and spies, under the command of a certain Captain Hunt, who had been
sent from the lower part of the river to protect the northern
plantations. With him I found five gentlemen, who, tired of residing in
Texas, had taken the opportunity of this military escort to return to
the Arkansas. As soon as they heard that I was going there myself, they
offered to join me, which I agreed to, as it was now arranged that
Gabriel and Roche should not accompany me farther than to the Red River.
[See note 1.]

The next morning I received a visit from Hunt and two or three inferior
officers, to advise upon the following subject. An agricultural company
from Kentucky had obtained from the Texian government a grant of lands
on the upper forks of the Trinity. There twenty-five or thirty families
had settled, and they had with them numerous cattle, horses, mules, and
donkeys a very superior breed. On the very evening I met with the
Texian rangers, the settlement had been visited by a party of ruffians,
who stole every thing, murdering sixty or seventy men, women, and
children, and firing all the cottages and log-houses of this rising and
prosperous village. All the corpses were shockingly mangled and
scalped, and as the assailants were painted in the Indian fashion, the
few inhabitants who had escaped and gained the Texian camp declared that
the marauders were Comanches.

This I denied stoutly, as did the Comanche party, and we all proceeded
with the Texian force to Lewisburg, the site of the massacre. As soon
as I viewed the bodies, lying here and there, I at once was positive
that the deed had been committed by white men. The Comanche chief could
scarcely restrain his indignation; he rode close to Captain Hunt and
sternly said to him:--

"Stoop, Pale-face of a Texian, and look with thy eyes open; be honest if
thou canst, and confess that thou knowest by thine own experience that
this deed is that of white men. What Comanche ever scalped women and
children. Stoop, I say, and behold a shame on thy colour and race--a
race of wolves, preying upon each other; a race of jaguars, killing the
female after having forced her--stoop and see.

"The bodies of the young women have been atrociously and cowardly
abused--seest thou? Thou well knowest the Indian is too noble and too
proud to level himself to the rank of a Texian or of a brute."

Twenty of our Comanches started on the tracks, and in the evening
brought three prisoners to th