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Show f 444 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ing, and drinking, and, when I had approached within five miles, I had to send for two kegs more. In short, the sixty gallons of ji re-water realized to the company over eleven hundred robes and eighteen horses, worth in St. Louis six thousand dollars. This trading whisky for Indian property is one of the most infernal practices ever entered into by man. Let the reader sit down and figure up the profits on a forty-gallon cask of alcohol, and he will be thunderstruck, or rather whisky struck. When disposed of, four gallons of water are added to each gallon of alcohol. In two hundred gallons there are sixteen hundred pints, for each one of which the trader gets a buffalo robe worth five dollars! The Indian women toil many long weeks to dress these sixteen hundred robes. The white trader gets them all for worse than nothing, for the poor Indian mother hides herself and her children in the forests until the effect of the poison passes away from the husbands, fathers, and brothers, who love them when they have no whisky, and abuse and kill them when they have. Six thousand dollars for sixty gallons of alcohol ! Is it a wonder that, with such profits in prospect, men get rich who are engaged in the fur trade? or is it a miracle that the poor buffalo are becoming gradually exterminated, being killed with s? little remorse that their very hides, among the Indians themselves, are known by the appellation of a pint of whisky? The chief made me a gratuity of forty robes. On two subsequent visits I paid him on his invitation, he made me further presents, until he had presented me with one hundred and eighty-five robes without receiv~ g a~r eq~ivalent. The extent of his "royal munifIcence senously alarmed Sublet. It was just this JAMES P. BECKWOURTH. 445 same profuse spirit, he said, that had bred disputes with other traders, often resulting in their losing their lives. It is as well a savage custf.lm as civilized, to expect a commensurate return for any favors bestowed, and an Indian is so punctilious in the observance of this etiquette, that he will part with his last horse and his last blanket rather tP.an receive a favor without requital. Mo-he-nes-to, without intending it, was rather troublesome on this point. When he became sober after these drunken carousals, he would begin to reflect seriously on things. l-Ie would find his robes all gone; his women's labor-for it would take months of toil in dressing and ornamenting these robes-thrown unprofitably away; his people had nothing to show for their late pile of wealth, and their wants would remain unsupplied. They would have no guns or ammunition to fight the Crows, who were always well supplied, and their whole year's earnings were squandered. These reflections would naturally make him discontended and irritable, and he would betake himself to the post for reparation. "White man," he would say, "I have given you my robes, which my warriors have spent months in hunting, and which my women have slaved a whole year in dressing; and what do you give me in return? I have nothing. You give me fire-water, which makes me and my people mad; and it is gone, and we have nothing to hunt more buffalo with, and to fight our enemies." The generality of traders will endeavor to make it apparent to him that there was a fair exchange of commodities effected, and that he had the worth of his wares, and they can do no more for him. |