lage, where they were afterward discovered, seized and confiscated. The furs being damp, they were spread out in the sun before the Guardia, in Santa Fé, when Sublette, perceiving two packs of beaver which had been his own property, got by honest labor, instantly seized them and carried them away before the eyes of the whole garrison, and concealed both them and his own person in a house opposite. … Mr. Sublette finally conveyed his furs in safety to the frontier, and thence to the United States."[1]
This account of Gregg's is corroborated by the continuation of the narrative in the Watson Sketch in such a way that makes it perfectly clear that Yount was a member of the Ewing Young party. To pick up the account where we dropped it after the battle with the Maricopas, the Sketch states that the trappers explored the Gila River to its source. This, possibly, refers to Salt River, or Black River, the name by which it was known to the early trappers, for they had just descended the Gila. The Sketch continues: "A little below the villages of the Maricopas was a lake abounding in black beaver. In trapping on the Colorado they constructed a small water craft by scooping out cottonwood logs, after the method practised by the Indians. After many encounters with the hostile tribes of Indians, George Yount returned to New Mexico, having five hundred dollars in money and several thousand dollars' worth of furs, which he cached near Bitter Creek. These were confiscated later on, however, and George Yount had to postpone returning to his family for another year."
The date of this confiscation seems to be established as the summer of 1827 from an extract of a letter of José Augustin Escudero dated March 22, 1831, in which he says "that in the year 1827, when I was at Santa Fé, I learned that they [a company of Anglo-American trappers] compromised a wretch named Don Luís Cabeza de
- ↑ Josiah Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies, 1844. I, 227-8.
