A courteous traveling companion was the notorious Indian-killer Comanche Bill.

Evidence

All this time, having crossed South Park, we were ascending the Continental Divide by what I think is termed the Breckenridge Pass, on a fairly good wagon road. We stopped at a cabin, where the woman seemed to know my companion, and, in addition to bread and milk, produced some venison steaks. We rode on again, and reached the crest of the Divide (see engraving), and saw snow-born streams starting within a quarter of a mile from each other, one for the Colorado and the Pacific, the other for the Platte and the Atlantic. Here I wished the hunter good-bye, and reluctantly turned north-east. It was not wise to go up the Divide at all, and it was necessary to do it in haste. On my way down I spoke to the woman at whose cabin I had dined, and she said, ”I am sure you found Comanche Bill a real gentleman”; and I then knew that, if she gave me correct information, my intelligent, courteous companion was one of the most notorious desperadoes of the Rocky Mountains, and the greatest Indian exterminator on the frontiera man whose father and family fell in a massacre at Spirit Lake by the hands of Indians, who carried away his sister, then a child of eleven. His life has since been mainly devoted to a search for this child, and to killing Indians wherever he can find them. — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 415

Categorization

• SHARE: The nice-demeanor-while-also-being-a-mass-killer detail — Bird rides miles with the territory’s most feared killer and only learns who he was afterward — is a sharp anecdote worth sending to someone into frontier history.
• QUESTION: Would like to verify the Spirit Lake massacre account and the sister’s fate — Bird relayed it secondhand from the cabin woman.