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"Quoique la celebre Marie eut, au XIIIe siecle, donne une assez ample histoire du Purgatoire de St.-Patrice, puisqu'elle est de plus de trois mille vers, deux autres Trouveres anglo-normands qui probablement ne connaissaient pas son poeme, volurent dans le siecle suivant traiter le meme sujet." Caen, 1834. t. iii., p. 245.
Wooton had an adventure once while he was stationed at Bent's Fort during a trading expedition with the Utes, on the Purgatoire, or Purgatory River, about ten or twelve miles from Trinidad. He had taken with him, with others, a Shawnee Indian.
The echoing of the flood as it tumbled through the canon was said to be the lamentation of the troopers. French trappers softened the suggestion of the Spanish title when they renamed it Purgatoire, and "bullwhackers" teaming across the plains twisted the French title into the unmeaning "Picketwire."
Colonel Sedgwick had been sent out to fight the Kiowas that year, and in the fall a large quantity of commissary stores had been sent him. Colonel Bent then moved up the river to a point just above the mouth of the Purgatoire, and built several rooms of cottonwood pickets, and there spent the winter.
We traveled up the Arkansas river to the mouth of the Purgatoire pronounced in that country Picket Wire which was about thirty miles from Bent's Fort.
"If you've got no beds, we won't bother you long," interposed Pardaloe. "I'd like a pitcher of ice-water, anyway," persisted Lefever. "Sit down, noble Greek; we'll talk this over." "Who are you fellows?" demanded Philippi, looking from one to the other. "I am a prospector from the Purgatoire," answered Pardaloe. Philippi turned his keen eye on Lefever. "You a railroad man?"
Glad were they when, after three days of this frightful passage, they halted on the welcome banks of the Purgatoire, a cool mountain-stream, and saw rising before them the snowy summits of the lofty Cimmaron and Spanish peaks and knew that the desert was passed.
Spreading out when they rode between the mountain walls, they made their way without interruption silently toward their rendezvous, an aspen grove near which Purgatoire Creek makes its way out of the Gap and, cutting a deep gash along the edge of the range for a hundred miles, empties into the Thief. Scott was the first to reach the trees.
The delightful Purgatoire, where the author sees a chorus of souls in Purgatory, is much better. His Purgatory has no punishments nor any griefs save the awaiting, the long and painful awaiting, of eternal happiness. There is a processional in which the fugue and melody alternate in the most felicitous manner.
W.J. Dixon, of Cimarron, Kan., wrote me in May, 1898, as follows: "In 1874 or '75 I killed sheep at the head of the north fork of the Purgatoire, or Rio de las Animas, on the divide between the Spanish Peaks and main range of the Rocky Mountains, southwest by west from the South Peak. I was there also in November, 1892, and saw three or four head at a distance, but did not go after them.
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