Just what Brown and his captains did during the first five months of their sojourn in the Territory has not been made public. Many pages of very irrelevant matter, containing very few facts, have been put forth upon the subject; but from the scraps of evidence occurring in the garbled accounts that have been published concerning their doings, they seem to have been engaged in stealing horses; but no big robbery was undertaken until in December. On July 20th, Brown began a letter to Mr. Sanborn which he completed August 6th, in which he said[318] that they would soon be in want of a small amount of money "_to feed us_. We cannot," he said, "work _for wages_; & provisions _are not_ easily obtained on the frontier." He also gave out the information that a portion of his men were "in other neighborhoods." In response to this request for money, Mr. Sanborn, on August 25th, sent him Gerrit Smith's check for fifty dollars. This check Brown enclosed to his wife, endorsed to Watson Brown, in a letter to her September 17th.[319] Because Brown returned this money to the East, it may be inferred that the urgency for money had been tided over; that the crisis had passed by the time Mr. Sanborn's letter with the check arrived; that money had been received from some other source, and that he did not need it then, "_to feed us_." It is also noticeable that his men, who were "in other neighborhoods," and could "not work for wages," managed to obtain a sufficient amount of money to supply their personal needs in some other way. The exact character of these pursuits has not been stated, but the conditions under which they acquired their living have been made public, in an incidental way, and they were by no means ideal. They seem to have worked the Territory in pairs. Mr. Gill, speaking for himself and Mr. Kagi, said,[320] equivocally: "Sometimes one had the ague, sometimes both. Sometimes we fished, sometimes we had our supper and beds; at other times we went supperless and took the prairie for our bed with the blue arch for our covering." It would perhaps be called harshness to say, at this time, that John Brown and his men were a band of horse thieves, although Mr. Villard does say that one of them, "Pickles, was a well known horse thief;" and it has been more than intimated, within the writer's hearing, that Charles Jennison, who joined the band temporarily, while indulging a _penchant_ for horses generally, was neither solicitous about his title to them, nor about the manner of getting possession of them. As a story tells it, one of the "psalms" sung by these humanitarians had special reference to Jennison; it ran in this way: Am I soldier of the boss-- A follower of Jim Lane? And shall I fear to steal a hoss Or blush to ride the same?