Joseph, Missouri) or on the Gunnison, or on the Unitah, but a humble kinsman, of a later generation.

For a number of years, Basil Robideaux led a hard life in the wilderness. He had the smallpox in 1838 which swept with such virulence over the plains, and depopulated Indian tribes. And at this time, the instinct of self preservation caused his compaions to desert him, as they thought, to die. This was on the south bank of the river, a few miles east of Scotts Bluff mountain.

Alone in the wilderness, sick unto death, and among hostile tribes, Robideaux looked up into the blue vault, thickly studded with eternal stars and counted the hours away. In the morning a Sioux medicine man found him, and treated him in the crude fashion of Indians and he recovered. After that, he lived among the Sioux, and whenever he met one of

the men who had left him, in his hour of sickness, he gave him an unmerciful drubbing.

But with him the years went by with a succession of disasters, and he suffered incredible hardships. His life tides ebbed low in melancholy and misery. He became sullen and morose. After days of hunger he would fall in with the fortune to kill a deer, wolf or buffalo. All indifferent to its kind, indiscriminate as to its quality, he would greedily fill of its carcass bloodraw ; and striking a fire to keep away creatures that were a little more wild than he, he would lie down by the remnants of the half eaten carcass to sleep the fitful sleep of the jungle man ; while around him from the wilderness dark, two by two, burned luminous eyes of firewild hungry beasts.