Blackwell Reference Online

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Behind thick walls of adobe, a community began its morning routine. Owl Woman kept her eyes closed for a minute. She knew it was early because her husband and her children still slept beside her on the floor, wrapped in soft hides against the chill that came off the river in the early fall. She listened to the sounds of the fort awakening: Mexican and Indian women arguing over spots at the creek, Mexican men taking horses outside to graze, English, French, Spanish, and Russian cursing as teamsters began to load their wagons, reveille from the American military camp just outside the fort. When she opened her eyes she noted the breeze blowing across her delicate Victorian desk and ruffling the brocade curtains hanging over adobe windows and she wondered if the linen shirts, leggings, and moccasins that she had laid out for her sons to wear would be warm enough. They planned to join her father's Cheyenne family for a fall hunt, along with the other boys who lived in the fort. Owl Woman, the wife of William Bent and the daughter of both Cheyenne and Arapaho leaders, lived in a distinctive world. Bent's Fort, along the Arkansas River in what is now southeastern Colorado, though isolated from the centers of American economic power in the 1830s, had every luxury from fine wines to soft beaded moccasins to elegant china to Mexican silver, all which got used daily in the fort's trading and ... log in or subscribe to read full text