The adventurers were enveloped and very nearly ridden down by over two hundred prancing, screaming horsemen, shouting to their visitors in their own guttural tongue or in broken Spanish, and enforcing their wild speech with vehement gestures.

It was a pandemonium which horribly frightened the Mexican rancheros, and made Coronado's dark cheek turn to an ashy yellow.
The civilized imagination can hardly conceive such a tableau of savagery as that presented by these Arabs of the great American desert.

Arabs! The similitude is a calumny on the descendants of Ishmael; the fiercest Bedouin are refined and mild compared with the Apaches.

Even the brutal and criminal classes of civilization, the pugilists, roughs, burglars, and pickpockets of our large cities, the men whose daily life is rebellion against conscience, commandment, and justice, offer a gentler and nobler type of character and expression than these "children of nature." There was hardly a face among that gang of wild riders which did not outdo the face of Texas Smith in degraded ferocity.

Almost every man and boy was obviously a liar, a thief, and a murderer.