One Of Them Was In
Tolerable Condition, But The Others Were Much Emaciated And Severely
Bitten By The Wolves.
Reduced as they were we carried two of them to
the settlements, and Henry exchanged the third with the Arapahoes for
an excellent mule.
On the day after, when we had stopped to rest at noon, a long train
of Santa Fe wagons came up and trailed slowly past us in their
picturesque procession. They belonged to a trader named Magoffin,
whose brother, with a number of other men, came over and sat down
around us on the grass. The news they brought was not of the most
pleasing complexion. According to their accounts, the trail below
was in a very dangerous state. They had repeatedly detected Indians
prowling at night around their camps; and the large party which had
left Bent's Fort a few weeks previous to our own departure had been
attacked, and a man named Swan, from Massachusetts, had been killed.
His companions had buried the body; but when Magoffin found his
grave, which was near a place called the Caches, the Indians had dug
up and scalped him, and the wolves had shockingly mangled his
remains. As an offset to this intelligence, they gave us the welcome
information that the buffalo were numerous at a few days' journey
below.
On the next afternoon, as we moved along the bank of the river, we
saw the white tops of wagons on the horizon. It was some hours
before we met them, when they proved to be a train of clumsy ox-
wagons, quite different from the rakish vehicles of the Santa Fe
traders, and loaded with government stores for the troops.
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