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The Travels and Romantic Adventures of Monsieur Violet Among the Snake Indians and Wild Tribes of the Great Western Prairies
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330 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1970
About the author
Frederick Marryat
1,044 books93 followersCaptain Frederick Marryat was a British Royal Navy officer and novelist, an early pioneer of the sea story.
For more information, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederic...
For more information, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederic...
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June 12, 2026
FULL CHAPTER-BY-CHAPTER SUMMARY:
(1/2)
I - His father once knew a man who tried to conspire against the Italian government, Prince Saravalle, but was found out. He was put in a prison. When let out, he travelled to America and lived peacefully with the Shoshones. He grew friendly with them. He thinks they could be civilized. He returns to France so he can get enough things to create a settlement in western america. The father throws his lot in with him, and has his son come along, along with some holy men who will educate him, and have experience doing missionary work in Thibet and Burma. And so their voyage begins.
II - Years pass, and our young hero is made a warrior. Unfortunately, multiple setbacks befall the settlement (many of their men are lost at sea, and the rest are lost when sent west to buy buffaloes.) But they are determined to make the Shoshones embrace agriculture. At a council meeting the Shoshones decide they will not agriculturalize.
III - The narrator reveals that he led a party to re-find the men sent to buy the buffalo, and found them captured by the crows. He successfully attacks and returns them home. Then a brief narration of the missionaries' fruitless attempts to convert the Shoshones ending in their untimely deaths due to old age is recounted. Now monsieur Violet is chosen to lead an expedition to Monterey or Santa Fe to get Mexican or Canadian laborers to work the fields instead of the squaws or Shoshone slaves.
IV - An outline of the land the Shoshones live in and a very, very brief bit about their culture, followed by conjectures upon their history and lineage, ending with an oral account of Shoshone history.
V - They set out. Violet confesses that he has by now (age 18) been fully converted to being an indian, and even looks upon his old life with some resentment, and so was not looking forward to the journey. However, he comes to adore Monterey, in a long and good description of the city and how happy the people are there. He also courts the ladies there. They meet a padre and they check out some ancient indian ruins with him, and he tells them a story about how he used to teach in India, and his brother defected to Islam and fled to Persia. But many years later they rejoined, and on his way back home his brother died.
VI - He wakes up in the boat in which he fell asleep the previous night, cast adrift. Luckily he falls in with some shipwrecked Russians, and they make it back to shore, where the Russians, tired with rowing, fall asleep immediately, but Violet's indian knowledge help him quickly procure some cattle, which he gives to his friends. Soon they find their way back to Monterey, he falls into favor with a don, whose daughter he is romancing advises him to let himself lose at chess against. He hears that he needs to return home, because the prince was killed by the Crows, and his father doesn't seem too far behind. Besides, he is wanted for his first war-path. The don allows him to return home by sea. They then meet a silly dancing Irishman named Roche who becomes Violet's companion.
VII - Violet comes to land, but has to recapture his horses stolen in a raid by some Umbiquas.
VIII - Violet and his men fortify a Shoshone town with a blockhouse, and they repel the Umbiquas in a dramatic battle. Violet returns home and finds his father is okay, and hears the story of the Prince Seravalle's death: he went to fort St. Louis to pick up some supplies, but on his way back was ambushed by some Crows who tried to extort him for horses, but he refused. They argue; a fight breaks out, and he is killed. As a result, Violet has to be an accountant for a couple months to settle the Prince's debts, and he hates it. It also supplanted his chance to go on his first war-path against the Crows. Afterwards, he becomes friends with the Irishman Roche, and Gabriel, a Parisian he met in Monterey.
IX - Another chapter describing the Shoshones, but this time a far deeper, and more personal chapter, describing their religion, law, (such as how a murderer may be spared from execution if his brother gives himself up as a slave to the victim's family), the peace-pipe, their dress, their weapons and warfare, like the lasso, and the only way for a white man to avoid being bested by it, and finishing with a couple anecdotes proving their natural and surprisingly accurate use of geometry; 1 example with using the length of an arrow's shadow and the length of a tree's shadow to estimate the height of a tree, and a chief creating a parallelogram between two trees and several equidistant points marked with his spear to estimate the width of a river.
X - A league is formed of neighboring tribes to wipe out the Shoshone. Violet again fortifies the settlement, and this time drives the enemies away by utilizing a few old Spanish cannons loaded with fireworks to confuse and disperse the enemy. His father survives the war, but the excitement on his nerves is too much and he dies. He is buried and honored by the Shoshone.
XI - Violet, Gabriel and Roche are caught one day when they are out by a party of Arrapahoe, but within a paragraph the Arrapahoes fall into the hands of some Spanish officers. Our hero discourses on mirages, and his theory they are actually reflections of the sky on gases close to the ground as opposed to refractions (A very uncharacteristically scientific examination for a wild frontiersman) And they find a nest of prairie dogs whom they observe for a while, which they spend a good 6 pages in describing and ruminating on.
XII - This chapter is an entertaining story-within-a-story about the drunken, murderous, infamous half-spanish, half-indian trader by the name of Overton, who would habitually guide groups of indians and white men across the west, but would turn them against each other and steal their things and resell them for cheap elsewhere, until he became infamous. One day some indians found him and chased him across a ledge, which he failed to jump, hiding inside a log. They surrounded the log and tried to burn him out, but, while on fire, he tried to jump the ledge again; actually made it, but succumbing to the flames, fell to his death. A fun story.
XIII - They arrive at Santa Fe, which apparently is a wretched hive of scum and villainy. But Violet has a run-in with a panther cub and its mother whom he has to shoot. Then the story of the founding of the Sante Fe trade route, and the scuffles between the natives and the white men, and the death of Captain Smith (a random settler whose wagon went off course and then he was shot to death as he came upon an oasis), is suddenly recounted with no given reason. Marryat does possibly take a swipe at American novelists, though; "If half of what is said about him [Captain Smith] is true, his dangerous travels and his hairbreadth escapes would fill many volumes more interesting and romantic than the best pages of the american novelist."
XIV - Violet and his friends start back for home. They meet some Comanches (friends), who tell them about the war they are about to begin with Texas, and why. Apparently, an old comanche chief and his daughter went to San Antonio for medicine, when his daughter was preyed upon by a lecherous Kentuckian lawyer, and the chief was put in prison wrongfully. A judge threw the case out because the law of Texas was not written for the Comanche. They part ways. On the way they raid a Crow encampment and steal their food, but Violet secretly feels guilty about it. Then they meet a couple of men in the wilderness who escaped from an Arrapaho raid. They accompany them, and drop them off in Saint Louis. Then they come under the pursuit of a band of Arrapahoes. They desert their horses and flee to a lake with a secret canoe Roche left there once for fishing. They make it to an island in the river with ruins on it and spend the day there. They go out fishing in the canoe and mocking the Arrapahoes on the shore, who then walk away defeated. They later leave the island and return home, finding, too, the horses that they had cut loose.
XV - A council-fire is held on the topic of possibly uniting all of the Shoshone's related tribes into one united tribe, with the benefit of making the Shoshones supreme on the west coast, brought up by Violet. It is a long and florid debate, culminating in the decision to send Violet and fifty men to the Apaches, along with ten chiefs and ten virgins to offer in marriage, to secure a union.
XVI - Violet successfully unites with the Apaches. With a combined party of about 300 indians, including Arrapahoes, Apaches and Shoshones, Violet bumps into some friends from Monterey who tell of the real historical uprising in Sonora that replaced the governor Fonesca, who returned to try to conquer Mexico with the aid of pirates and Sandwich islanders. Violet and his indians, along with the Mexican forces retake the city. Very cool chapter.
XVII - Violet and his forces fight another much tougher battle against some enemy troops, in which they win but lose many men. A newspaper extract misrepresents the victory and rewrites the indian involvement in the retaking of Sonora as villainous. For giving them a bad name, Violet and his friends Gabriel and Roche are given a nice dinner and then shipped off as prisoners to the Mexicans. "That was my first taste of civilized life!" Laments the betrayed Violet, who finds that the christian men are less trustworthy than the natives. In a footnote, he also implicates Catholicism as being complicit in the greed of Mexico.
XVIII - To honor the Shoshones upon our last seeing them in the book, Marryat relates five Shoshone oral stories which showcase their bravery. First, a narrative in which a young Shoshone refuses his coming-of-age crown, confessing to having stolen a piece of meat. But for his honesty, he is given the crown anyway. Second, a story about an Apache who allows a Mexican to steal his horse because he does not wish to feel revenge, of course, the Mexican is touched and gives it back. Next, a chief gives a warrior his wife in exchange for saving his life from a bear attack. Then, a Shoshone who meets his brother's murderer, but though he has the right of retaliation, he lets him go for his family's sake, and for mercy. Finally, an anecdote of Gabriel's about how he had his horse stolen by some yankee traders; his Shoshone friends recaptured them, and made them beat each other.
And, to round off this series of stories with something completely unrelated, he talks about the Blackfeet tribe and the deadly smallpox epidemic that killed thousands of natives; using it to brighten the Shoshones' reputation, as apparently the suffered less, due to their habitual hygienic practices.
XIX - Violet and his companions are rescued by the Comanche. They travel together a while, until splitting in two, so some Comanches can go home and so others can go to the Texan border. Then Marryat does a deep dove into Texas geography and history, all the while showing Texas off to be full of depredation and dishonesty. Texas had angered the Comanches by inviting their chiefs to a meeting and killing them; making a great enemy not just of themselves, but of america as a whole, for the Comanches do not distinguish between a Texian and an American. He also does not ignore that Texas wanted to combine with the U.S so that it could be split into three slaveholding states, and so slavery could be preponderant in the senate. He also looks at Texan life, showing that honest people long vacated Texas and have been replaced by drunk vagabonds; Comanche border wars hurt the state, and roving gangs that disguise themselves as indians kill innocent men and rape their women. In the end, Marryat evaluates Texas as "proving, by a course of pursuing the opposite, that honesty is always the best policy." Okay, is he going to get back to the story now?
XX - Violet and the gang meet some respectable men in San Antonio, but they immediately depart. (I don't know what they're doing at this part in the story.) They meet a Lepan chief named Castro, who hates the Texans. They describe the Texan wilderness, including buffalo stampedes, and they even have a run-in with one.
XXI - Violet and his companions journey more across the wilderness, descriving the hills and precipices. They are briefly taken in by the Wakoe tribe, who are exceedingly kind. They encounter a band of cannibals (Cayugas) with white and indian captives. They kill half of them; but after interviewing the white captives, find out that they don't believe they will be eaten, as they have only eaten the indians so far, and so they leave them there.
XXII - They come across a picturesque canyon full of ruins, which are described so grandly that it sounds made up. They also have a buffalo hunt, wherein Violet uses some horseback archery to kill the creature; they then fall in with the Comanches, which apparently was the object of this journey, who are very hospitable to them. A story is recounted of a troop of soldiers that offered many barrels fire-water (alcohol) to the Comanches, but the most ancient wise man rose up and told them off (still providing them lodging, however, saying they will burn the lodges they stayed in the next day.)
XXIII - A council fore is held with the object of forming a war party to destroy the Cayugas. The next day, however, Violet goes off to steal some younglings from a birds' nest, but ends up stepping on a rattlesnake that bites him. He thinks he is done for (briefly recalling his childhood in France), but quickly he brews an antidote from some roots he digs up with his knife. He returns to the camp barely alive, and falls comatose for two weeks. When he wakes up, he finds out that the campaign against the cayugas was a success. However, as the Texans will be coming through the area soon because of hostilities with Mexico, the Comanches vacate the area and move their camp elsewhere.
XXIV - An old wise man tells the story of a recollection his, seeing a ship that bombarded a village. He refers to it as a creature with eyes on its sides and a lodge on its back. Then, he relates a story of how some pale-faces were taken in by the indians and eventually lived on their own, to become the mixed wakoe tribe. Then, the story of the French explorer La Rochelle is given. The chapter ends by seeing "The reader may perceive there is not much difference between the oral histories of the Comanches and our own."
XXV - In this chapter he gives the story of the Texan expedition through Santa Fe which occurred while he was convalescent. It is a horrible story, as the Texans ate their own horses in hunger, robbed a Wakoe village and shot their children, before surrendering to a band of Mexicans. Then some misconceptions about Mexican soldiers are and the Texan war of independence are cleared up. The Mexican soldiers are not stupid, but they value honor and high birth above learning new tactics. San Jacinto was more of a kidnapping than a battle. And Santa Anna did not return to Texas because there was a regime change when he was captured, and the new president campaigned on ending the Texan war; when Santa Anna returned to Mexico, he was too busy picking up the pieces of his life. Finally, we end on a story about the death of a man named Henry Golpin, which by Texan accounts was passed off as a cruel murder on the part of the Mexicans- but a newspaper article says that he was a quadroon and a slave overseer who was violent against his master's daughters when they rejected his advances. And when he was shot by the Mexicans, it was because he murdered an old woman not more than an hour before for refusing to give him extra alcohol.
XXVI - Peace is made between the Comanches and the Pawnees, who recently wronged them. They also meet a few white men, mormons, which are trying to get back home. Violet hopes he can make a deal with them to establish a communication with England or Europe and help the Shoshones, but he is never shown to speak with the mormons. Then the comanches move farther West for the year, and our heroes accompany them. They heard robber gangs who disguise themselves as indians are at large, which Marryat tells us about, as being very common in the west and especially Texas around this time, and no doubt account for a good amount of "indian atrocities" committed. They find some Texans, lead by a Captain Hunt, who accuse the comanches of committing a crime up at a nearby fort; but after looking at the bodies, it is clear to them that they are white men: and so the comanche chief gives them a good scold, and they part ways.
XXVII - Captain Hunt, and General Smith, who became a Texan general after fleeing justice fir murdering his wife, comes back to talk with the Comanche chief, but they are turned away. Later, they ambush a party of indians travelling with Roche; an indian, showing customary kindness to their guest Roche, sacrifices himself to save his life. As such, the Comanches decide to retaliate, and so they invade their camp, and scalp Captain Hunt. The Texans set fore to barrels of grease, which the comanches escape, stealing only 40 horses which had originally been taken from them in the last war. Later, General Smith publishes a newspaper article that bends the truth into a Texan victory against comanche cruelty. (Seems to be a theme in this book.) But now our heroes have five honest white men accompanying them, all men from the east who could not find work; 3 lawyers who find the west too lawless for work, 1 doctor who keeps getting pickpocketed, and 1 theologian who finds nobody is religious. Then Marryat tells us about a twenty-dollar bill that had travelled with one of the men his entire trip because everybody suspected it was fake, and so finishes by informing us that in Galveston there is a thriving counterfeit bill industry.
XXVIII - Violet and his men travel for a while, and suffer starvation. Then a Texan preacher who is with them gives a long story about his life. He is a hypocrite who had adventures losing his wallet on an Indiana riverboat, being scammed by some greedy characters, gambling, then preaching about modesty, and suffering by an evil texan politician who is eventually put to death legally. Then they see the daybreak, and he is confused because he checks his watch and it isn't even past 1am. It turns out to be a prairie fire and a buffalo stampede. They run away on their horses, then try building a fire to dissway the buffaloes, which only works when gabriel throws a bottle of alcohol on it. After the buffaloes pass, they try to outrun the spreading fire on horseback, which is easier said than done, and they only escape because they leap down a chasm littered with the bodies of buffaloes.
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(1/2)
I - His father once knew a man who tried to conspire against the Italian government, Prince Saravalle, but was found out. He was put in a prison. When let out, he travelled to America and lived peacefully with the Shoshones. He grew friendly with them. He thinks they could be civilized. He returns to France so he can get enough things to create a settlement in western america. The father throws his lot in with him, and has his son come along, along with some holy men who will educate him, and have experience doing missionary work in Thibet and Burma. And so their voyage begins.
II - Years pass, and our young hero is made a warrior. Unfortunately, multiple setbacks befall the settlement (many of their men are lost at sea, and the rest are lost when sent west to buy buffaloes.) But they are determined to make the Shoshones embrace agriculture. At a council meeting the Shoshones decide they will not agriculturalize.
III - The narrator reveals that he led a party to re-find the men sent to buy the buffalo, and found them captured by the crows. He successfully attacks and returns them home. Then a brief narration of the missionaries' fruitless attempts to convert the Shoshones ending in their untimely deaths due to old age is recounted. Now monsieur Violet is chosen to lead an expedition to Monterey or Santa Fe to get Mexican or Canadian laborers to work the fields instead of the squaws or Shoshone slaves.
IV - An outline of the land the Shoshones live in and a very, very brief bit about their culture, followed by conjectures upon their history and lineage, ending with an oral account of Shoshone history.
V - They set out. Violet confesses that he has by now (age 18) been fully converted to being an indian, and even looks upon his old life with some resentment, and so was not looking forward to the journey. However, he comes to adore Monterey, in a long and good description of the city and how happy the people are there. He also courts the ladies there. They meet a padre and they check out some ancient indian ruins with him, and he tells them a story about how he used to teach in India, and his brother defected to Islam and fled to Persia. But many years later they rejoined, and on his way back home his brother died.
VI - He wakes up in the boat in which he fell asleep the previous night, cast adrift. Luckily he falls in with some shipwrecked Russians, and they make it back to shore, where the Russians, tired with rowing, fall asleep immediately, but Violet's indian knowledge help him quickly procure some cattle, which he gives to his friends. Soon they find their way back to Monterey, he falls into favor with a don, whose daughter he is romancing advises him to let himself lose at chess against. He hears that he needs to return home, because the prince was killed by the Crows, and his father doesn't seem too far behind. Besides, he is wanted for his first war-path. The don allows him to return home by sea. They then meet a silly dancing Irishman named Roche who becomes Violet's companion.
VII - Violet comes to land, but has to recapture his horses stolen in a raid by some Umbiquas.
VIII - Violet and his men fortify a Shoshone town with a blockhouse, and they repel the Umbiquas in a dramatic battle. Violet returns home and finds his father is okay, and hears the story of the Prince Seravalle's death: he went to fort St. Louis to pick up some supplies, but on his way back was ambushed by some Crows who tried to extort him for horses, but he refused. They argue; a fight breaks out, and he is killed. As a result, Violet has to be an accountant for a couple months to settle the Prince's debts, and he hates it. It also supplanted his chance to go on his first war-path against the Crows. Afterwards, he becomes friends with the Irishman Roche, and Gabriel, a Parisian he met in Monterey.
IX - Another chapter describing the Shoshones, but this time a far deeper, and more personal chapter, describing their religion, law, (such as how a murderer may be spared from execution if his brother gives himself up as a slave to the victim's family), the peace-pipe, their dress, their weapons and warfare, like the lasso, and the only way for a white man to avoid being bested by it, and finishing with a couple anecdotes proving their natural and surprisingly accurate use of geometry; 1 example with using the length of an arrow's shadow and the length of a tree's shadow to estimate the height of a tree, and a chief creating a parallelogram between two trees and several equidistant points marked with his spear to estimate the width of a river.
X - A league is formed of neighboring tribes to wipe out the Shoshone. Violet again fortifies the settlement, and this time drives the enemies away by utilizing a few old Spanish cannons loaded with fireworks to confuse and disperse the enemy. His father survives the war, but the excitement on his nerves is too much and he dies. He is buried and honored by the Shoshone.
XI - Violet, Gabriel and Roche are caught one day when they are out by a party of Arrapahoe, but within a paragraph the Arrapahoes fall into the hands of some Spanish officers. Our hero discourses on mirages, and his theory they are actually reflections of the sky on gases close to the ground as opposed to refractions (A very uncharacteristically scientific examination for a wild frontiersman) And they find a nest of prairie dogs whom they observe for a while, which they spend a good 6 pages in describing and ruminating on.
XII - This chapter is an entertaining story-within-a-story about the drunken, murderous, infamous half-spanish, half-indian trader by the name of Overton, who would habitually guide groups of indians and white men across the west, but would turn them against each other and steal their things and resell them for cheap elsewhere, until he became infamous. One day some indians found him and chased him across a ledge, which he failed to jump, hiding inside a log. They surrounded the log and tried to burn him out, but, while on fire, he tried to jump the ledge again; actually made it, but succumbing to the flames, fell to his death. A fun story.
XIII - They arrive at Santa Fe, which apparently is a wretched hive of scum and villainy. But Violet has a run-in with a panther cub and its mother whom he has to shoot. Then the story of the founding of the Sante Fe trade route, and the scuffles between the natives and the white men, and the death of Captain Smith (a random settler whose wagon went off course and then he was shot to death as he came upon an oasis), is suddenly recounted with no given reason. Marryat does possibly take a swipe at American novelists, though; "If half of what is said about him [Captain Smith] is true, his dangerous travels and his hairbreadth escapes would fill many volumes more interesting and romantic than the best pages of the american novelist."
XIV - Violet and his friends start back for home. They meet some Comanches (friends), who tell them about the war they are about to begin with Texas, and why. Apparently, an old comanche chief and his daughter went to San Antonio for medicine, when his daughter was preyed upon by a lecherous Kentuckian lawyer, and the chief was put in prison wrongfully. A judge threw the case out because the law of Texas was not written for the Comanche. They part ways. On the way they raid a Crow encampment and steal their food, but Violet secretly feels guilty about it. Then they meet a couple of men in the wilderness who escaped from an Arrapaho raid. They accompany them, and drop them off in Saint Louis. Then they come under the pursuit of a band of Arrapahoes. They desert their horses and flee to a lake with a secret canoe Roche left there once for fishing. They make it to an island in the river with ruins on it and spend the day there. They go out fishing in the canoe and mocking the Arrapahoes on the shore, who then walk away defeated. They later leave the island and return home, finding, too, the horses that they had cut loose.
XV - A council-fire is held on the topic of possibly uniting all of the Shoshone's related tribes into one united tribe, with the benefit of making the Shoshones supreme on the west coast, brought up by Violet. It is a long and florid debate, culminating in the decision to send Violet and fifty men to the Apaches, along with ten chiefs and ten virgins to offer in marriage, to secure a union.
XVI - Violet successfully unites with the Apaches. With a combined party of about 300 indians, including Arrapahoes, Apaches and Shoshones, Violet bumps into some friends from Monterey who tell of the real historical uprising in Sonora that replaced the governor Fonesca, who returned to try to conquer Mexico with the aid of pirates and Sandwich islanders. Violet and his indians, along with the Mexican forces retake the city. Very cool chapter.
XVII - Violet and his forces fight another much tougher battle against some enemy troops, in which they win but lose many men. A newspaper extract misrepresents the victory and rewrites the indian involvement in the retaking of Sonora as villainous. For giving them a bad name, Violet and his friends Gabriel and Roche are given a nice dinner and then shipped off as prisoners to the Mexicans. "That was my first taste of civilized life!" Laments the betrayed Violet, who finds that the christian men are less trustworthy than the natives. In a footnote, he also implicates Catholicism as being complicit in the greed of Mexico.
XVIII - To honor the Shoshones upon our last seeing them in the book, Marryat relates five Shoshone oral stories which showcase their bravery. First, a narrative in which a young Shoshone refuses his coming-of-age crown, confessing to having stolen a piece of meat. But for his honesty, he is given the crown anyway. Second, a story about an Apache who allows a Mexican to steal his horse because he does not wish to feel revenge, of course, the Mexican is touched and gives it back. Next, a chief gives a warrior his wife in exchange for saving his life from a bear attack. Then, a Shoshone who meets his brother's murderer, but though he has the right of retaliation, he lets him go for his family's sake, and for mercy. Finally, an anecdote of Gabriel's about how he had his horse stolen by some yankee traders; his Shoshone friends recaptured them, and made them beat each other.
And, to round off this series of stories with something completely unrelated, he talks about the Blackfeet tribe and the deadly smallpox epidemic that killed thousands of natives; using it to brighten the Shoshones' reputation, as apparently the suffered less, due to their habitual hygienic practices.
XIX - Violet and his companions are rescued by the Comanche. They travel together a while, until splitting in two, so some Comanches can go home and so others can go to the Texan border. Then Marryat does a deep dove into Texas geography and history, all the while showing Texas off to be full of depredation and dishonesty. Texas had angered the Comanches by inviting their chiefs to a meeting and killing them; making a great enemy not just of themselves, but of america as a whole, for the Comanches do not distinguish between a Texian and an American. He also does not ignore that Texas wanted to combine with the U.S so that it could be split into three slaveholding states, and so slavery could be preponderant in the senate. He also looks at Texan life, showing that honest people long vacated Texas and have been replaced by drunk vagabonds; Comanche border wars hurt the state, and roving gangs that disguise themselves as indians kill innocent men and rape their women. In the end, Marryat evaluates Texas as "proving, by a course of pursuing the opposite, that honesty is always the best policy." Okay, is he going to get back to the story now?
XX - Violet and the gang meet some respectable men in San Antonio, but they immediately depart. (I don't know what they're doing at this part in the story.) They meet a Lepan chief named Castro, who hates the Texans. They describe the Texan wilderness, including buffalo stampedes, and they even have a run-in with one.
XXI - Violet and his companions journey more across the wilderness, descriving the hills and precipices. They are briefly taken in by the Wakoe tribe, who are exceedingly kind. They encounter a band of cannibals (Cayugas) with white and indian captives. They kill half of them; but after interviewing the white captives, find out that they don't believe they will be eaten, as they have only eaten the indians so far, and so they leave them there.
XXII - They come across a picturesque canyon full of ruins, which are described so grandly that it sounds made up. They also have a buffalo hunt, wherein Violet uses some horseback archery to kill the creature; they then fall in with the Comanches, which apparently was the object of this journey, who are very hospitable to them. A story is recounted of a troop of soldiers that offered many barrels fire-water (alcohol) to the Comanches, but the most ancient wise man rose up and told them off (still providing them lodging, however, saying they will burn the lodges they stayed in the next day.)
XXIII - A council fore is held with the object of forming a war party to destroy the Cayugas. The next day, however, Violet goes off to steal some younglings from a birds' nest, but ends up stepping on a rattlesnake that bites him. He thinks he is done for (briefly recalling his childhood in France), but quickly he brews an antidote from some roots he digs up with his knife. He returns to the camp barely alive, and falls comatose for two weeks. When he wakes up, he finds out that the campaign against the cayugas was a success. However, as the Texans will be coming through the area soon because of hostilities with Mexico, the Comanches vacate the area and move their camp elsewhere.
XXIV - An old wise man tells the story of a recollection his, seeing a ship that bombarded a village. He refers to it as a creature with eyes on its sides and a lodge on its back. Then, he relates a story of how some pale-faces were taken in by the indians and eventually lived on their own, to become the mixed wakoe tribe. Then, the story of the French explorer La Rochelle is given. The chapter ends by seeing "The reader may perceive there is not much difference between the oral histories of the Comanches and our own."
XXV - In this chapter he gives the story of the Texan expedition through Santa Fe which occurred while he was convalescent. It is a horrible story, as the Texans ate their own horses in hunger, robbed a Wakoe village and shot their children, before surrendering to a band of Mexicans. Then some misconceptions about Mexican soldiers are and the Texan war of independence are cleared up. The Mexican soldiers are not stupid, but they value honor and high birth above learning new tactics. San Jacinto was more of a kidnapping than a battle. And Santa Anna did not return to Texas because there was a regime change when he was captured, and the new president campaigned on ending the Texan war; when Santa Anna returned to Mexico, he was too busy picking up the pieces of his life. Finally, we end on a story about the death of a man named Henry Golpin, which by Texan accounts was passed off as a cruel murder on the part of the Mexicans- but a newspaper article says that he was a quadroon and a slave overseer who was violent against his master's daughters when they rejected his advances. And when he was shot by the Mexicans, it was because he murdered an old woman not more than an hour before for refusing to give him extra alcohol.
XXVI - Peace is made between the Comanches and the Pawnees, who recently wronged them. They also meet a few white men, mormons, which are trying to get back home. Violet hopes he can make a deal with them to establish a communication with England or Europe and help the Shoshones, but he is never shown to speak with the mormons. Then the comanches move farther West for the year, and our heroes accompany them. They heard robber gangs who disguise themselves as indians are at large, which Marryat tells us about, as being very common in the west and especially Texas around this time, and no doubt account for a good amount of "indian atrocities" committed. They find some Texans, lead by a Captain Hunt, who accuse the comanches of committing a crime up at a nearby fort; but after looking at the bodies, it is clear to them that they are white men: and so the comanche chief gives them a good scold, and they part ways.
XXVII - Captain Hunt, and General Smith, who became a Texan general after fleeing justice fir murdering his wife, comes back to talk with the Comanche chief, but they are turned away. Later, they ambush a party of indians travelling with Roche; an indian, showing customary kindness to their guest Roche, sacrifices himself to save his life. As such, the Comanches decide to retaliate, and so they invade their camp, and scalp Captain Hunt. The Texans set fore to barrels of grease, which the comanches escape, stealing only 40 horses which had originally been taken from them in the last war. Later, General Smith publishes a newspaper article that bends the truth into a Texan victory against comanche cruelty. (Seems to be a theme in this book.) But now our heroes have five honest white men accompanying them, all men from the east who could not find work; 3 lawyers who find the west too lawless for work, 1 doctor who keeps getting pickpocketed, and 1 theologian who finds nobody is religious. Then Marryat tells us about a twenty-dollar bill that had travelled with one of the men his entire trip because everybody suspected it was fake, and so finishes by informing us that in Galveston there is a thriving counterfeit bill industry.
XXVIII - Violet and his men travel for a while, and suffer starvation. Then a Texan preacher who is with them gives a long story about his life. He is a hypocrite who had adventures losing his wallet on an Indiana riverboat, being scammed by some greedy characters, gambling, then preaching about modesty, and suffering by an evil texan politician who is eventually put to death legally. Then they see the daybreak, and he is confused because he checks his watch and it isn't even past 1am. It turns out to be a prairie fire and a buffalo stampede. They run away on their horses, then try building a fire to dissway the buffaloes, which only works when gabriel throws a bottle of alcohol on it. After the buffaloes pass, they try to outrun the spreading fire on horseback, which is easier said than done, and they only escape because they leap down a chasm littered with the bodies of buffaloes.
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