Читать книгу Lost Worlds of 1863. Relocation and Removal of American Indians in the Central Rockies and the Greater Southwest онлайн
66 страница из 156
Eventually, they were so driven to the point of hunger that one of them suggested that the alternative to starving to death would be to sacrifice one of their party so as to save the lives of the others. The idea was voted down, and La Bonté and the others, who had noticed some deer-tracks, decided to hunt for wild game. At sunset when La Bonté returned to camp he saw one of his companions named Forey broiling some meat on the embers. The young girls were gone, perhaps having escaped. In the distance he saw what he thought was the carcass of a deer. Forey shouted, “there’s the meat, hos—help yourself.” La Bonté drew his knife and approached the carcass, but, as his narrator George Frederick Ruxton notes, to his horror he saw “the yet quivering body of one of the Indian squaws, with a large portion of the flesh butchered from it, and part of which Forey was already greedily devouring.”36
The La Bonté experience is an extreme example and may be a composite of fiction and reality, but it does illustrate the ideas of cannibalism and mutilation of Indian bodies. As for the eating of human flesh, even the great pathfinder and anti-slavery crusader John C. Frémont experienced cannibalism during his attempt to cross the San Juan Mountains in the winter of 1848–1849.37