Note (return) — Chapter I

For two or three years after arriving at their new home, the Carson family, with a few neighbors, lived in a picketed log fort; and when they were engaged in agricultural pursuits, working their farms, and so forth, it was necessary to plough, sow and reap under guard, men being stationed at the sides and extremities of their fields to prevent the working party from being surprised and massacred by wild and hostile savages who infested the country. At this time the small pox, that disease which has proved such a terrible scourge to the Indian, had but seldom visited him.1