iefly of young
hunters, not yet warriors. On such occasions there is frequently, though
not always, an ancient warrior for every eight hunters, just to show to
them the crafts of Indian mode of hunting. These parties often bring
with them their squaws and children, and never fight but when obliged
to do so.]

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 Texan 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 of a very superior breed. On the very evening I met with the
Texan rangers, the settlement had been visited by a party of ruffians,
who stole everything, 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 Texan camp declared that the
marauders were Comanches.

This I denied stoutly, as did the Comanche party, and we all proceeded
with the Texan 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 Texan, 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 Texan or of a brute."

Twenty of our Comanches started on the tracks, and in the evening
brought three prisoners to the camp. They were desperate blackguards,
well known to every one of the soldiers under Captain Hunt, who, in
spite of their Indian disguise, identified them immediately. Hunt
refused to punish them, or to