[Footnote 19:  What I here say of the Apaches applies to the whole Shoshone race.]

Their generosity is unbounded; and by the treatment I received at their hands the reader may form an idea of that brave people.  They will never hurt a stranger coming to them.  A green bough in his hand is a token of peace.  For him they will spread the best blankets the wigwam can afford; they will studiously attend to his wants, smoke with him the calumet of peace, and when he goes away, whatever he may desire from among the disposable wealth of the tribe, if he asks for it, it is given.

Gabriel was once attacked near Santa Fe, and robbed of his baggage, by some honest Yankee traders.  He fell in with a party of Apaches, to whom he related the circumstance.  They gave him some blankets, and left him with their young men at the hunting-lodges they had erected.  The next day they returned with several Yankee captives, all well tied, to prevent any possibility of escape.  These were the thieves; and what they had taken of Gabriel was, of course, restored to him, one of the Indians saying, that the Yankees, having blackened and soiled the country by theft, should receive the punishment of dogs, and as it was beneath an Apache to strike them, cords were given to them, with orders that they should chastise each other for their rascality.  The blackguards were obliged to submit, and the dread of being scalped was too strong upon them to allow them to refuse.  At first they did not seem to hurt each other much; but one or two of them, smarting under the lash, returned the blows in good earnest, and then they all got angry, and beat each other so unmercifully that, in a few minutes, they were scarcely able to move.  Nothing could exceed the ludicrous picture which Gabriel would draw out of this little event.

There is one circumstance which will form a particular datum in the history of the Western wild tribes,—­I mean the terrible visitation of the small-pox.  The Apaches, Comanches, the Shoshones, and Arrapahoes are so clean and so very nice in the arrangement of their domestic comforts, that they suffered very little, or not at all; at least, I do not remember a single case which brought death in these tribes; indeed, as I have before mentioned, the Shoshones vaccinate.

But such was not the case with the Club Indians of the Colorado of the West, with the Crows, the Flat-heads, the Umbiquas, and the Black-feet.  These last suffered a great deal more than any people in the world ever suffered from any plague or pestilence.  To be sure, the Mandans had been entirely swept from the surface of the earth; but they were few, while the Black-feet were undoubtedly the most numerous and powerful tribe in the neighbourhood of the mountains.  Their war-parties ranged the country from the northern English posts on the Slave Lake down south to the very borders of the Shoshones, and many among them had taken scalps of the Osages, near the Mississippi, and even