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I am Geoffrey Benteen, Gentleman Adventurer, with much experience upon the border, where I have passed my life My father was that Robert Benteen, lish race to make perhly profitable trade with the Indians, his bateaux voyaging as far northward as the falls of the Ohio, while his influence a the tribesmen extended to the eastern mountains My ustine, so I grew up fairly proficient in three languages, and to theues which often stood me in excellent stead amid the vicissitudes of the frontier The early death of my mother cos, so that before I was seventeen the dies of savages had grown as familiar to me as were the streets and houses of my native town Hence it happened, that when h he left to my care considerable property and a widely scattered trade, I could not easily content myself with the saer, ever hungering for the woods and the free life of the mountains

Yet I heldout the tangled threads, and ed in peaceful traffic until the end of life, had it not been for awith her who held htest whim It matters little now the cause of the quarrel, or where rested the greater blah that its occurrence drove , desirous only to leave all of e environetfulness of the past

It was in Septeo as I write--that I found er to the town, except for the few rough flatboat-reat river Five years previously, heartsick and utterly careless of life, I had plunged into the trackless wilderness stretching in al ht outto ain would I turn face to southward or enter the boundaries of Louisiana Province During those years, beyond reach of news and the tongue of gossip, I wandered aie, ever certain of welcoes of Creeks and Shawnees, or farther away a the Ohio and the Illinois, constantly feeling how little the world held of value since both one, and this last blow had fallen I loved the free, wild life of the warriors hoeurs beside whom I camped, and had learned to distrust ain beside the sweeping current of the broad Mississippi, than I was gripped by the old irresistible yearning, and, although uninspired by either hope or purpose, drifted doard to the hated Creole town