rly in the century
faced the perils of the remote frontier. From his neck he always wore
suspended a perforated bullet, with a large oblong bead on each side of
it, tied in place by a single thread of sinew. This amulet he obtained
while chief of the Crows,[52] and it was his "medicine," with which he
excited the superstition of his warriors.

His success as a trader among the various tribes of Indians has never
been surpassed; for his close intimacy with them made him know what
would best please their taste, and they bought of him when other traders
stood idly at their stockades, waiting almost hopelessly for customers.

But Beckwourth himself said: "The traffic in whiskey for Indian property
was one of the most infernal practices ever entered into by man. Let the
most casual thinker sit down and figure up the profits on a forty-gallon
cask of alcohol, and he will be thunderstruck, or rather whiskey-struck.
When it was to be disposed of, four gallons of water were added to each
gallon of alcohol. In two hundred gallons there are sixteen hundred
pints, for each one of which the trader got a buffalo-robe worth five
dollars. The Indian women toiled many long weeks to dress those sixteen
hundred robes. The white traders got them for worse than nothing; for
the poor Indian mother hid herself and her children until the effect of
the poison passed away from the husband and father, who loved them when
he had no whiskey, and abused and killed them when he had. Six thousand
dollars for sixty gallons of alcohol! Is it a wonder with such profits
that men got rich who were engaged in the fur trade? Or was it a miracle
that the buffalo were gradually exterminated?--killed with so little
remorse that the hides, among the Indians themselves, were known by the
appellation of 'A pint of whiskey.'"

Beckwourth claims to have established the Pueblo where the beautiful
city of Pueblo, Colorado, is now situated. He says: "On the 1st of
October, 1842, on the Upper Arkansas, I erected a trading-post and
opened a successful business. In a very short time I was joined by from
fifteen to twenty free trappers, with their families. We all united
our labour and constructed an adobe fort sixty yards square. By the
following spring it had grown into quite a little settlement, and we
gave it the name of Pueblo."

CHAPTER XVII. UNCLE DICK WOOTON.

Immediately after Kit Carson, the second wreath of pioneer laurels, for
bravery and prowess