In the winter of 1832-33, twelve men with their baggage and about $10,000 in specie left New Mexico for the States. They met a large body of Comanches and Kiowas, who approached one by one and in small bodies till they were all beside the travellers, who began to move on. A man named Pratt, trying to herd in two mules, was shot. A battle then opened. The white men made a breastwork of their packs and fought desperately for thirty-six hours, when they made an effort to escape in the night. The owners of the money told all to help themselves, and what could not be carried was buried in the sand, where the Comanches afterwards found it. The men stole away as quietly as possible in the darkness. Five went west and at last reached a Creek village near the Arkansas where they were kindly received. Only two of the others succeeded in getting out of the Wilderness. It was on the Santa Fé Trail in 1831 that the famous Jedediah Smith finally lost his life. With his partners, Jackson and Sublette, he had gone into the Santa Fé trade and was on his way to that capital. In his remarkable career he had escaped many dangers, and he was still a very young man, but his hour was approaching. He started for Santa Fé over the general route, but after leaving the Arkansas became lost among the multitudinous buffalo trails. Gregg says: "He was one of the most undaunted spirits that ever traversed the Rocky Mountains, and if one half of what has been told of him be true ... he would surely be entitled to one of the most exalted seats in the Olympus of Prairie Mythology." There was something highly dramatic in the lonely simplicity of this dauntless trapper's death amidst a wide barren waste, at the hands of the race he had so often successfully opposed and eluded. He set off alone to find water for his party in the dreary expanse of the Cimarron desert, when on mounting a hill he perceived what appeared to be a small river. It was the sandy bed of the deceptive Cimarron. Smith scooped out a basin in the moist sand and waited for the water to fill it, unconscious of a band of Comanches lurking near. As he stooped to drink, an arrow pierced him. With the indomitable tenacity and power that so often had carried him through danger, he returned the fire and two or three of the enemy paid with their lives the penalty of bringing the gallant knight in buckskin to the ground. The picture was exactly the composition one would expect to find surrounding the last hour of this eminent and characteristic breaker of the Wilderness. His task was done. Beside the treacherous Cimarron his bones are forgotten, but his splendid fearlessness, his even justice, and his bold enterprise in cleaving the silent mysteries have consecrated the sands that drank his blood and dedicated the Wilderness to a lofty future. [Illustration: The Heart of the Sierra. Photograph by Watkins.]