"The ropes are cut! Shoot them down! Rifles began to crack, and six of the Indians fell, five of whom were instantly scalped (for scalps are taken off with greater ease while the bodies are warm), and the remaining Indian having crawled into the river after receiving his wound, his scalp was lost. One of their chiefs was among the slain. He was shot in our camp before he had time to make his retreat." The Blackfeet were always hostile to everybody, white or red, and the Arapahos and Sioux were apt to be. Some tribes were friendly most of the time; others were friendly all the time. Beckwourth describes numerous bloody engagements, especially when he was a chief among the Crows, but doubtless these accounts must be somewhat discounted. Once he and Sublette dragged a wounded Amerind away from the enemy's lines, although the desperate fellow clung to the grass and made it a difficult task. They placed him for execution before one of their own men, who had been wounded, in order that this man might have the satisfaction of killing one of the hated race. "But," says Beckwourth, "the poor fellow had not strength sufficient to perforate the Indian's skin with his knife, and we were obliged to perform the job ourselves." Ashley finally sold out his interest to Sublette, Fitzpatrick, and others, who made up the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, and himself returned to St. Louis to settle down and enjoy the large income now his from the success of his energy and judgment. He never went to the mountains again. He had "handsome grounds" about his house, and enclosed within them one or two of the ancient mounds which then were common on the site of St. Louis. At this time in St. Louis there was a variety of architecture. There were broad, steep-roofed stone houses of the French; tall stuccoed dwellings with tiers "of open corridors above them, like a once showy but half-defaced galleon in a fleet of battered frigates,"—the houses of the Spaniards; and the "clipper-built brick houses of the Americans—light as a Baltimore schooner and pert as a Connecticut smack." The population was seven or eight thousand, extremely varied with plenty of trappers and frontiersmen, who "think as much of an Indian encounter as a New York blood does of a spree with a watchman."