o
prevent any possibility of escape. These were the thieves; and what they
had taken of Gabriel was, of course, restored to him, one of the Indians
saying, that the Yankees, having blackened and soiled the country by
theft, should receive the punishment of dogs, and as it was beneath an
Apache to strike them, cords were given to them, with orders that they
should chastise each other for their rascality. The blackguards were
obliged to submit, and the dread of being scalped was too strong upon
them to allow them to refuse. At first they did not seem to hurt each
other much; but one or two of them, smarting under the lash, returned
the blows in good earnest, and then they all got angry, and beat each
other so unmercifully that, in a few minutes, they were scarcely able to
move. Nothing could exceed the ludicrous picture which Gabriel would
draw out of this little event.

There is one circumstance which will form a particular datum in the
history of the Western wild tribes,--I mean the terrible visitation of
the small-pox. The Apaches, Comanches, the Shoshones, and Arrapahoes are
so clean and so very nice in the arrangement of their domestic comforts,
that they suffered very little, or not at all; at least, I do not
remember a single case which brought death in these tribes; indeed, as I
have before mentioned, the Shoshones vaccinate.

But such was not the case with the Club Indians of the Colorado of the
West, with the Crows, the Flat-heads, the Umbiquas, and the Black-feet.
These last suffered a great deal more than any people in the world ever
suffered from any plague or pestilence. To be sure, the Mandans had been
entirely swept from the surface of the earth; but they were few, while
the Black-feet were undoubtedly the most numerous and powerful tribe in
the neighbourhood of the mountains. Their war-parties ranged the country
from the northern English posts on the Slave Lake down south to the very
borders of the Shoshones, and many among them had taken scalps of the
Osages, near the Mississippi, and even of the great Pawnees. Between the
Red River and the Platte they had once one hundred villages, thousands
and thousands of horses. They numbered more than six thousand warriors.
Their name had become a by-word of terror on the northern continent,
from shore to shore, and little children in the eastern states, who knew
not the name of the tribes two miles from their dwellings, had learned
to dread even the name of a Bla