Tóm tắt

This is an adventure story of the Old Santa Fe Trail. The Old Trail ran from Independence, near Kansas City, to Santa Fe, across the buffalo country of the Great Plains, a distance about the same as that from New York to Chicago. At the time of the story, about 1835, the vast American prairies west of the Mississippi were the undisputed territory of the buffalo and the Plains Indians. The powerful and warlike tribes of Pawnees and Comanches, of Arapahoes, Cheyennes, Kiowas, and Sioux, were all bold horsemen, hunters, and warriors. Some of the tribes lived south and some north of the Arkansas River, where it flows through the present States of Kansas and Colorado. A central region around Walnut Creek, Pawnee Rock, and Pawnee Fork in the present State of Kansas was inhabited by none of the tribes, but was the battleground of them all. It was through this dangerous Indian country that the Santa Fe traders took their long trains of heavy wagons drawn by oxen or mules. The proud Indians of those days had not yet felt the strength of the United States Army; and on the long triprnof eighty or ninety days each way, the men of the caravan had to protect themselves against the hordes of savages, who were always ready to rob and scalp the traders. The adventures of Silas Benson and his two sons and their staunch friend Burley among the Pawnees and Comanches are told in this story. Never was there a time and a country of more stirring romance and bolder adventure than the period and the region of the Old Santa Fe Trail.