but its bloodiest tragedy was enacted in 1854, when the Utes surprised the sleeping company and savagely massacred all. While these events were transpiring at the old fort a party of Mexicans had journeyed from the south, crossed the Arkansas River and formed a settlement on the east side of the Fontaine. A characteristically squalid and miserable place it was, with the dwellings--they scarce deserved the name of houses--built in the side of the bluffs very much as animals might burrow in the ground. Part dug-out and part adobe were those wretched habitations, and the shed-like parts which projected from the hill were composed of all conceivable and inconceivable kinds of rubbish. Sticks, stones, bits of old iron, worn-out mattings and gunny-sacks entered more or less into the construction of these dens, all stuck together with the inevitable adobe mud. The settlement extended some distance along the side of the bluff, and the sloping plain in front was dignified as the _plaza_. Perhaps the dark-hued immigrants expected a large town to spring from these unpromising beginnings, and their plaza to take on eventually all the importance which a place so named ever deserves in the Spanish and Mexican mind. But the Pike's Peak excitement, originating in 1852 with the finding of gold by a party of Cherokee Indians, and reaching its culmination in 1859, brought a far different class of people to our Rocky-Mountain outpost, and a civilization was inaugurated which speedily compelled the ancient Mexican methods to go by the board. Thus, Fontaine was soon absorbed by the rising town of Pueblo, though the ancient dug-outs still picturesquely dot the hillside, inhabited by much the same idle and vagabond class from which the prosperous ranchman soon learns to guard his hen-roost.