Chief of Scouts | Page 9

piece of meat as I ever ate.
The next morning we bid the Indians good bye, but before they left us
one of them stooped down and with a finger marked out the route we
should take, thinking we did not know the country we must pass over,
and strange to say, the route this wild Indian marked out in the sand
was accurate in every particular. He made dots for the places where we
should camp and a little mark for a stream of water, then little piles of
sand for mountains, some large and some small, according to the size
of the mountain we were to cross. After he had finished his work, I
examined the diagram and I found he had marked out every place
where we should camp.
From there to the head of the Arkansas river, I called Jonnie West and
asked him to look at it. He examined it at every point and said, "This
beats any thing I ever saw or heard tell of; with this to guide us, we
could not get lost if we tried to."
We were now ready to start. Jonnie said to me, "Well, I feel we owe
this Indian something. How many butcher knives have you?"
I said, "I have two." "Alright, I will give him this finger ring and you
give him one of your knives."
We did so, and I think he was the proudest Indian I ever saw; he
jumped up and shouted, "Hy-you-scu-scum, white man," which meant
"Good white man."
The Indians all shook hands with us and then mounted their horses and
were gone. We now pulled out on our long and dangerous trip to Taos,

New Mexico, and strange to say, we never missed a camping ground
that the Indians had marked out for us, until we reached the head of the
Arkansas river, and the beauty of it was, we had good grass and good
water at every camping place, which was very essential for ourselves
and our horses.
When we struck the head of the Arkansas river we considered ourselves
out of danger of all hostile Indians. Besides, we knew every foot of the
ground we had to travel over from here to Taos, New Mexico. We
camped one night on the river, down below where Leadville stands
now, and I never saw so many huckleberries at one place as I saw there.
After we had our horses unpacked and staked out to grass, I said to the
boys, "Now you go and pick berries, and I will try and find some meat
for supper." I did not go far when looking up on a high bluff I saw a
band of mountain sheep. I noticed they had not seen me yet and were
coming directly towards me. When they got in gun-shot, I fired and
killed a half-grown sheep, and he did not stop kicking until he was
nearly at my feet. This was the first mountain sheep I had ever killed,
and it was as fine a piece of meat as I ever ate, and until this day,
mountain sheep is my favorite wild meat. This was one of the nights to
be remembered, fine fresh meat, and ripe huckleberries, what luxuries,
for the wilds to produce.
In a few days we reached Taos, and here I met my old friend Jim
Bridger. After laying around a few days and resting up, Jonnie West
said to me, "Will, what are we going to do this winter? You are like me,
you can't lay around without going wild."
I said, "That's so, Jonnie. Let's go and hunt up Jim Bridger, and ask him
what he is going to do this winter."
We went to the house where Jim was boarding and we found him in
one of his talkative moods. We asked him what he proposed doing this
winter; he said, "I am going out a trapping, and I want you boys to go
with me."
I asked him where he was going to trap, and he said he thought he
would trap on the head of the Cache-la-Poudre, and the quicker we

went the better it would be for us. "I have all the traps we will need this
winter," he said; "now you boys go to work and mould a lot of bullets."
The reader will understand that in those days we used the
muzzle-loading gun, and we had to mould all of our bullets. In a few
days we were ready to pull out. I asked Jim if we could keep our horses
with us through the winter. He said, "Yes, as the snow does not get
very deep in that country, and there is plenty of Cotton Wood and
Quaker Asp for them to browse on