The camp had all the appearance of permanency; for not only did it comprise one or two unusually comfortable shanties, but the numerous stages on which huge strips of buffalo-meat were hanging in process of cure, showed that the party had settled themselves here in order to lay in a store of provisions, or, as it is termed in the language of the mountains, "to make meat." Round the camp fed twelve or fifteen mules and horses, their fore-legs confined by hobbles of rawhide; and, guarding these animals, two men paced backwards and forwards, driving in the stragglers, ascending ever and anon the bluffs which overhung the river, and leaning on their long rifles, whilst they swept with their eyes the surrounding prairie. Three or four fires burned in the encampment, at some of which Indian women carefully tended sundry steaming pots; whilst round one, which was in the center of it, four or five stalwart hunters, clad in buckskin, sat cross-legged, pipe in mouth. They were a trapping party from the north fork of Platte, on their way to wintering-ground in the more southern valley of the Arkansa; some, indeed, meditating a more extended trip, even to the distant settlements of New Mexico, the paradise of mountaineers. The elder of the company was a tall gaunt man, with a face browned by twenty years' exposure to the extreme climate of the mountains; his long black hair, as yet scarcely tinged with gray, hanging almost to his shoulders, but his cheeks and chin clean shaven, after the fashion of the mountain-men. His dress was the usual hunting-frock of buckskin, with long fringes down the seams, with pantaloons similarly ornamented, and moccasins of Indian make. Whilst his companions puffed their pipes in silence, he narrated a few of his former experiences of western life; and whilst the buffalo hump-ribs and tenderloin are singing away in the pot, preparing for the hunters' supper, we will note down the yarn as it spins from his lips, giving it in the language spoken in the "Far West":-- "'Twas about calf-time, maybe a little later, and not a hundred year ago by a long chalk, that the biggest kind of rendezvous was held 'to' to Independence, a mighty handsome little location away up on old Missoura. A pretty smart lot of boys was camped thar, about a quarter from the town, and the way the whisky flowed that time was some now, _I_ can tell you. Thar was old Sam Owins--him as got rubbed out * by the Spaniards at Sacramenty, or Chihuahuy, this hoss doesn't know which, but he went under ** anyhow. Well, Sam had his train along, ready to hitch up for the Mexican country--twenty thunderin' big Pittsburgh wagons; and the way his Santa Fé boys took in the liquor beat all--eh, Bill?" * Killed, adapted from the Indian figurative language ** Died. "_Well_, it did."