broadcloth coat, was haranguing the company in the style of the stump orator.  With one hand he sawed the air, and with the other clutched firmly a brown jug of whisky, which he applied every moment to his lips, forgetting that he had drained the contents long ago.  Richard formally introduced me to this personage, who was no less a man than Colonel R., once the leader of the party.  Instantly the colonel seizing me, in the absence of buttons by the leather fringes of my frock, began to define his position.  His men, he said, had mutinied and deposed him; but still he exercised over them the influence of a superior mind; in all but the name he was yet their chief.  As the colonel spoke, I looked round on the wild assemblage, and could not help thinking that he was but ill qualified to conduct such men across the desert to California.  Conspicuous among the rest stood three tail young men, grandsons of Daniel Boone.  They had clearly inherited the adventurous character of that prince of pioneers; but I saw no signs of the quiet and tranquil spirit that so remarkably distinguished him.

Fearful was the fate that months after overtook some of the members of that party.  General Kearny, on his late return from California, brought in the account how they were interrupted by the deep snows among the mountains, and maddened by cold and hunger fed upon each other’s flesh.

I got tired of the confusion.  “Come, Paul,” said I, “we will be off.”  Paul sat in the sun, under the wall of the fort.  He jumped up, mounted, and we rode toward Fort Laramie.  When we reached it, a man came out of the gate with a pack at his back and a rifle on his shoulder; others were gathering about him, shaking him by the hand, as if taking leave.  I thought it a strange thing that a man should set out alone and on foot for the prairie.  I soon got an explanation.  Perrault—­this, if I recollect right was the Canadian’s name—­had quarreled with the bourgeois, and the fort was too hot to hold him.  Bordeaux, inflated with his transient authority, had abused him, and received a blow in return.  The men then sprang at each other, and grappled in the middle of the fort.  Bordeaux was down in an instant, at the mercy of the incensed Canadian; had not an old Indian, the brother of his squaw, seized hold of his antagonist, he would have fared ill.  Perrault broke loose from the old Indian, and both the white men ran to their rooms for their guns; but when Bordeaux, looking from his door, saw the Canadian, gun in hand, standing in the area and calling on him to come out and fight, his heart failed him; he chose to remain where he was.  In vain the old Indian, scandalized by his brother-in-law’s cowardice, called upon him to go upon the prairie and fight it out in the white man’s manner; and Bordeaux’s own squaw, equally incensed, screamed to her lord and master that he was a dog and an old woman.  It all availed nothing.  Bordeaux’s prudence got the better of his valor, and he would not stir.  Perrault stood showering approbrious epithets at the recent bourgeois.  Growing tired of this, he made up a pack of dried meat, and slinging it at his back, set out alone for Fort Pierre on the Missouri, a distance of three hundred miles, over a desert country full of hostile Indians.