s
quickly; cavalry was more used, in a chase: but after a time the
Indians grew to fear the infantry more than the cavalry.

"Pony soldiers run; walk-a-heaps no can run, must fight," they said.

So while the caravan might have preferred dragoons or mounted riflemen,
to scour on either side and ride in front and rear, it must have taken
comfort in the presence of the plodding solid "walk-a-heaps," the
unbeatable dough-boys.

Now for the first time since the Lieutenant Pike expedition of 1806 a
detachment of American regular soldiers marched into the Southwest
between the Missouri River and the Arkansas.

The march of a Santa Fe caravan was a noble sight: the enormous hooded
wagons, flaring like poke bonnets, each drawn by twelve and sixteen
oxen or mules, lumbering on in a long double file or sometimes four
abreast; the booted teamsters trudging beside the fore-wheels, cracking
their eighteen-foot lashes; the armed out-riders guarding the
flanks--galloping here and there in quest of Indians and game; the
captain and his aides spying the country ahead; and the calallada or
herd of loose extra animals bringing up the rear.

The gait was only two or two and a half miles an hour, so the Major
Riley infantry easily kept pace.

When the Arkansas River had been reached, at the crossing or ford Major
Riley made camp, to wait until the caravan returned. The teams were
doubled and trebled--twenty, thirty, forty animals to a wagon; and with
them all straining and snorting, a dozen teamsters cracking whips and
shouting, and the heavy Conestogas careening to their hubs in the
quick-sand, the crossing was won.

No Mexican escort had appeared. Captain Bent boldly led on, into
Mexico.

This portion of the Santa Fe Trail was especially perilous. Between
the Arkansas River and the Cimarron River (which through most of the
year was no river at all) there was no water for fifty and sixty miles,
except right after rains. The stretch was called the "water scrape."
All the five-gallon kegs hanging under the wagons had to be filled, and
the teams were hustled day and night in order to get across as quickly
as possible.

It was a hot country, of soft sand hub-deep and of wind-swept tracts so
hard that the wagon wheels left no trace. Caravans traveled by
compass; and even then were likely to toil and wander miserably, with
their mules and oxen dying from thirst. The Indians loved to catch a
caravan in here. The Kiowas and Coman