ity of their villages built along the shores of deep and
broad rivers. Inhabiting a warm clime, cleanness, first a necessity,
has become a second nature. The hides and skins are never dried in the
immediate vicinity of their lodges, but at a great distance where the
effluvia can hurt no one. The interior of their lodges is dry, and
always covered with a coat of hard white clay, a good precaution against
insects and reptiles, the contrast of colour immediately betraying their
presence. Besides which, having always a plentiful supply of food, they
are temperate in their habits, and are never guilty of excess; while the
Crows, Black-feet, and Clubs, having often to suffer hunger for days,
nay, weeks together, will, when they have an opportunity, eat to
repletion, and their stomachs being always in a disordered state (the
principal and physical cause of their fierceness and ferocity), it is no
wonder that they fell victims, with such predispositions to disease.

It will require many generations to recover the number of Indians which
perished in that year; and, as I have said, as long as they live, it
will form an epoch or era to which they will for centuries refer.

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Note 1. There is every prospect of these north-western tribes remaining
in their present primitive state, indeed of their gradual improvement,
for nothing can induce them to touch spirits. They know that the
eastern Indians had been debased and conquered by the use of them, and
consider an offer of a dram from an American trader as an indirect
attempt upon their life and honour.

CHAPTER NINETEEN.

In the last chapter but one, I stated that I and my companions, Gabriel
and Roche, had been delivered up to the Mexican agents, and were
journeying, under an escort of thirty men, to the Mexican capital, to be
hanged as an example to all liberators. This escort was commanded by
two most atrocious villains, Joachem Texada and Louis Ortiz. They
evidently anticipated that they would become great men in the republic,
upon the safe delivery of our persons to the Mexican government, and
every day took good care to remind us that the gibbet was to be our fate
on our arrival.

Our route lay across the central deserts of Senora, until we arrived on
the banks of the Rio Grande; and so afraid were they of falling in with
a hostile party of Apaches, that they took long turns out of the gene