Democratic Sentinel, Volume 18, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 May 1894 — An Expert Trailer. [ARTICLE]

An Expert Trailer.

All who have been on the frontier have heard of the remarkable faculty of Pedro Espinosa, the famous Mexican trailer, whose powers border upon the mythical. General Dodge tells the following story of an experience with this remarkable man, which will give a good idea of what an expert trailer can do: “I was once sent In pursuit of a party of murdering Comanches, who had been pursued, scattered, and the trail abandoned by a company of socalled Texas Rangers. On the eighth day after the scattering, Espinosa took the trail after a single shod horse. When we were fairly into the rough, rocky Guadaloupe Mountains, he stopped, dismounted, and picked up from the foot of a tree the four shoes of the horse ridden by the Indian. With a grim smile, he ha’nded them to me, and informed me that the Indian intended to hide his trail. “For six days we journeyed over the roughest mountains, turning and twisting in apparently the most objectless way, not a man in the whole command being able to discover, sometimes for hours, a single mark by which Espinosa might direct himself. Sometimes I lost patience, and demanded that he show me what he was following. * Poco tiempo ’ (in a short time), he would blandly answer, and, in a longer or shorter time, show me the clear-cut footprints of the horse in the soft bank of a mountain stream, or point with his long, wiping stick to other most unmistakable ‘sign.’ Following the devious windings of this trail for nearly pne hundred and fifty miles, arid only once or twice dismounting more closely to examine the ground, he finally brought me to where the Indians had reunited."