The Indian tribes who possessed the fair land of Texas when the white man first set foot on its soil were rapidly dying out. Some were already extinct, having left hardly a trace to show where their villages and wigwams had once stood. The Cenis, that noble nation which welcomed La Salle and nursed him tenderly when he lay for months “sick of a fever” in their midst, and who sheltered the fleeing fugitives from Fort St. Louis,—these had entirely passed away. So had the kindly Coushattis, the friends of Lallemand’s colonists; and the Orquisacas, the Nacogdoches, and all those gentler tribes by whose help the Franciscan friars had built the earliest missions. Gone were the music-loving Wacoes from the banks of the Brazos; and from the Trinity the corn-growing Tehas.  
The fierce Carankawaes, once the terror of the coast and long believed to be cannibals, and the Kiowas, called the red-eyed, had melted before the coming of the pale-faces, as the snow melts under the April sun.
 
But remnants of the warlike western tribes remained. The Comanches, the Apaches, and the Lipans still hovered like dark clouds about the frontier. They called themselves Nianis (live Indians); and though they were taken away by the............