After three weeks’ journey we came at last to a more spacious canyon formed by White River. At the entrance to it the Winta Indians prepared an ambush which annoyed us somewhat; but when their reddish arrows began to reach the roof of my wife’s wagon, I struck on them with my men so violently that they scattered at once. We killed three or four of them. The only prisoner whom we took, a youth of sixteen, when he had recovered a little from terror, pointed in turn at us and to the West, repeating the same gestures which the Yampa had made. It seemed to us that he wanted to say that there were white men near by, but it was difficult to give credit to that supposition. In time it turned out to be correct, and it is easy to imagine the astonishment and delight of my men on the following day, when, descending from an elevated plateau, we saw on a broad valley which lay at our feet, not only wagons, but houses built of freshly-cut logs. These houses formed a circle, in the centre of which rose a large shed without windows; through the middle of the plain a stream flowed; near it were herds of mules, guarded by men on horseback.
The presence of men of my own race in that valley filled me with astonishment, which soon passed into fear, when I remembered that they might be “criminal outlaws” hiding in the desert from death. I knew from experience that such outcasts push frequently to very remote and entirely desert regions, where they form detachments, on a complete military footing. Sometimes they are founders of new societies as it were, which at first live by plundering people moving to more inhabited places; but later, by a continual increase of population, they change by degrees into ordered societies. I met more than once with “outlaws” on the upper course of the Mississippi, when, as a squatter, I floated down logs to New Orleans; more than once I had bloody adventures with them, hence their cruelty and bravery were equally well known to me.
I should not have feared them had not Lillian been with us; but at thought of the danger in which she would be if we were defeated and I fell, the hair rose on my head, and for the first time in my life I was as full of fear as the greatest coward. But I was convinced that if those men were outlaws, we could not avoid battle in any way, and that the conflict would be more difficult with them than with Indians.