22 LIFE IN THE FAR WEST. 



Injuns having enough of ?/s, dashed after 'em right away. Them 

 poor devils looked back miserable novi^, with about a hundred red 

 varmints tearin' after their hair, and whooping hke mad. Young 

 Jem Bulcher was the last ; and when he seed it was no use, and 

 his time was nigh, he throw' d himself off the mule, and standing 

 as upright as a hickory wiping stick, he waves his hand to us, and 

 blazes away at the first Injun as come up, and dropped him slick ; 

 but the moment after, you may guess, he died. 



** We could do nothin', for, before our guns were loaded, all 

 three were dead and their scalps gone. Five of our boys got rub- 

 bed out that time, and seven Injuns lay wolf's meat, while a 

 many more went away gut-shot, I'll lay, How'sever, five of us 

 went under, and the Pawnees made a raise of a dozen mules, wagh !" 



Thus far, in his own words, we have accompanied the old 

 hunter in his tale ; and probably he would have taken us, by the 

 time the Squaw Chilipat had pronounced the beaver tails cooked, 

 safely across the grand prairies — fording Cotton "Wood, Turkey 

 Creek, Little Arkansas, Walnut Creek, and Pawnee Fork — pass- 

 ed the fireless route of the Coon Creeks, through a sea of fat buf- 

 falo meat without fuel to cook it ; have struck the big river, and, 

 leaving at the " Crossing" the wagons destined for Santa Fe, have 

 trailed us up the Arkansas to Bent's Fort ; thence up Boiling 

 Spring across the divide over to the southern fork of the Platte, 

 away up to the Black Hills, and finally camped us, with hair still 

 preserved, in the beaver-abounding valleys of the Sweet Water, 

 and Cache la Poudre, under the rugged shadow of the Wind 

 River Mountains ; if it had not so happened at this juncture — as 

 all our mountaineers sat cross-legged round the fire, pipe in mouth, 

 and with Indian gravity listened to the yam of the old trapper, 

 interrupting him only with an occasional wagh I or with the ex- 

 clamation of some participator in the events then under narration, 

 who would every now and then put in a corroborative — " This 

 child remembers that fix," or, " hyars a niggur lifted hair on that 



