Chief of Scouts

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1.

At the age of fifteen I found myself in St. Louis, Mo., probably five hundred miles from my childhood home, with one dollar and a half in money in my pocket. I did not know one person in that whole city, and no one knew me. After I had wandered about the city a few days, trying to find something to do to get a living, I chanced to meet what proved to be the very best that could have happened to me. I met Kit Carson, the world's most famous frontiersman, the man to whom not half the credit has been given that was his due.

The time I met him, Kit Carson was preparing to go west on a trading expedition with the Indians. When I say "going west" I mean far beyond civilization. He proposed that I join him, and I, in my eagerness for adventures in the wild, consented readily.

When we left St. Louis, we traveled in a straight western direction, or as near west as possible. Fifty-eight years ago Missouri was a sparsely settled country, and we often traveled ten and sometimes fifteen miles without seeing a house or a single person.

We left Springfield at the south of us and passed out of the State of Missouri at Fort Scott, and by doing so we left civilization behind, for from Fort Scott to the Pacific coast was but very little known, and was inhabited entirely by hostile tribes of Indians.

A great portion of the country between Fort Scott and the Rocky
Mountains that we traveled over on that journey was a wild, barren
waste, and we never imagined it would be inhabited by anything but wild
Indians, Buffalo, and Coyotes.

We traveled up the Neosha river to its source, and I remember one incident in particular. We were getting ready to camp for the night when Carson saw a band of Indians coming directly towards us. They were mounted on horses and were riding very slowly and had their horses packed with Buffalo meat.

With the exception of Carson we were all scared, thinking the Indians were coming to take our scalps. As they came nearer our camp Carson said, "Boys, we are going to have a feast".

On the way out Carson had taught me to call him "Uncle Kit." So I said,
"Uncle Kit, are you going to kill an Indian and cook him for supper?"

He laughed and answered, "No, Willie, not quite as bad as that. Besides, I don't think we are hungry enough to eat an Indian, if we had one cooked by a French cook; but what will be better, to my taste at least, the Indians are bringing us some Buffalo meat for our supper," and sure enough they proved to be friendly.

They were a portion of the Caw tribe, which was friendly with the whites at that time. They had been on a hunt, and had been successful in getting all the game they wanted. When they rode up to our camp they surrounded Carson every one of them, trying to shake his hand first. Not being acquainted with the ways of the Indians, the rest of us did not understand what this meant, and we got our guns with the intention of protecting him from danger, but seeing what we were about to do, Carson sang out to us, "Hold on, boys....