His friends love the young chief, but he must
not escape from them, else the evil spirit would make the young
Arrapahoes drunk as a beastly Crow, and excite them in their folly to
kill the Pale-faces."
As nothing could be attempted for the present, we submitted to our fate,
and were conducted by a long and dreary journey to the eastern shores of
the Rio Colorado of the West, until at last we arrived at one of the
numerous and beautiful villages of the Arrapahoes. There we passed the
winter in a kind of honourable captivity. An attempt to escape would
have been the signal of our death, or, at least, of a harsh captivity.
We were surrounded by vast sandy deserts, inhabited, by the Clubs
(Piuses), a cruel race of people, some of them cannibals. Indeed, I may
as well here observe that most of the tribes inhabiting the Colorado are
men-eaters, even including the Arrapahoes, on certain occasions. Once we
fell in with a deserted camp of Clubmen, and there we found the remains
of about twenty bodies, the bones of which had been picked with
apparently as much relish as the wings of a pheasant would have been by
a European epicure. This winter passed gloomily enough, and no wonder.
Except a few beautiful groves, found here and there, like the oases in
the sands of the Sahara, the whole country is horribly broken and
barren.
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