The Party Of Mr. Campbell Had Met With A Disaster In The Course
Of Their Route From The Sweet Water.
Three or four of the men,
who were reconnoitering the country in advance of the main body,
were visited one night in their camp, by fifteen or twenty
Shoshonies.
Considering this tribe as perfectly friendly, they
received them in the most cordial and confiding manner. In the
course of the night, the man on guard near the horses fell sound
asleep; upon which a Shoshonie shot him in the head, and nearly
killed him. The savages then made off with the horses, leaving
the rest of the party to find their way to the main body on foot.
The rival companies of Captain Bonneville and Mr. Campbell, thus
fortuitously brought together, now prosecuted their journey in
great good fellowship; forming a joint camp of about a hundred
men. The captain, however, began to entertain doubts that
Fitzpatrick and his trappers, who kept profound silence as to
their future movements, intended to hunt the same grounds which
he had selected for his autumnal campaign; which lay to the west
of the Horn River, on its tributary streams. In the course of his
march, therefore, he secretly detached a small party of trappers,
to make their way to those hunting grounds, while he continued on
with the main body; appointing a rendezvous, at the next full
moon, about the 28th of August, at a place called the Medicine
Lodge.
On reaching the second chain, called the Bighorn Mountains, where
the river forced its impetuous way through a precipitous defile,
with cascades and rapids, the travellers were obliged to leave
its banks, and traverse the mountains by a rugged and frightful
route, emphatically called the "Bad Pass." Descending the
opposite side, they again made for the river banks; and about the
middle of August, reached the point below the rapids where the
river becomes navigable for boats.
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