Jan. 22, 1910.] 
131 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
good-natured and kindly woman and is said to 
have been half French and half Mexican. She 
spoke French readily. She was married to one 
of the employees of the fort. 
Andrew Green, the black cook,* has already 
been spoken of as having ultimately been set 
free. 
The old French tailor had come up from New 
Orleans. He had a shop in one of the rooms 
of the fort where he used to make and repair 
clothing for the men. Much of this clothing was 
of buckskin, which he himself dressed, for he 
was a good tanner. 
In winter the teamsters and laborers spent 
their evenings usually in playing cards and 
checkers in the quarters by the light of tallow 
candles, the only lights they had to burn. These 
candles were made at the fort, Chipita doing the 
work. They were moulded of buffalo tallow in 
old-fashioned tin moulds, perhaps a dozen in a 
set. The work of fixing the wicks in the moulds 
occupied considerable time. The tallow was then 
melted, the refuse skimmed from it, the fluid 
grease poured into the moulds and the wicks, 
which hung from the top, were cut off with a 
pair of scissors. Then the moulds were dipped 
in a barrel of water standing by to cool the 
candles, and presently they were quite hard and 
could be removed from the moulds ready for use. 
In the winter Chipita would sometimes vary 
the monotony of the life by getting up a candy 
pulling frolic in which the laborers and team¬ 
sters all took part, and which was more or less 
a jollification. During the afternoon and eve- 
ning the black New Orleans molasses, which was 
used in the Indian trade, was boiled, and after 
supper the people gathered in one of the rooms 
and pulled the candy. Candy such as this was 
a great luxury and was eagerly eaten by those 
who could get it. 
Ihe work of the carpenter and blacksmith, 
whose shops stood at the back of the fort, was 
chiefly on the wagons which they kept in good 
order. For them winter was the busy season, 
for it was their duty to have everything in good 
order and ready for the train to start out in 
April. 
In the store of the fort—presumably for sale 
to travelers or for the use of the proprietors— 
were to be found such unusual luxuries as but¬ 
ter crackers, Bent’s water crackers, candies of 
various sorts and most remarkable of all great 
jars of preserved ginger of the kind which forty 
or fifty years ago used to be brought from China. 
Elderly people of the present day can remem¬ 
ber, when they were children, seeing these blue 
china jars, which were carried by lines of vege¬ 
table rope passed around the necks of the jars, 
and can remember also how delicious this gin¬ 
ger was when they were treated to*a taste of it. 
At the post were some creatures which greatly 
astonished the Indians. On one of his trips to 
St. Louis St. Vrain purchased a pair of goats, 
intending to have them draw a cart for some of 
the children. On the way across the plains, how¬ 
ever, one of them was killed, but the one that 
survived lived at the fort for some years and 
used to clamber all over the walls and buildings. 
The creature was a great curiosity to the plains 
♦Andrew Green, Chas. Bent’s slave, was called Dick 
by the trappers. He went with St. Vrain’s company of 
trappers in the expedition to Taos and fought gallantly, 
being badly wounded in an engagement with the Pueblos 
and Mexicans. 
people who had never before seen such an ani¬ 
mal, and they never wearied of watching its 
climbing and its promenading along the walls 
of the fort. As it grew older it became cross 
and seemed to take pleasure in scattering little 
groups of Indian children and chasing them 
about. 1 he Southern Cheyennes went but little 
into the mountains at this time and but few of 
them had ever seen the mountain sheep. If they 
had they would not have regarded the domestic 
goat with so much wonder. 
The post was abundant y supplied with poul¬ 
try, for pigeons, chickens and turkeys had been 
brought out there and bred and did well. At 
one time George Bent brought out several pea¬ 
cocks, whose gay plumage and harsh voices as¬ 
tonished and more or less alarmed the Indians 
who called them Thunder Birds, Nun urn' a e vikls. 
There was no surgeon at the fort, Colonel 
Bent doing his own doctoring. He possessed an 
BLACK BEAVER. 
A cued Delaware Hunter, Guide and Scout, long 
employed at Bent’s old fort. 
ample medicine chest which he replenished on 
his trips to St. Louis. He had also a number 
of medical books and no doubt these and such 
practical experience as came to him with the 
years made him reasonably skillful in the rough 
medicine and surgery that he practiced. With 
the train he carried a small medicine chest which 
occasionally came in play. 
For many years Bent’s Fort was the great and 
only gathering place for the Indians in the south¬ 
western plains, and at different times there were 
large companies of them present there. 
At one time no less than 350 lodges of Kiowa 
Apaches were camping near the fort on the 
south side of the river, and at another, accord¬ 
ing to Thomas Boggs, six or seven thousand 
Cheyennes were camped there at one time. 
When the Kiowas, Comanches and Apaches 
were camped about the fort the number of In¬ 
dians was very large. It must be remembered 
that prior to 1849 the Indians of the southwest 
had not been appreciably affected by any of the 
new diseases brought into the country by the 
whites. This was largely due to the forethought 
of William Bent, who, by his action in 1829 
when small pox was raging at his stockade, pro¬ 
tected the Cheyennes and Arapahoes at least, and 
very likely other Indians from the attacks of 
this dread disease. 
Shortly after the great peace between the 
Cheyennes, Arapahoes, Kiowas, Comanches and 
Apaches, which was made in 1840, the two great 
camps moved up to Bent’s fort, the Cheyennes 
and Arapahoes camping on the north side of 
the river, the Kiowas, Comanches and Apaches 
on the south. It was a great gathering of In¬ 
dians and the feasting, singing and dancing and 
drumming were continuous. Though peace had 
just been made, there was danger that some of 
the old ill feeling that had so long existed be¬ 
tween the tribes yet remained. Colonel Bent, 
with his usual wisdom, warned his employees 
that to these camps no spirits whatever should 
be traded. Fie recognized that if the Indians 
got drunk they would very likely begin to quar¬ 
rel again, and a collision between members of 
tribes formerly hostile might lead to the break¬ 
ing of the newly made peace. This was per¬ 
haps the greatest gathering of the Indians that 
ever collected at Fort William. Flow many were 
there will never be known. 
Such briefly is the story of Bent’s Fort, the 
oldest, largest and most important of 1 the fur¬ 
trading posts on the great plains of the United 
States. Unless some manuscript, the existence 
of which is now unknown, should hereafter be 
discovered, it is likely to be all that we shall 
ever know of the place that once occupied an 
important position in the history of our country. 
George Bent and His Friends. 
Two of the illustrations printed this week pos¬ 
sess unusual historic interest. That on page 129 
gives an excellent portrait of George Bent, the 
only surviving son of Colonel William Bent, of 
Bent’s Old Fort. As has already been said in 
the series of articles printed on this subject, 
George Bent is the son of Colonel William Bent 
and of Owl Woman, daughter of White Thun¬ 
der, or Gray Thunder, an eminent man who was 
long the keeper of the Cheyenne medicine arrows 
and who in the year 1838 was killed in the great 
battle between the Cheyennes and Arapahoes on 
one side and the Kiowas, Comanches and Apaches 
on the other. 
The group picture represents a scene at 
Colony, Okla., when Big Knee, a Southern 
Cheyenne, was relating to John J. White, Jr., 
of New York, a story which George Bent 
was interpreting from the Cheyenne into Eng¬ 
lish. John H. Seger was long superintendent of 
the Indian school at Colony, which he founded. 
His experience with the Southern Cheyennes 
dates back to about 1874, and he it was who 
took these wild sons of the plains, controlled 
them and started them on the road toward civili¬ 
zation, which they have ever since been slowly 
and painfully traveling. 
Black Beaver was a Delaware trapper, hunter, 
guide and scout, who was long employed at 
Bent’s Old Fort, and whose name occurs in 
many of the writings which have to do with the 
early Southwest. About Black Beaver, Dodge 
and Marcy have much to say in their books on 
prairie travel and prairie life. Fie was a man 
highly esteemed by all who knew him. He died 
at Anadarko, Okla., May 8, 18S0. 
