I saw a familiar red
beard and mustache in the gateway. They belonged to the captain, who
with his party had just crossed the stream. We met him on the stairs as
he came up, and congratulated him on the safe arrival of himself and his
devoted companions. But he remembered our treachery, and was grave and
dignified accordingly; a tendency which increased as he observed on our
part a disposition to laugh at him. After remaining an hour or two at
the fort he rode away with his friends, and we have heard nothing of him
since. As for R., he kept carefully aloof. It was but too evident that
we had the unhappiness to have forfeited the kind regards of our London
fellow-traveler.

CHAPTER X

THE WAR PARTIES

The summer of 1846 was a season of much warlike excitement among all the
western bands of the Dakota. In 1845 they encountered great reverses.
Many war parties had been sent out; some of them had been totally cut
off, and others had returned broken and disheartened, so that the whole
nation was in mourning. Among the rest, ten warriors had gone to the
Snake country, led by the son of a prominent Ogallalla chief, called The
Whirlwind. In passing over Laramie Plains they encountered a superior
number of their enemies, were surrounded, and killed to a man.
Having performed this exploit the Snakes became alarmed, dreading the
resentment of the Dakota, and they hastened therefore to signify their
wish for peace by sending the scalp of the slain partisan, together with
a small parcel of tobacco attached, to his tribesmen and relations. They
had employed old Vaskiss, the trader, as their messenger, and the scalp
was the same that hung in our room at the fort. But The Whirlwind proved
inexorable. Though his character hardly corresponds with his name, he is
nevertheless an Indian, and hates the Snakes with his whole soul. Long
before the scalp arrived he had made his preparations for revenge. He
sent messengers with presents and tobacco to all the Dakota within three
hundred miles, proposing a grand combination to chastise the Snakes, and
naming a place and time of rendezvous. The plan was readily adopted and
at this moment many villages, probably embracing in the whole five or
six thousand souls, were slowly creeping over the prairies and tending
towards the common center at La Bonte's Camp, on the Platte. Here their
war-like rites were to be celebrated with more than ordinary solemnity,
and a thousand warriors, as it was