La Salle and the discovery of the great West - North Central ...

414 ST. LOUIS OF TEXAS. [168(5.visitors with offerings of food and all that wasprecious in their eyes. La Salle was lodged withthe great chief;but he compelled his men to encampat a distance, lest the ardor of their gallantry mightgive occasion of offence. The lodges of the Cenis,forty or fifty feethigh, and covered with a thatch ofmeadow-grass, looked like huge bee-hives. Eachheld several families, whose fire was in the middle,and their beds around the circumference. The spoilof the Spaniards was to be seen on allsides, — silverlamps and spoons, swords, old muskets, money,clothing, and a bull of the Pope dispensing theSpanish colonists of New Mexico from fasting duringsummer. 1These treasures, as well as their numeroushorses, were obtained by the Cenis from theirneighborsand allies the Camanches, that fierce prairiebanditti who then, as now, scourged the Mexicanborder with their bloody forays. A party of thesewild horsemen was in the village.Douay was edifiedat seeing them make the sign of the cross in imitationof the neophytes of one of the Spanish missions.They enacted, too, the ceremony of the mass; andone of them, in his rude way, drew a sketch of apicture he had seen in some church which he hadpillaged, wherein the friar plainly recognized theVirgin weeping at the foot of the cross. Theyinvited the French to join them on a raid into NewMexico; and they spoke with contempt, as theirtribesmen will speak to this day, of the Spanish* Douay in Le Clerc, ii. 321; Cavelier, Relation.