"I myself, with three trappers, cleared a fandango at Taos, armed only with bowie-knives--some score Mexicans, at least, being in the room. * In accordance with this suggestion, the name was changed to Brand. The mountaineers, it seems, are more sensitive to type than to tomahawks; and poor Ruxton, who always contemplated another expedition among them, would sometimes jestingly speculate upon his reception, should they learn that he had shown them up in print. "With regard to the incidents of Indian attacks, starvation, cannibalism, &c., I have invented not one out of my own head. They are all matters of history in the mountains; but I have no doubt jumbled the _dramatis persono_ one with another, and may have committed anachronisms." Scholars may detect some inaccuracies here and there, such as scarcely could be avoided by one who wrote, as we may say, in the saddle; but these detract nothing from the essential verity of the book. Ruxton's purpose was not to write a chronicle, but to exhibit vividly the mountain men and the natives in relation to their environment. If he wrought disconnected incidents into a continuous story, and staged men together who may have been a thousand miles apart at the time, it was only because, to this extent, "fiction is the most convincing way of telling the truth." As the author of this book was himself a true knight of the wilderness whose brief life was filled with thrilling adventures, we append the following memoir by one of his friends:-- "The London newspapers of October, 1848, contained the mournful tidings of the death, at St. Louis on the Mississippi, and at the early age of twenty-eight, of Lieutenant George Frederick Ruxton, formerly of her Majesty's 89th Regiment, the author of the following sketches: "Many men, even in the most enterprising periods of our history, have been made the subjects of elaborate biography with far less title to the honor than this lamented young officer. Time was not granted him to embody in a permanent shape a tithe of his personal experiences and strange adventures in three quarters of the globe. Considering, indeed, the amount of physical labor he underwent, and the extent of the fields over which his wanderings spread, it is almost surprising he found leisure to write so much. "At the early age of seventeen, Mr. Ruxton quitted Sandhurst, to learn the practical part of a soldier's profession in the civil wars of Spain. He obtained a commission in a squadron of lancers then attached to the division of General Diego Leon, and was actively engaged in several of the most important combats of the campaign. For his marked gallantry on these occasions he received from Queen Isabella II. the cross of the first class of the Order of St. Fernando, an honor which has seldom been awarded to one so young.