The Indian Chief by Gustave Aimard

Were we writing a romance there are many details we would leave in the shade, many facts we should pass over in silence. Unfortunately we are only historians, and, as such, compelled to the most scrupulous exactitude.

In the first episode of this history we related how the Count de Lhorailles, at the head of 150 Frenchmen, selected from the colony of Guetzalli, which he had founded, let himself be led in pursuit of the Apache Indians into the great Del Norte desert; and how, after wandering about with his party in the midst of this ocean of shifting sand, and seeing his bravest comrades fall around him, he had blown out his brains, while, in a few hours after his death, the few Frenchmen who survived this great disaster succeeded in emerging from the desert and regaining the road to the colony.