This remote vale, even at the present day, is but thinly peopled by white men, and is still a frontier settlement round which the wolf and the bear prowl curiously, and from which the startled deer bounds terrified away.

At the period of which we write the valley had just been taken possession of by several families of squatters, who, tired of the turmoil and the squabbles of the _then_ frontier settlements, had pushed boldly into the far west to seek a new home for themselves, where they could have "elbow room," regardless alike of the dangers they might encounter in unknown lands and of the Redskins who dwelt there.
The squatters were well armed with axes, rifles, and ammunition.

Most of the women were used to dangers and alarms, and placed implicit reliance in the power of their fathers, husbands, and brothers to protect them; and well they might, for a bolder set of stalwart men than these backwoodsmen never trod the wilderness.

Each had been trained to the use of the rifle and the axe from infancy, and many of them had spent so much of their lives in the woods that they were more than a match for the Indian in his own peculiar pursuits of hunting and war.

When the squatters first issued from the woods bordering the valley, an immense herd of wild horses or mustangs were browsing on the plain.