Tragic Encounters by Page Smith

Author:Page Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619026643
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2015-11-08T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XII

THE INDIANS OF THE SOUTHWEST

In 1821, just before the beginning of the brown gold rush, traders’ caravans, loaded with goods to trade in Santa Fe, started out from Fort Smith on the Arkansas River. Mexico had won its independence from Spain six months earlier and, in the resultant euphoria, trade with the United States was encouraged by the revolutionary and the Mexican government.

One of the first traders to take advantage of the new opportunity was Major Jacob Fowler who, with a party of twenty men, among them five Frenchmen and a black slave of Fowler’s, departed for Santa Fe on September 6, 1821. The group, officially under the command of Colonel Hugh Glenn, included “thirty Horses and mules seventeen of which carried traps and goods for the Indian trade. . . .” They traveled along the Arkansas through the range of the Osage Indians, from whom, as Fowler, the recorder of the trip noted, they “got Some dryed meet Corn Beens and dryed Pumpkins. . . .” The next contact with the Osage was not encouraging, “These last Indians,” Fowler wrote, “appear more unfriendly and talk Sassy and bad to us but this is to be Expected as the[y] . . . are Said to be a Collection of the Raskals from the other villages.”

Fowler’s party followed the Arkansas to present-day Colorado but they found hard going. Buffalo were scarce and grass for the pack animals difficult to find. Soon they were in Pawnee country and they had to be ceaselessly vigilant lest their horses be stolen or their camps attacked. “We Have all Readey lost 13 Horses and two mules,” Fowler noted on the sixth of November, “and the Remainder Hardly fit for use. . . . 11 treaks of Indians Barfooded” were observed in the sand along the river. At the Purgatory River Lewis Dawson, who had left the party to pick grapes, was surprised by a “White Bare” or grizzly, which seized and shook him like a terrier with a rat. Fowler and the others were alerted by the “dred-full Screems” of the victim and the bear was finally driven off and killed. Dawson’s head was terribly lacerated, but the wounds “Ware Sewed up as Well as Cold be don by men in our Situation Haveing no Surgen or Surgical Instruments. . . .” Dawson was conscious but convinced that his hours were numbered, declaring “I am killed . . . I heard my skull break.” Three days later he died.

Near the juncture of the North Platte and the Niobrara rivers Fowler’s band encountered a party of Kiowa, allies of the Comanche, who “Came Riding at full Speed With all their Weapons . . . in a florish as tho the Ware Chargeing upon an Enemey but on their aproch the most friendly disposition appereed in all their actions as Well [as] gusters.” It was a typically dramatic Indian encounter. As soon as the Kiowa discovered that the party was a trading expedition, they took it under their collective wing.

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