ered with dead fish, killed by the heat
of the sun. That made no difference. The pool was wet.

Major Riley and his soldiers turned back the next morning. Captain
Bent took the caravan on, to Santa Fe.

From here, he and his brothers that fall located their trading post.
The place was two hundred and sixty miles north of Santa Fe, on the
north bank of the Arkansas River, fourteen miles above the mouth of the
Purgatory River, or about half way between the towns of La Junta and
Las Animas in present southeastern Colorado.

One branch, the Mountain Branch, of the Santa Fe Trail, led up the
Arkansas, to it, and on, to turn south across the Raton Mountain for
Santa Fe. The Cheyennes gathered near-by, every fall, for their great
winter camp. The Utes from the Rocky Mountains, one hundred and thirty
miles west, sometimes came down. A traders' and trappers' trail
between Santa Fe and the Platte River passed this way. It was a sort
of a cross-roads, in the wilderness.

Bent's Fort, called also Fort William after William Bent, was built of
adobe or clay bricks. It was one hundred and fifty feet long and one
hundred feet wide. Its walls were eighteen feet high, and six or seven
feet thick at the base. The tops formed a parapet or walk. In two
diagonally opposite corners were bastions of round towers, thirty feet
high, swelling out so as to command the walls. The main gateway was
thirty feet wide and closed by a pair of huge plank doors. Over the
gateway there was a sentry box, floating the United States flag. The
six-pounder brass cannon of the caravan was mounted upon a wall, on a
swivel, to fire in all directions; other cannon were added.

Bent's Fort became famous. Soon all the Indians for leagues around
knew of it. The Arapahos and the Southern Cheyennes traded in their
buffalo robes here; the mountain Utes, and the Red River Comanches of
northern Texas came in. At one time, in the late fall and in the
winter, twenty thousand Indians would be camped within sight of it.

Trappers from north, west and south made it their market and
headquarters. Traders trailed in, from the States and from New Mexico.
In 1846 General Stephen Watts Kearny's army from Leavenworth for Santa
Fe and California halted here, to refit.

So Bent's Fort prospered. It had the only ice-house on the plains; the
pumpkin pies of its negress cook, Charlotte, spread its fame wider; the
rank and file of the Indians and the trappers and t