raders, and the army
officers themselves, swore by Bent's Fort.

The Indians called William Bent "Hook-Nose Man" or "Roman Nose." He
married a Cheyenne girl. He was the governor of the fort. His brother
George helped. Charles Bent was largely at Santa Fe, at Taos, midway,
and on the trail, until in 1846 he was appointed first American
governor of New Mexico.

The next year the Mexicans and Pueblo Indians revolted against the
American government, and killed him at his home in Taos.

Bent's Fort lasted through more than twenty years. Then William Bent
offered to sell it to the Government for an army post. He asked
$16,000; the Government proposed $12,000. They dickered. Colonel Bent
would not yield one penny. He had a short stock of patience in dealing
with white men or red men either. So in the summer of 1852 he blew up
the fort with powder and marched away, to build another post, for
Indian trade, thirty miles down-river.

This became Fort Wise, of the army, but was known to the settlers as
"old" Fort Lyon.

Ten years after selling it to the Government, this time at his own
price, in 1869 William Bent died, aged sixty, near the ranch that he
owned only a few miles from the ruins of his celebrated Bent's Fort.

CHAPTER XVI

A SEARCH FOR A SILVER MINE (1831)

AND THE "BOWIE INDIAN FIGHT"

While the American traders were bent upon opening a trail through the
desert country of the Southwest Indians--the Kiowas, Comanches and
Apaches--into northern Mexico, American settlers had entered Mexico
itself.

Moses Austin, born in Connecticut, but lastly a lead merchant in those
same mines of Washington County, Missouri, where Major Andrew Henry the
fur-hunter also was working, heard of the rich lands of the Spanish
province of Texas. Major Henry thought mainly of beaver-fur--a
get-rich-quick business that took what it might out of a country and
left little in exchange. Moses Austin was a merchant and a
manufacturer--in Missouri he turned his lead into shot, bars and
sheets, and shipped his product to New Orleans. Now in 1820 he
determined to settle Texas with American farmers.

Toward the close of the year he obtained from the Spanish governor, at
San Antonio the capital of Texas, a grant of land. He died before he
had removed there, himself; but his son Stephen Fuller Austin led the
first settlers, gathered at New Orleans, in December, 1821. They
located up the Brazos River in southeastern Texas