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A hundred years before the white men set up their trading-posts on the Arkansas and Platte, a band of mountain hunters made a descent on what they took to be a small company of plainsmen, but who proved to be the enemy in force, and who, in turn, drove the Utes for the aggressors were of that tribe into the hills.
There was no longer any sound of firing. The long silence alarmed Bob. Was it possible that his friends had been driven off? Or that they had retired from the field under the impression that all of the riders who had plunged over the bluff had been killed? This fear obsessed him. It rode him like an old man of the sea. He could not wait here till the Utes came to murder him and Houck.
While visiting the Indians, and noting their fertile, irrigated farms, he found many evidences that "this beautiful valley has been the home of a people of a higher grade of cultivation than the present Utes.
He is going with his friend to hunt, and to fight by his side if the Utes come; he wants none of the gold. I explained the matter to him, and he said carelessly: 'Leaping Horse will take the two shares, but it will be for his brother, and that he may send it to the girls, the sisters of his friend Tom, of whom he spoke one night by the fire.
They and their partners were, however, more than satisfied with the result, for although the lode was found to pinch in as they got lower, it maintained for the first six weeks the extraordinary average of that they had first crushed. At the end of that time the Indians reported that they had seen traces of the Utes having visited the valley.
The Snakes and Utes living farther down called it the Bitter-root. Fremont called it the Rio Verde of the Spaniards, but apparently without good authority. It was also spoken of as Spanish River, from the report that Spaniards occupied its lower valleys. Colorado was also one of its names, and this is what it should have remained.
According to our standards such dwellings were very primitive, but they were almost as great an advance upon the brush piles of the Utes as our skyscrapers are upon them. Farther south in the Carolinas, the Cherokees, another Iroquoian tribe, stand out prominently by reason of their unusual mental ability.
The Pueblo was captured by the savages, and every man, woman, and child in it murdered, with the exception of one aged Mexican, and he was so badly wounded that he died in a few days. His story was that the Utes came to the gates of the fort on Christmas morning, professing the greatest friendship, and asking permission to be allowed to come inside and hold a peace conference.
* From here to the California mission of San Gabriel would hardly have been as difficult as the route taken, excepting perhaps the matter of water, and little if any further than the distance to Santa Fe, but the Pai Utes could give him no information of the distance to the sea. There was an old crossing near there, also.
In 1877 Meeker was made Indian agent, and he did his best to live up to the dream of the Indian-maniacs; but, after two years of self-sacrifice and devotion to the cause, he was brutally betrayed and murdered by Chief Douglas, of the Utes, his guest at the time. Mrs. Meeker and her daughters, and a Mrs.
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