tufts of hair hanging down on their foreheads, and it
seemeth they have beards because of the great store of hair
hanging down at their chins and throats. The males have
very long tails, and a great knob or flock at the end,
so that in some respects they resemble the lion, and in some
other the camel. They push with their horns, they run,
they overtake and kill an horse when they are in their
rage and anger. Finally it is a foul and fierce beast of
countenance and form of body. The horses fled from them,
either because of their deformed shape, or else because
they had never before seen them.

"The number," continues the historian, "was incredible." When the
soldiers, in their excitement for the chase, began to kill them,
they rushed together in such masses that hundreds were literally
crushed to death. At one place there was a great ravine; they jumped
into it in their efforts to escape from the hunters, and so terrible
was the slaughter as they tumbled over the precipice that the
depression was completely filled up, their carcasses forming a bridge,
over which the remainder passed with ease.

The next recorded expedition across the plains via the Old Trail
was also by the Spaniards from Santa Fe, eastwardly, in the year 1716,
"for the purpose of establishing a Military Post in the Upper
Mississippi Valley as a barrier to the further encroachments of
the French in that direction." An account of this expedition is found
in _Memoires Historiques sur La Louisiane_, published in Paris in 1858,
but never translated in its entirety. The author, Lieutenant Dumont
of the French army, was one of a party ascending the Arkansas River
in search of a supposed mass of emeralds. The narrative relates: