human
very properly granted it. At the head of these, Kit did excellent service during the war, on one occasion taking 9,000 Navajoes prisoners with less than 600 men, and at its close was ordered to Fort Garland and given command of a wide region there. We found him in log quarters, rough but comfortable, with his Mexican wife and half-breed children around him. We had expected to see a small and wiry man, weather-beaten and reticent; but met a medium sized, rather stoutish, florid, and quite talkative person instead. He certainly bore the marks of exposure, but none of that extreme
gpt
that we had anticipated. In age, he seemed to be about forty-five. His head was a remarkably good one, with the bumps of benevolence and reflection well developed. His eye was mild and blue, the very type of good nature, while his voice was as soft and sympathetic as a woman's. He impressed you at once as a man of rare kindliness and charity, such as a truly brave man ought always to be. As simple as a child, but brave as a lion, he soon took our hearts by storm, and grew upon our regard all the while we were with him. He talked and smoked far into the night each evening we spent together, and we have no room here for a tithe of what he told us. Born in Kentucky, he emigrated to the Plains and Mountains when a child, and attached himself to a party of trappers and hunters, when he was so small that he couldn't set a trap. When he became older, he turned trapper himself, and as such wandered all over our possessions, from the Missouri to the Pacific, and from British America to Mexico. Next he became a government scout and guide, and as such piloted Fremont and others all over the Plains and through the Mountains. He confirmed the accounts, we had heard, that Fremont, as an explorer, was somewhat of a charlatan, and said the worst time the Pathfinder ever had was, when on one of his expeditions, he disregarded his (Kit's) advice, and endeavored to force the Mountains northwest of where Fort Garland now stands. Kit told him he could not get through or over them at that period of the year, and, when Fremont nevertheless insisted on proceeding, he resigned as guide. The Pathfinder, however, went sternly forward, but got caught in terrible snow-storms, and presently returned, with half of his men and animals perished outright, from cold and hunger. Subsequently, Kit became a U.S. Indian Agent, and one of the best we ever had. Familiar with their language and customs, he frequently spent months together among them, without seeing a white man, and indeed became sort of half Indian himself. In talking, I observed, that he frequently hesitated for the right English word; but when speaking bastard Spanish (Mexican) or Indian, he was as fluent as a native. Both Mexican and Indian, however, are largely pantomime, which may have helped him along somewhat. The Utes seemed to have the greatest possible confidence in him, and invariably called him simply
human
Kit. Said Sherman, while at Garland,
gpt
These Red Skins think Kit twice as big a man as me. Why his integrity is simply perfect. They know it, and they would believe him and trust him any day before me. And Kit returned this confidence, by being their most steadfast and unswerving friend. He declared all our Indian troubles were caused originally by bad white men, and was terribly severe on the barbarities of the Border. He said he was once among the Indians for two or three years exclusively, and had seen an Indian kill his brother even, for insulting a white man in the old times. He protested, that in all the peculiar and ingenious outrages for which the Indians had been so much abused of late years, they were only imitating or improving on the bad example of wicked white men. His anathemas of Col. Chivington, and the Sand Creek massacre of 1864, were something fearful to listen to. He pleaded for the Indians, as