Page:Thirty-One Years on the Plains and in the Mountains.djvu/418

308 was as well pleased over his new butcher knife as a boy would be over his first pair of red topped boots.

We found the Indians anxious to trade robes for our trinkets and we had no trouble in getting a load and more than we could pack again. We made five trips that fall and winter with the very best success, keeping those same four Indians with us all winter.

Jim Bridger proposed that he and I make a trip to Fort Kearney together, and remain there until the emigrants began to come along, thinking that perhaps the Sioux would be so bad on the plains again that summer that we might get a layout scouting for trains going to California. Both of us were well acquainted with a greater part of the country to be traveled over, and there were few other men as well posted as to where the Indians