Boys' Book of Frontier Fighters Part 33

The surface of the pool was covered with dead fish, killed by the heat of the sun. That made no difference. The pool was wet.

Major Riley and his soldiers turned back the next morning. Captain Bent took the caravan on, to Santa Fe.

From here, he and his brothers that fall located their trading post.

The place was two hundred and sixty miles north of Santa Fe, on the north bank of the Arkansas River, fourteen miles above the mouth of the Purgatory River, or about half way between the towns of La Junta and Las Animas in present southeastern Colorado.

One branch, the Mountain Branch, of the Santa Fe Trail, led up the Arkansas, to it, and on, to turn south across the Raton Mountain for Santa Fe. The Cheyennes gathered near-by, every fall, for their great winter camp. The Utes from the Rocky Mountains, one hundred and thirty miles west, sometimes came down. A traders' and trappers' trail between Santa Fe and the Platte River pa.s.sed this way. It was a sort of a cross-roads, in the wilderness.

Bent's Fort, called also Fort William after William Bent, was built of adobe or clay bricks. It was one hundred and fifty feet long and one hundred feet wide. Its walls were eighteen feet high, and six or seven feet thick at the base. The tops formed a parapet or walk. In two diagonally opposite corners were bastions of round towers, thirty feet high, swelling out so as to command the walls. The main gateway was thirty feet wide and closed by a pair of huge plank doors. Over the gateway there was a sentry box, floating the United States flag. The six-pounder bra.s.s cannon of the caravan was mounted upon a wall, on a swivel, to fire in all directions; other cannon were added.

Bent's Fort became famous. Soon all the Indians for leagues around knew of it. The Arapahos and the Southern Cheyennes traded in their buffalo robes here; the mountain Utes, and the Red River Comanches of northern Texas came in. At one time, in the late fall and in the winter, twenty thousand Indians would be camped within sight of it.

Trappers from north, west and south made it their market and headquarters. Traders trailed in, from the States and from New Mexico.

In 1846 General Stephen Watts Kearny's army from Leavenworth for Santa Fe and California halted here, to refit.

So Bent's Fort prospered. It had the only ice-house on the plains; the pumpkin pies of its negress cook, Charlotte, spread its fame wider; the rank and file of the Indians and the trappers and traders, and the army officers themselves, swore by Bent's Fort.

The Indians called William Bent "Hook-Nose Man" or "Roman Nose." He married a Cheyenne girl. He was the governor of the fort. His brother George helped. Charles Bent was largely at Santa Fe, at Taos, midway, and on the trail, until in 1846 he was appointed first American governor of New Mexico.

The next year the Mexicans and Pueblo Indians revolted against the American government, and killed him at his home in Taos.

Bent's Fort lasted through more than twenty years. Then William Bent offered to sell it to the Government for an army post. He asked $16,000; the Government proposed $12,000. They d.i.c.kered. Colonel Bent would not yield one penny. He had a short stock of patience in dealing with white men or red men either. So in the summer of 1852 he blew up the fort with powder and marched away, to build another post, for Indian trade, thirty miles down-river.

This became Fort Wise, of the army, but was known to the settlers as "old" Fort Lyon.

Ten years after selling it to the Government, this time at his own price, in 1869 William Bent died, aged sixty, near the ranch that he owned only a few miles from the ruins of his celebrated Bent's Fort.

CHAPTER XVI

A SEARCH FOR A SILVER MINE (1831)

AND THE "BOWIE INDIAN FIGHT"

While the American traders were bent upon opening a trail through the desert country of the Southwest Indians--the Kiowas, Comanches and Apaches--into northern Mexico, American settlers had entered Mexico itself.

Moses Austin, born in Connecticut, but lastly a lead merchant in those same mines of Was.h.i.+ngton County, Missouri, where Major Andrew Henry the fur-hunter also was working, heard of the rich lands of the Spanish province of Texas. Major Henry thought mainly of beaver-fur--a get-rich-quick business that took what it might out of a country and left little in exchange. Moses Austin was a merchant and a manufacturer--in Missouri he turned his lead into shot, bars and sheets, and s.h.i.+pped his product to New Orleans. Now in 1820 he determined to settle Texas with American farmers.

Toward the close of the year he obtained from the Spanish governor, at San Antonio the capital of Texas, a grant of land. He died before he had removed there, himself; but his son Stephen Fuller Austin led the first settlers, gathered at New Orleans, in December, 1821. They located up the Brazos River in southeastern Texas.

The government of Mexico was glad to have the st.u.r.dy Americans upon its frontier, to act as a bulwark against the Indians. All Texas, like the Ohio Valley, was the favorite range of hard-fighting tribes; from the cannibal Karankawas (six feet tall, and wielding long-bows that no white man could draw) on the Gulf coast in the south, to the widely riding Comanches and Apaches in the north, with the Wacos, the Tawakonis, the Caddos, and others, in between.

The Spanish soldiery had made little progress against them. The Mexican settlements were few, the missions built by the Spanish priests had been destroyed; from San Antonio in the west to Nacogdoches in the east the country still belonged to the red warriors.

They began to pillage and kill the Americans. Texas was another Kentucky. But as in Kentucky and the Ohio Valley the Americans pushed on and on. They were not the kind to quit.

Among the early Americans to make their homes in Texas were the Bowie brothers: James, Rezin and Stephen. They were Georgians, but raised in Louisiana. The United States claimed Texas as a part of the Louisiana Territory that had been bought from France. Before ever Moses Austin had obtained his grant of land, parties of American adventurers were constantly invading, to seize the country which as yet seemed to belong to n.o.body.

In 1819 James Bowie had landed, in just such a company, near Galveston; and although the company was driven out he chose Texas for his home.

He traveled through it, lived at old San Antonio, entered into business, at Saltillo, south of the Rio Grande on the present Mexican border, was naturalized as a Mexican citizen, and in 1830 married the daughter of Juan Veramendi, the vice-governor of the State of Coahuila and Texas.

His brother Rezin also was now a Texan; Stephen came in a little later.

The two, Jim and Rezin, were famous for their bowie-knife, as well as for their bold fighting qualities. The knife was an accident. The first one had been invented by Rezin from a finely-tempered blacksmith's file, for a hunting-knife, in Louisiana. When hammered and drawn into shape it had a blade five and one-quarter inches long and one and one-half inches wide; was so nicely balanced that it was proved to be both a useful tool and a terrible weapon.

Rezin gave this first knife to his brother Jim, and ordered another for himself. "Bowie's knife" gained much favor from those who tried it; and speedily the "bowie-knife" was being adopted by the hunters, backwoodsmen, desperadoes and all. Some wore it in their belts; some wore it in their boots.

The Spanish from the south had been in Texas long before the Americans were admitted; the Spanish military post of San Antonio de Bejar was founded in 1718, to protect the Catholic missionaries there. Two hundred miles to the northwest of San Antonio the Spanish priests had started the mission of San Saba, in 1857, among the Lipan Apaches; but that had been destroyed in the spring of the next year by the Comanches, Wichitas, Tawehash, and other Indians who hated the Apaches and the Spaniards both.

They had other reason, than revenge upon the Lipan mission Indians and the Spanish who were helping their enemies. Along the San Saba River there were rich veins of silver which the Tawehash owned. Miners from the mining district of Amalgres, Mexico, came to the mission and worked the veins, and sent the precious metal away. The Indians did not wish to have their silver taken; and they set out to close the mines. This they achieved in one stroke--wiped the mission and the pupils and the miners from the face of the valley.

For almost seventy-five years the "New Amalgres" mines, as they were known, of the San Saba, remained only as a secret to the Indians. No outsider could get near them; no Indian would show them to the stranger: and of course the longer they were hidden from view, the richer they grew in story and guess.

About the time that he was married to the lovely daughter of Vice-Governor Juan Veramendi, Jim Bowie himself, with a party of thirty other fearless bordermen, started from San Antonio to prospect, and discover the storied Amalgres mines, which would make their fortunes.

Before swinging north they traveled one hundred miles west, to the Frio River country; here they came upon an outcrop of silver and sunk a shaft; at the same time they built a rock fort near a spring on a ridge between the forks of the Frio, so as to stand off the Indians.

The Indians found them very promptly; in the early morning drove them from their shaft to the rock fort, and besieged them hotly all the day.

These Texans were good shots; they were Texan Ranger stuff--and the Texan Rangers have been unmatched as frontier fighters. But though the Indians could not get in, they themselves were out-numbered and could not get out; could not even get to the spring, and what with the thirst from sun and powder-smoke they at last had drained their canteens.

Doubtless the Indians were counting on this; but they had not reckoned the nerve of the men behind the walls.

Jim Bowie was the commander there. He figured the situation over.

They had to have water; already thirst was torturing, and making his men reckless. There were twenty-nine white men, and one negro slave, Jim--his own servant. Jim was the poorest shot and could be the most easily spared. He turned to Jim, by his side.

"See here, Jim. I want you to take the canteens and fetch us water from that spring."

It may be readily believed that Jim's eyes popped.

"Out among dem Injuns! No, sar, Ma.r.s.e Jim! Dem Injuns is layin' dare in dem rocks an' bushes by de t'ousand, an' all dey gotto do is rare up an' kill dis n.i.g.g.e.r 'foh he could say 'Scat!' at 'em twice! No, sar; I cain't fill dem cainteens. Dey won't let me. No, sar!"

The white Jim looked for a moment at the black Jim, with those steady gray eyes that never wavered even when, six years later, they gazed from a sickbed and waited the attack of a hundred Mexicans in the tragic Alamo.

"Jim!" he said, "Which are you most afraid of: me, or those Indians?"

Black Jim's knees shook, and he scratched his woolly thatch.

"Well, now, Ma.r.s.e Jim, if de boys got to have water 'foh dey kin lick dem Injun, an' you 'sist on me goin,' 'cose den I'll volunteer. Jes'

gimme dem cainteens."

"All right, Jim." And white Jim smiled grimly. "You'll be safe.

We'll cover every head with our guns and you sha'n't be hurt. The spring's in short range. Just fill the canteens, and come back with them."

Out went Negro Jim, as brave as the bravest. Sure enough, he made the spring and not a shot was fired at him; he filled the canteens, and started back with his load--and no Indian had managed to get sight of him. But the canteens clinked, a warrior peeked and saw, and the whoop of alarm rang.

The Indians' guns spoke; the fort replied briskly; dark forms sprang from shelter, to cut the water-carrier off, and through the whizz of b.a.l.l.s black Jim legged for the fort, with the canteens bouncing on his back and shanks.