We gave them food, we helped
them to take from the waters the planks of their big canoe, and to build
the first wigwam in which the Pale-faces ever dwelt in Texas. Two moons
they remained hunting the buffalo with our young men, till at last their
chief and his bravest warriors started in some small canoes of ours, to
see if they could not enter the great stream, by following the coast
towards the sunrise. He was gone four moons, and when he returned, he
had lost half of his men, by sickness, hunger, and fatigue; yet Mosh
Kohta bade him not despair; the great chief promised the Pale-faces to
conduct them in the spring to the great stream, and for several more
moons we lived all together, as braves and brothers should. Then, for
the first time also, the Comanches got some of their rifles, and others
knives. Was it good--was it bad? Who knows? Yet the lance and arrows
killed as many buffaloes as lead and black dust (powder), and the squaws
could take off the skin of a deer or a beaver without knives. How they
did it, no one knows now; but they did it, though they had not yet seen
the keen and sharp knives of the Pale-faces.
"However, it was not long time before many of the strangers tired of
remaining so far from their wigwams: their chief every morning would
look for hours towards the rising of the sun, as if the eyes of his soul
could see through the immensity of the prairies; he became gloomy as a
man of dark deeds (a Medecin), and one day, with half of his men, he
began a long inland trail across prairies, swamps, and rivers, so much
did he dread to die far from his lodge.
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