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tered a grocery store with a baby bound to her back, and a greasy blanket over all. blanket over all. In her hand she held some pieces of deer-skin work for barter. Her eye wandered with a savage restlessness over the shelves, and fell to an open barrel of brown sugar. An Arrapahoe can no more resist sugar than a wasp. Mrs. Lo uttered a guttural of exultation, thrust the deer-skin into the grocer's hands, whipped the baby out of his pouch in a jiffy, cast her blanket on the floor, and after throwing into the middle of it all the sugar she could scoop before the grocer cried, "Hold!" tied it up composedly by the corners, hung it over one arm and her offspring over the other, marching out of the store with all the dignity of Penthesilea, and considerably fewer clothes than that royal Amazon wore on public occasions; in other words, nothing but a breech-cloth.

Towards nightfall might occasionally be seen a stalwart brave stalking out of the town towards the encampment, metaphorically speaking with his hands in his pockets, and a high-bred insolence in his carriage, followed by a trail of wives laden with babies and the day's shopping of the family. I was about to utter a sneer at the cruelty of savage life, when a question occurred to me whether women still carry the heaviest burdens in our own civilized society. Here is Mrs. Lo stumbling under twenty pounds of sugar and young Indian; but I have known white wives who had loads to carry for their lords something heavier and far less sweet.

On the 23d of June, two of us resumed our journey toward California, by the Overland wagon. The other two stayed behind to visit friends who had introduced Eastern farming to a well timbered tract

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of low bottom land on the Platte, near Denver. Our party was to reunite at Salt Lake or at some intermediate station.

Nothing noticeable occurred on the road to Latham to change the moonlight impression of it which I have heretofore given, with the exception of Arrapahoe Indians. They were on their way southward, and those we had seen in or around Denver were the mere skirmish line of the tribe. For the first forty miles out of Denver, we were perpetually meeting parties of them on horseback, or encamped under black skin tents resembling the Sibley, and having quite an improved style of egress at the apex of the cone for the smoke, which among some tribes has no means of exit but the front slit. They made no hostile signs, being for the present on their summer tour, and not their war-path; but I could not help thinking of them, as I have among lunatics in an asylum, or wild beasts in a menagerie, how little they knew their power, or . how to exercise it. There were enough of them to have swept away every vestige of civilization between Latham and Pike's Peak. The puniest woman who could wield my Ballard's carbine was a match for ten of them.

We found tents pitched near several of the stations where we stopped to change horses, and took advantage of the halt to push our acquaintance with the Arrapahoes. I was particularly anxious to see the noble Indian. When a boy, I read everything that was ever written about him. At that time of life, I regarded him as a sort of every-day Alexander the Great, slightly tinctured with Damon and Pythias. He principally followed burning himself at stakes, rather liked it than otherwise,—so much so that he

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was in the habit of requesting to be allowed to suggest whether hot pinchers would not be a neater method of ending the job. In his intervals of ennui, he did the lecture business on a free basis, visiting public lyceums known by the descriptive title of powwows, and affording much satisfaction to audiences, chiefly on the themes of "the Bounding Deer" and "the Blasted Pine." He was a poet, an orator, a prophet, a hero, a highly educated and accomplished gentleman, who, from native simplicity of character, went without his clothes on. The only screw loose in his whole construction was an unaccountable propensity to die off. This was called "fading before the advance of the cruel white man." When I thought of it, I felt ashamed of being white; I belonged to a cruel race that "advanced;" I wished that the cruel race would only listen to the good people who disliked "advancing," and consent to stop it. As for the female Indian, there was a period when I pined for her. I owe her many melancholy months between the ages of nine and twelve. I remained faithfuler to my ideal than my ideal proved to me. I remember what a solace Beadle's Dime Novels would have been to me then, just as I think how much better off I might have been, had chloroform only been invented when I had my first tooth out. "Wishky-Washky, or the Queen of the Pottowatomies," would have served me for one good dose. As it was, I read Cooper cumulatively to get the same effect. Every Indian woman was beautiful. All you had to do to equal the Venus de Medici was to turn the color of a new cent. The Indian woman lived principally on shady banks, with her feet in the water; but the same guilelessness of character which

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