His mood was less merry than usual, but a stream of frontier anecdote
and story flowed from him, that held them listening with charmed
attention. His foreign speech interlarded with French words added to
the picturesqueness of his narratives, and he himself sitting
crosslegged on his blanket, his hair hanging dense to his shoulders,
his supple body leaning forward in the tension of a thrilling climax,
was a fitting minstrel for these lays of the wild.
His final story was that of Antoine Godin, one of the classics of
mountain history. Godin was the son of an Iroquois hunter who had been
brutally murdered by the Blackfeet. He had become a trapper of the
Sublette brothers, then mighty men of the fur trade, and in the
expedition of Milton Sublette against the Blackfeet in 1832 joined the
troop. When the two bands met, Godin volunteered to hold a conference
with the Blackfeet chief. He chose as his companion an Indian of the
Flathead tribe, once a powerful nation, but almost exterminated by wars
with the Blackfeet. From the massed ranks of his warriors the chief
rode out for the parley, a pipe of peace in his hand.
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