Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 24.djvu/23

 Ewing Young in Far Southwest 11 hired to Young under the command of Wolf skill taken together, if we may add the names of Young and one other who may have dropped out, check with the eighteen for which the passport was issued in the name of Joaquin Joon (Ewing Young) by Narbona in the latter part of August, 1826. Still a third account which clearly relates to the same expedition is the statement of George C. Yount. Yount also came to New Mexico in the summer of 1826 in the caravan in which Young made the journey. Upon his arrival in Santa Fe, he says, he found business at a stand- still, having been overdone by enterprising Americans. He was at last induced to join a band of free trappers under license from the governor of New Mexico to trap the Gila and Colorado rivers for beaver. On his way to the Gila his party passed the copper mines, in the vicinity of which they remained some three weeks. At the Boil- ing Springs three men abandoned the party, which Yount then says had numbered sixteen. This agrees with our previous calculations. The eleven in the Young party under the command of Wolf skill and the five in the Smith group bring the number up to the sixteen referred to by Yount. According to his statement the party proceeded down the Gila to the vicinity of the mouth of Salt River, on their way passing through the Pima villages. When near the mouth of Salt River they came upon the place where the Robidoux party had been massacred, as Yount says, "within the last three weeks." Here the manuscript statement of Yount, preserved in the Bancroft Library, ends abruptly. This statement is apparently a copy of a fragment of a more complete account which seems to have been used as the basis of The Sketch of the Life of George C. Yount, written by his grand-daughter, Elizabeth Ann Watson. This Sketch continues the narrative by saying that "the trappers now numbered thirty-two and it was not long before they were surrounded by Indians, painted and with nodding plumes,