together to the Comanche camp, three leagues distant. [Footnote: This
meeting took place a little north of the Arkansas, apparently where that
river makes a northward bend, near the 22d degree of west longitude. The
Comanche villages were several days' journey to the southwest. This tribe
is always mentioned in the early French narratives as the Padoucas,--a name
by which the Comanches are occasionally known to this day. See Whipple and
Turner, _Reports upon Indian Tribes,_ in _Explorations and Surveys
for the Pacific Railroad,_ (Senate Doc., 1853,1854).]

Bourgmont pitched his tents at a pistol-shot from the Comanche lodges,
whence a crowd of warriors presently came to visit him. They spread
buffalo-robes on the ground, placed upon them the French commander, his
officers, and his young son; then lifted each, with its honored load, and
carried them all, with yells of joy and gratulation, to the lodge of the
Great Chief, where there was a feast of ceremony lasting till nightfall.

On the next day Bourgmont displayed to his hosts the marvellous store of
gifts he had brought for them--guns, swords, hatchets, kettles, gunpowder,
bullets, red cloth, blue cloth, hand-mirrors, knives, shirts, awls,
scissors, needles, hawks' bells, vermilion, beads, and other enviable
commodities, of the like of which they had never dreamed. Two hundred
savages gathered before the French tents, where Bourgmont, with the gifts
spread on the ground before him, stood with a French flag in his hand,
surrounded by his officers and the Indian chiefs of his party, and
harangued the admiring auditors.

He told them that he had come to bring them a message from the King, his
master, who was the Great Chief of all the nations of the earth, and whose
will it was that the Comanches should live in peace with his other
children,--the Missouris, Osages, Kansas, Otoes, Omahas, and Pawnees,--with