Shortly after this event another caravan was fallen in with and attacked by the savages, who carried off with them thirty-five scalps, two hundred and fifty mules, and goods to the amount of thirty thousand dollars.

These terrible dramas were constantly reacted in these vast western solitudes, and the fate of the unfortunate traders would be unknown, until some day, perchance, a living skeleton, a famished being, covered with blood, dust, and mire, would arrive at one of the military posts on the borders, and relate an awful and bloody tragedy, from which he alone had escaped.

In 1831, Mr. Sublette and his company crossed the prairies with twenty-five waggons.  He and his company were old pioneers among the Rocky Mountains, whom the thirst of gold had transformed into merchants.  They went without guides, and no one among them had ever performed the trip.  All that they knew was that they were going from such to such a degree of longitude.  They reached the Arkansas river, but from thence to the Cimaron there is no road, except the numerous paths of the buffaloes, which, intersecting the prairie, very often deceive the travellers.

When the caravan entered this desert the earth was entirely dry, and the pioneers mistaking their road, wandered during several days exposed to all the horrors of a febrile thirst under a burning sun.  Often they were seduced by the deceitful appearance of a buffalo-path, and in this perilous situation Captain Smith, one of the owners of the caravan, resolved to follow one of these paths, which he considered would indubitably lead him to some spring of water or to a marsh.

He was alone, but he had never known fear.  He was the most determined adventurer who had ever passed the Rocky Mountains, and if but half of what is said of him is true, his dangerous travels and his hairbreadth escapes would fill many volumes more interesting and romantic than the best pages of the American novelist.  Poor man! after having during so many years escaped from the arrows and bullets of the Indians, he was fated to fall under the tomahawk, and his bones to bleach upon the desert sands.

He was about twelve miles from his comrades, when, turning round a small hill, he perceived the long-sought object of his wishes.  A small stream glided smoothly in the middle of the prairie before him.  It was the river Cimaron.  He hurried forward to moisten his parched lips, but just as he was stooping over the water he fell, pierced by ten arrows.  A band of Comanches had espied him, and waited there for him.  Yet he struggled bravely.  The Indians have since acknowledged that, wounded as he was, before dying, Captain Smith had killed three of their people.

Such was the origin of the Santa Fe trade, and such are the liabilities which are incurred even now, in the great solitudes of the West.

CHAPTER XIV.