Finding
themselves unable to drink the whole, they had sold the residue to
these Indians, and it needed no prophet to foretell the results; a
spark dropped into a powder magazine would not have produced a
quicker effect.
Instantly the old jealousies and rivalries and
smothered feuds that exist in an Indian village broke out into
furious quarrels. They forgot the warlike enterprise that had
already brought them three hundred miles. They seemed like
ungoverned children inflamed with the fiercest passions of men.
Several of them were stabbed in the drunken tumult; and in the
morning they scattered and moved back toward the Missouri in small
parties. I feared that, after all, the long-projected meeting and
the ceremonies that were to attend it might never take place, and I
should lose so admirable an opportunity of seeing the Indian under
his most fearful and characteristic aspect; however, in foregoing
this, I should avoid a very fair probability of being plundered and
stripped, and, it might be, stabbed or shot into the bargain.
Consoling myself with this reflection, I prepared to carry the news,
such as it was, to the camp.
I caught my horse, and to my vexation found he had lost a shoe and
broken his tender white hoof against the rocks. Horses are shod at
Fort Laramie at the moderate rate of three dollars a foot; so I tied
Hendrick to a beam in the corral, and summoned Roubidou, the
blacksmith.
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