A sharp tiralleur fire from their respective covers was carried on between the Shoshones and Crows for half an hour, in which the Crows lost ten more scalps, and having at length reached a rugged hill full of briars and bushes, they took fairly to their heels, without even attempting to answer the volleys poured after them. The victims were carried to the settlement, and the very day they were consigned to their grave, the Shoshones started for the land of the Crows. The results of the expedition I have mentioned already.
With my father I found the three trappers; two of whom were preparing to start for California, but the third, a young Parisian, who went by the name of Gabriel, preferred remaining with us, and never left me until a long time afterwards, when we parted upon the borders of the Mississippi, when I was forcing my way towards the Atlantic Ocean. He and Roche, when I parted with them, had directed their steps back to the Shoshones; they delighted too much in a life of wild and perilous adventure to leave it so soon, and the Irishman vowed that if he ever returned within the pale of civilization, it would be to Monterey, the only place where, in his long wanderings, he had found a people congenial to his own ideas.
When, in the meeting of a great council, I apprised the tribe of the attack made upon the boat-house by the Umbiquas, and of its results, there was a loud burst of satisfaction. I was made a War-Chief on the spot; and it was determined that a party should immediately proceed to chastise the Umbiquas. My father did not allow me to join it, as there was much to be done in settling the affairs of the Prince, and paying the debts he had contracted at Fort Hall; consequently, I led a clerk's life for two months, writing accounts, &c.--rather a dull occupation, for which I had not the smallest relish. During this time, the expedition against the Umbiquas had been still more successful than that against the Crows, and, in fact, that year was a glorious one for the Shoshones, who will remember it a long while, as a period in which leggings and moccasins were literally sewn with human hair, and in which the blanched and unburied bones of their enemies, scattered on the prairie, scared even the wolves from crossing the Buena Ventura. Indeed, that year was so full of events, that my narration would be too much swelled if I were to enumerate them all.