As the names Aliatan and Tetau here quoted from Lewis and Clark, with their variants, have been the cause of much confusion in our western tribal nomenclature, some explanation will not be out of place. Although so unlike in appearance, these appellations are really but different forms of the same word. The Ute of the mountain, region at the headwaters of the Platte and the Arkansas, being a powerful and aggressive tribe, were well known to all the Indians of the plains, who usually called them by some form of their proper name, _Yútawáts_, or, in its root form, _Yuta_, whence we get Eutaw, Utah, and Ute. Among the Kiowa the name becomes _Íătä_(_-go_), while the Siouan tribes seem to have nasalized it so that the early French traders wrote it as Ayutan, Iatan, or Ietan. By prefixing the French article it became L'Iatan, and afterward Aliatan, while by misreading of the manuscript word we get Jatan, Jetan, and finally Tetau. Moreover, as the early traders and explorers knew but little of the mountain tribes, they frequently confounded those of the same generic stock, so that almost any of these forms may mean Shoshoni, Ute, or Comanche, according to the general context of the description. UNSUCCESSFUL OVERTURES OF THE DAKOTA As an incident of the war in progress during this period between the Kiowa and the Dakota, we find it recorded on a calendar of the latter tribe, under date of 1814-15, that a party of their people visited the Kiowa camp on Horse creek for the purpose of making peace, but their benevolent purpose was defeated by the occurrence of a sudden quarrel between one of their own men and a Kiowa, which ended by the Dakota sinking his tomahawk into the Kiowa's head, thus bringing the peace negotiations to an abrupt close (_Mallery, 3_). The story, which well illustrates the uncertainty of Indian temper, has a striking parallel in Grinnell's story of "The Peace with the Snakes" (_Grinnell, Blackfoot, 1_). The Kiowa camp was at the junction of Kiowa creek with Horse creek, which enters the North Platte from the south in Nebraska, just east of the Wyoming line. SMALLPOX EPIDEMIC OF 1816 In 1816 the smallpox made terrible ravages among all the tribes in the region of the Red and Rio Grande, being probably communicated from the Spanish settlements. The Comanche especially lost heavily (_Morse, 1_). The Kiowa suffered in proportion, and their old men speak of this as the first epidemic of smallpox within the memory of their tribe. It is probable, however, that they had suffered in the same way some years before, for we know that in 1801 a Pawnee war party, returning from New Mexico, brought the smallpox home with them, with the result that it spread among the tribes from the Missouri to the coast of Texas. The prairie tribes are said to have lost more than half their population at this time, while the Wichita, Caddo, and others in the south suffered almost as severely (_Morse, 2_; _Lewis and Clark, 4_). THE KIOWA IN 1820