every trapper, trader, and hunter
from the Yellowstone to the Gila, was one of the most famous and
eccentric men of the early days. In 1826, as a boy, he ran away from St.
Louis with a party of Santa Fe traders, and so fascinated was he with
the desultory and exciting life, that he chose to sit cross-legged,
smoking the long Indian pipe, in the comfortable buffalo-skin teepee,
rather than cross legs on the broad table of his master, a tailor to
whom he had been apprenticed when he took French leave from St. Louis.

He spent his first winter with the Blackfeet Indians, but came very
near losing his scalp in their continual quarrels, and therefore allied
himself with the more peaceable Sioux. Once while on the trail of a
horse-stealing band of Arapahoes near the head waters of the Arkansas,
the susceptible young hunter fell in love with a very pretty Cheyenne
squaw, married her, and remained true to the object of his early
affection during all his long and eventful life, extending over a period
of forty years. For many decades he lived with his dusky wife