The Indians, he says, had a system of long distance communication, carried on among themselves by means of fire and smoke signals from the mountain tops. A puff of smoke was like a telephone message, and as easily understood; a second puff had its own peculiar meaning, and a blaze carried its special message to distant tribes. The whole country could be aroused in a day and night--the signals being taken up and repeated from mountain top to mountain top. The Indians spread themselves out to sleep in their tents, on buffalo robes or willow mattresses, with their feet towards a common fire in the center. They would place their dead in trees, or on a platform built on the top of four poles planted in the ground. The dead would be placed in a blanket, a buffalo robe wrapped around it, and then all bound together with strips of hide; the dead would thus lie for years. It was gruesome to happen upon these graveyard scenes at night, with the uncanny owls hooting in the treetops, and the wolves howling their warning notes. The Indians rode bareback with a rope for a bridle that would be fastened around the under jaw of the pony, which was trained to obey the slightest pressure of the knees or swaying of the body. One of the feats of which Wooten was proud, and with good reason, was taking a great drove of sheep through to California. To do this successfully in the face of possible depredations from the Indians, to whom the sheep is a savory morsel; to escape the bands of thousands of aggressive grey wolves; to swim unbridged rivers when sheep so dislike to swim; to follow narrow mountain paths where overcrowding would precipitate the herd into the chasms below; to get by the crops of the Mormons who were all the time hunting for trouble; to reach his destination with every sheep fatter than when he started--that, says Uncle Dick, was the work of an artist. Wooten came to Denver in 1858, where a few cabins had been built, and where a handful of people had centered. He started a store and built a two-story log house, the first pretentious building ever erected in Denver. Later, he built a frame residence when the saw mill came, a mill that had been stolen in the East and brought to this out-of-the-way country, where it was thought it could never be traced--in which, however, the plunderers were disappointed.