Life in the Wilderness.

A Surgical Operation.--A Winter with Kin Cade.--Study of the
Languages and Geography.--Return towards Missouri.--Engagement
with a new Company and Strange Adventures.--The
Rattlesnake.--Anecdote of Kit Carson.--The Sahara.--New
Engagements.--Trip to El Paso.--Trapping and Hunting.--Prairie
Scenery.--The Trapper's Outfit.--Night Encampment.--Testimony of
an Amateur Hunter.


The company of traders which Kit had joined enjoyed, on the whole, a
prosperous expedition. They met with no hostile Indians and, with one
exception, encountered nothing which they could deem a hardship. There was
one exception, which most persons would deem a terrible one. The
accidental discharge of a gun, incautiously handled, shattered a man's
arm, shivering the bone to splinters. The arm rapidly grew inflamed,
became terribly painful, and must be amputated or the life lost. There was
no one in the party who knew anything of surgery. But they had a razor, a
handsaw and a bar of iron.

It shows the estimation in which the firm, gentle, and yet almost womanly
Kit Carson was held, that he was chosen to perform the operation. Two
others were to assist him. The sufferer took his seat, and was held
firmly, that in his anguish his struggles might not interfere with the
progress of the knife. This boy of but eighteen years then, with great
apparent coolness, undertook this formidable act of surgery.

He bound a ligature around the arm very tightly, to arrest, as far as
possible the flow of blood. With the razor he cut through the quivering