For several days previously the old scoundrel had been a visitor at the post, offering furs and ponies and the beads and blankets off his back for a hollow wood of firewater. This intimation that single blessedness was not well for him, and Chintzille's nervousness had seen what was coming.

After some sparring for an opening, which was cleverly avoided, the old villain came out plainly and wanted to trade his beautiful daughter for a keg of whiskey.

"But," says Long Knife, "while Chintzille is very beautiful, she does not want me." Old Bull tail argued that such a condition was not infrequent, and that Chintzille was a dutiful daughter of her race, and would learn to shower the wealth of her affection upon Long Knife, and he would be proud of her.

The diplomacy of refusing the daughter of a chief is a very difficult matter, but Long Knife succeeded in impressing the old fellow that the alliance Was impossible, and that he could under no circumstances let him have the hollow wood of firewater.

He left in high dudgeon.

In one of these affairs, where a trader of less principle than Long Knife, sold some liquor to the Indians about the fort, there followed a drunken brawl and Susa-chiecha was killed, and around the body of their chief that night the Indians revelled in their frightful orgies.

LTntil Captain Bonneville went into the mountains, and for some time afterward, the Cheyennes were totally averse to drinking, but, says the Missionary Merrill in his diary, April 14, 1837: "A trader named Gant sweetened the liquor and made them fond of it, and now they are a nation of drunkards."