As soon as he saw me, he ran to meet me and shouted “Kain, igo,”—­ meaning “Hello, friend,”—­and shook hands with me.

The Pimas were out on their annual hunt for that season, and we had to remain with them two days.  Being acquainted with them all, and as I have said before, when one is out in a hostile Indian country, sometimes the company of friendly Indians is quite acceptable.

After leaving here we would be compelled to pass over a small portion of the Ute country, and game being plentiful at this time, we feared they might be out on a hunt, and just at present we were not hankering after sport of the Indian fighting kind.  So I proposed to Jim Bridger that we hire four of these young Pimas to accompany us through the Ute country, knowing that the Pimas were on good terms with all their neighboring tribes.  Jim said that we had nothing to give them, having neither jewelry or beads with us.

I told him that I would spare them a horse if we could get them to go, I had four horses with me, while Jim only had three.  He told me to go ahead and make any kind of a bargain with them I liked and he would stand his portion.

That night after supper while we were sitting around the camp fire, smoking and cracking jokes—­for an Indian enjoys a joke as well as any one—­I got up and told them that we would, after leaving their country, have to travel over a small portion of the Ute country, and they being hostile towards the white people, we did not feel safe to try to cross their country alone, I told them we were very poor, having no beads nor blankets to spare, but if four of their men would accompany us for three days, I would give them a good horse.

The young Indian said:  “You have been a good friend to me, and me and my friend will go with you across the Ute country.  We don’t want your horse, but when you come back you can bring us some beads.”

This we agreed to do, and the next morning we started early, accompanied by four young Pima Indians.

During the first two days’ travel from the Pima camp we saw not less than two hundred Indians of the Ute tribe, camping the second night within a quarter of a mile of a large village of them, but having those Pimas with us they did not offer to molest us.

When we were approaching a village two of the Pimas would ride ahead and tell the Utes that we were their friends.  They traveled with us four days, when we concluded we were safe and they returned to their crowd of hunters, and we proceeded on our journey, crossing the main divide of the Rocky Mountains at the head of the Blue river, striking the head of the Arkansas river as soon as we were across the main divide.

The day we crossed the divide we went into camp as soon as we were out of the snow on the east side.  That night when it was dark we could see down the Arkansas river a great number of camp fires, and what this all meant was a mystery to us.  We knew that we were then in the Comanche country, but we could not think that they were up in that region so early in the season.  We were both somewhat restless that night, sleeping but very little, fearing that these were camp-fires of the Utes, and if so we were sure to have trouble with them before we could get out of this part of the country.