In a few days everything was cosey and comfortable around them.  During the months of December and January, and until the middle of February, while wintry blasts swept the hills, warmth, abundance and friendliness reigned in these sheltered, cheerful huts in a Rocky Mountain valley.  There was one exciting event which disturbed the serenity of this winter encampment.

A band of Blackfeet Indians had cautiously dogged their footsteps, watching for an opportunity to stampede their horses.  One very dark night, a number of these savages, supported by quite a numerous band of warriors, crept, like wolves, into the grazing ground of the horses, and succeeded in seizing eighteen of them, with which they made off rapidly towards their own country.  The loss was not discovered until morning.  After a few moments’ deliberation it was decided that the valuable property must be recovered if possible, and the Indians chastised for such insolence.

The unanimous voice called upon Kit Carson to lead the enterprise, and to select his men.  He took eleven.  In a few minutes they were all mounted; a blanket their only baggage; their rifles and ammunition their only stores.  The ground was covered with snow.  These veteran mountaineers knew well when and how to spare their horses for a continuous pursuit.

The Indians being more numerous, having horses to lead, and with their steeds somewhat jaded with the long journey from their own country, could not travel as fast as their pursuers were able to do with their fresh animals.  Still the savages had so much the start that it required fifty miles of sharp riding before they were overtaken.  Fortunately for the pursuers, there had been recently a heavy fall of snow, so that the Indians were under the necessity of breaking a path.  Their party was so large that the white men were furnished with a clearly marked, well-trodden trail.  This toil through the snow, seems quite to have exhausted the strength of the horses of the Indians.  They had been compelled to stop at noonday to refresh the animals.  A spot had been selected on a hill-side, where the wind had blown away the snow, and where the horses found, for grazing, an abundance of succulent dried grass.

Suddenly, and probably not a little to their consternation, the twelve trappers, rounding an eminence on the full trot, appeared before them.  Carson halted his troop to reconnoitre; for his foes were strongly posted and far outnumbered him.  The savages, seeing the impossibility of immediately gathering and mounting their horses for flight, cunningly sent a flag of truce to solicit a parley.  According to their custom, this flag consisted of one of their warriors advancing entirely unarmed, half-way to the opposing band.  There he stopped, and folding his arms, waited for some one of the other party similarly weaponless, to come forward to confer with him.

These savage thieves manifested a degree of intelligence in their cunning, which was hardly to have been expected of them.  Through their interpreter they assumed an air of perfect innocence, affecting great surprise that the horses belonged to the trappers, saying that they supposed that they had been robbing their hereditary foes, the Snake Indians.