Following It Up, He Reached The Brow Of A Cliff,
Whence He Beheld Three Savages Running Across The Valley Below
Him.
He fired his gun to call their attention, hoping to induce
them to turn back.
They only fled the faster, and disappeared
among the rocks. The hunter returned and reported what he had
seen. Captain Bonneville at once concluded that these belonged to
a kind of hermit race, scanty in number, that inhabit the highest
and most inaccessible fastnesses. They speak the Shoshonie
language, and probably are offsets from that tribe, though they
have peculiarities of their own, which distinguish them from all
other Indians. They are miserably poor; own no horses, and are
destitute of every convenience to be derived from an intercourse
with the whites. Their weapons are bows and stone-pointed arrows,
with which they hunt the deer, the elk, and the mountain sheep.
They are to be found scattered about the countries of the
Shoshonie, Flathead, Crow, and Blackfeet tribes; but their
residences are always in lonely places, and the clefts of the
rocks.
Their footsteps are often seen by the trappers in the high and
solitary valleys among the mountains, and the smokes of their
fires descried among the precipices, but they themselves are
rarely met with, and still more rarely brought to a parley, so
great is their shyness, and their dread of strangers.
As their poverty offers no temptation to the marauder, and as
they are inoffensive in their habits, they are never the objects
of warfare:
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