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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY

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BUILDERS OF THE NATION

OR

From the Indian Trail to the Railroad

National Edition
Complete in Twelve Volumes

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THE TRAPPER

i

By

A. C. Laut

Author of Heralds of Empire, etc.

ILLUSTRATED

•— "™

NEW YORK

THEB^MPTONSOCIETY

PUBLISHERS

f OF THE

Copyright, 1902
By D. APPLETON & COMPANY

Copyright, 1908
By THE BRAMPTON SOCIETY

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. — GAMESTERS OF THE WILDERNESS .... 1

II.— THREE COMPANIES IN CONFLICT .... 8

III. — THE NOR' WESTERS' COUP 22

IV. — THE ANCIENT HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY WAKENS
UP 28

V.— MR. ASTOR'S COMPANY ENCOUNTERS NEW OP
PONENTS 38

VI.— THE FRENCH TRAPPER 50

VII. — THE BUFFALO-RUNNERS 65

VIII. — THE MOUNTAINEERS 81

IX.— THE TAKING OF THE BEAVER . . . .102

X.— THE MAKING OF THE MOCCASINS . . . .117

XI. — THE INDIAN TRAPPER 128

Trapper. I.

•

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

ON THE WAY TO THE TRAPS . . . FRONTISPIECE

From an Original Painting by D. C. Hutchison.

PAGE

INDIAN VOYAGEURS " PACKING" OVER LONG PORTAGE . . 30

TRADERS RUNNING A MACKINAW OR KEEL-BOAT DOWN

THE RAPIDS 57

THE BUFFALO-HUNT . . 78

WITH EYE AND EAR ALERT THE MAN PADDLES SI
LENTLY ON 105

THEY DODGE THE COMING SWEEP OF THE UPLIFTED

ARM . 143

Trapper. I.

TO ALL WHO KNOW
THE GIPSY YEARNING FOB THE WILDS

EDITOK'S PKEFACE

THE picturesque figure of the trapper follows close
behind the Indian in the unfolding of the panorama
of the West. There is the explorer, but the jrapper
himself preceded the explorers — witness Lewis's and
Clark's meetings with trappers on their journey. The
trapper's hard-earned knowledge of the vast empire
lying beyond the Missouri was utilized by later com
ers, or in a large part died with him, leaving occa
sional records in the documents of fur companies, or
reports of military expeditions, or here and there in
the name of a pass, a stream, a mountain, or a fort.
His adventurous warfare upon the wild things of the
woods and streams was the expression of a primitive
instinct old as the history of mankind. The develop
ment of the motives which led the first pioneer trap
pers afield from the days of the first Eastern settle
ments, the industrial organizations which followed, the
commanding commercial results which were evolved
from the trafficking of Radisson and Groseilliers in the

vii

Viii THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

North, the rise of the great Hudson's Bay Company,
and the American enterprise which led, among other
results, to the foundation of the Astor fortunes, would
form no inconsiderable part of a history of North
America. The present volume aims simply to show
the type-character of the Western trapper, and to sketch
in a series of pictures the checkered life of this adven
turer of the wilderness.

The trapper of the early West was a composite fig
ure. From the Northeast came a splendid succession of
French explorers like La Verendrye, with coureurs des
lois, and a multitude of daring trappers and traders
pushing west and south. From the south the Spaniard,
illustrated in figures like Garces and others, held
out hands which rarely grasped the waiting commerce.
From the north and northeast there was the steady
advance of the sturdy Scotch and English, typified in
the deeds of the Henrys, Thompson, MacKenzie, and the
leaders of the organized fur trade, explorers, traders,
captains of industry, carrying the flags of the Hudson's
Bay and North-West Fur companies across Northern
America to the Pacific. On the far Northwestern coast
the Russian appeared as fur trader in the middle of
the eighteenth century, and the close of the century
saw the merchants of Boston claiming their share of
the fur traffic of that coast. The American trapper
becomes a conspicuous figure in the early years of the
nineteenth century. The emporium of his traffic was

EDITOR'S PREFACE ix

St. Louis, and the period of its greatest importance
and prosperity began soon after the Louisiana Purchase
and continued for forty years. The complete history
of the American fur trade of the far West has been
written by Captain IT. M. Chittenden in volumes which
will be included among the classics of early Western
history. Although his history is a publication de
signed for limited circulation, no student or specialist
in this field can fail to appreciate the value of his faith
ful and comprehensive work.

In The Story of the Trapper there is presented for
the general reader a vivid picture of an adventurous
figure, which is painted with a singleness of purpose
and a distinctness impossible of realization in the large
and detailed histories of the American fur trade and
the Hudson's Bay and North-West companies, or the
various special relations and journals and narratives.
The author's wilderness lore and her knowledge of the
life, added to her acquaintance with its literature, have
borne fruit in a personification of the Western and
Northern trappers who live in her pages. It is the man
whom we follow not merely in the evolution of the West
ern fur traffic, but also in the course of his strange life
in the wilds, his adventures, and the contest of his craft
against the cunning of his quarry. It is a most pic
turesque figure which is sketched in these pages with
the etcher's art that selects essentials while boldly
disregarding details. This figure as it is outlined here

X THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

will be new and strange to the majority of readers, and
the relish of its piquant flavour will make its own ap
peal. A strange chapter in history is outlined for those
who would gain an insight into the factors which had
to do with the building of the West. Woodcraft, ex
emplified in the calling of its most skilful devotees, is
painted in pictures which breathe the very atmosphere
of that life of stream and forest which has not lost its
appeal even in these days of urban centralization. The
flash of the paddle, the crack of the rifle, the stealthy
tracking of wild beasts, the fearless contest of man
against brute and savage, may be followed throughout
a narrative which is constant in its fresh and personal
interest.

The Hudson's Bay Company still flourishes, and
there is still an American fur trade; but the golden
days are past, and the heroic age of the American
trapper in the West belongs to a bygone time. Even
more than the cowboy, his is a fading figure, dimly
realized by his successors. It is time to tell his story,
to show what manner of man he was, and to preserve
for a different age the adventurous character of a Rom
any of the wilderness, fascinating in the picturesque-
ness and daring of his primeval life, and also, judged
by more practical standards, a figure of serious his
torical import in his relations to exploration and com
merce, and even affairs of politics and state.

If, therefore, we take the trapper as a typical figure

EDITOR'S PREFACE xi

in the early exploitation of an empire, his larger sig
nificance may be held of far more consequence to us
than the excesses and lawlessness so frequent in his
life. He was often an adventurer pure and simple.
The record of his dealings with the red man and with
white competitors is darkened by many stains. His
return from his lonely journeys afield brought an out
break of license like that of the cowboy fresh from the
range, but with all this the stern life of the old frontier
bred a race of men who did their work. That work was
the development of the only natural resources of vast
regions in this country and to the Northward, which
were utilized for long periods. There was also the task
of exploration, the breaking the way for others, and as
pioneer and as builder of commerce the trapper's part
in our early history has a significance which cloaks the
frailties characteristic of restraintless life in untrodden
wilds.

THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

PART I

CHAPTER I

GAMESTERS OF THE WILDERNESS

FEARING nothing, stopping at nothing, knowing no
law, ruling his stronghold of the wilds like a despot,
checkmating rivals with a deviltry that beggars paral
lel, wassailing with a shamelessness that might have
put Eome's worst deeds to the blush, fighting — fighting
— fighting, always fighting with a courage that knew
no truce but victory, the American trapper must ever
stand as a type of the worst and the best in the militant
heroes of mankind.

Each with an army at his back, Wolfe and Napoleon
won victories that upset the geography of earth. The
fur traders never at any time exceeded a few thousands
in number, faced enemies unbacked by armies and sal
lied out singly or in pairs; yet they won a continent
that has bred a new race.

Like John Colter,* whom Manuel Lisa met coming
from the wilds a hundred years ago, the trapper
IBtrapped a pack to his back, slung a rifle over his shoul-

* Whom Bradbury and Irving and Chittenden have all con
spired to make immortal.

2 1

2 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

der, and,, without any fanfare of trumpets, stepped
into the pathless shade of the great forests. Or else,
like Williams of the Arkansas, the trapper left the
moorings of civilization in a canoe, hunted at night,
hid himself by day, evaded hostile Indians by sliding
down-stream with muffled paddles, slept in mid-cur
rent screened by the branches of driftwood, and if a
sudden halloo of marauders came from the distance,
cut the strap that held his craft to the shore and got
away under cover of the floating tree. Hunters cross
ing the Cimarron desert set out with pack-horses, and,
like Captain Becknell's party, were often compelled
to kill horses and dogs to keep from dying of thirst.
Frequently their fate was that of Rocky Mountain
Smith, killed by the Indians as he stooped to scoop out
a drinking-hole in the sand. Men who brought down
their pelts to the mountain rendezvous of Pierre's
Hole, or went over the divide like Fraser and Thomp
son of the North- West Fur Company, had to abandon
both horses and canoes, scaling canon walls where the
current was too turbulent for a canoe and the precipice
too sheer for a horse, with the aid of their hunting-
knives stuck in to the haft.* Where the difficulties
were too great for a few men, the fur traders clubbed

* While Lewis and Clark were on the Upper Missouri, the
former had reached a safe footing along a narrow pass, when he
heard a voice shout, "Good God, captain, what shall I do?"
Turning, Lewis saw Windsor had slipped to the verge of a preci
pice, where he lay with right arm and leg over it, the other arm
clinging for dear life to the bluff. With his hunting-knife he
cut a hole for his right foot, ripped off his moccasins so that his
toes could have the prehensile freedom of a monkey's tail, and
thus crawled to safety like a fly on a wall.^

GAMESTERS OF THE WILDERNESS 3

together under a master-mind like John Jacob Astor
of the Pacific Company, or Sir Alexander MacKenzie
of the Nor' Westers. Banded together, they thought
no more of coasting round the sheeted antarctics, or
slipping down the ice-jammed current of the MacKenzie
Eiver under the midnight sun of the arctic circle, than
people to-day think of running from New York to New
port. When the conflict of 1812 cut off communication
between western fur posts and New York by the over
land route, Farnham, the Green Mountain boy, didn't
think himself a hero at all for sailing to Kamtchatka
and crossing the whole width of Asia, Europe, and the
Atlantic, to reach Mr. Astor.

The American fur trader knew only one rule of ex
istence — to go ahead without any heroics, whether the
going cost his own or some other man's life. That is
the way the wilderness was won; and the winning is
one of the most thrilling pages in history.

About the middle of the seventeenth century Pierre
Radisson and Chouart Groseillers, two French adven
turers from Three Rivers, Quebec, followed the chain of
waterways from the Ottawa and Lake Superior north
westward to the region of Hudson Bay.* Returning
with tales of fabulous wealth to be had in the fur trade
of the north, they were taken in hand by members of
the British Commission then in Boston, whose influ
ence secured the Hudson's Bay Company charter in
1670; and that ancient and honourable body — as the
company was called — reaped enormous profits from the

* Whether they actually reached the shores of the bay on this
trip is still a dispute among French-Canadian savants.

4: THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

bartering of pelts. But the bartering went on in a
prosy, half-alive way, the traders sitting snugly in
their forts on Kupert and Severn Kivers, or at York
Factory (Port Nelson) and Churchill (Prince of
Wales). The French governor down in Quebec issued
only a limited number of licenses for the fur trade
in Canada; and the old English company had no fear
of rivalry in the north. It never sought inland tribes,
but waited with serene apathy for the Indians to come
down to its fur posts on the bay. Young Le Moyne
d'Iberville * might march overland from Quebec to the
bay, catch the English company nodding, scale the
stockades, capture its forts, batter down a wall or two,
and sail off like a pirate with ship-loads of booty for
Quebec. What did the ancient company care? Euro
pean treaties restored its forts, and the honourable ad
venturers presented a bill of damages to their govern
ment for lost furs.

But came a sudden change. Great movements west
ward began simultaneously in all parts of the east.

This resulted from two events — England's victory
over France at Quebec, and the American colonies'
Declaration of Independence. The downfall of French
ascendency in America meant an end to that license
system which limited the fur trade to favourites of
the governor. That threw an army of some two
thousand men — voyageurs, coureurs des bois, mangeurs

*1685-'87; the same Le Moyne d'Iberville who died in
Havana after spending his strength trying to colonize the Mis
sissippi for France — one instance which shows how completely
the influence of the fur trade connected every part of America,
from the Gulf to the pole, as in a network irrespective of

GAMESTERS OF THE WILDERNESS 5

de lard,* famous hunters, traders, and trappers — on
their own resources. The MacDonalds and MacKenzies
and MacGillivrays and Frobishers and MacTavishes—
Scotch merchants of Quebec and Montreal — were quick
to seize the opportunity. Uniting under the names of
North-West Fur Company and X. Y. Fur Company,
they re-engaged the entire retinue of cast-off French
men, woodcraftsmen who knew every path and stream
from Labrador to the Eocky Mountains. Giving
higher pay and better fare than the old French traders,
the Scotch merchants prepared to hold the field against
all comers in the Canadas. And when the X. Y. amalga
mated with the larger company before the opening of the
nineteenth century, the Nor' Westers became as famous
for their daring success as their unscrupulous ubiquity.
But at that stage came the other factor — American
Independence. Locked in conflict with England, what
deadlier blow to British power could France deal than
to turn over Louisiana with its million square miles
and ninety thousand inhabitants to the American Ee-
public? The Lewis and Clark exploration up the Mis
souri, over the mountains, and down the Columbia to
the Pacific was a natural sequel to the Louisiana Pur
chase, and proved that the United States had gained
a world of wealth for its fifteen million dollars. Be
fore Lewis and Clark's feat, vague rumours had come
to the New England colonies of the riches to be had
in the west. The Eussian Government had organized
a strong company to trade for furs with the natives of
the Pacific coast. Captain Vancouver's report of the

* The men employed in mere rafting and barge work in con
tradistinction to the trappers and voyageurs.

6 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

north-west coast was corroborated by Captain Grey, who
had stumbled into the mouth of the Columbia ; and be
fore 1800 nearly thirty Boston vessels yearly sailed to
the Northern Pacific for the fur trade.

Eager to forestall the Hudson's Bay Company, now
beginning to rub its eyes and send explorers westward
to bring Indians down to the bay,* Alexander Mac-
Kenzie of the Nor' Westers pushed down the great
river named after him,f and forced his way across the
northern Rockies to the Pacific. Flotillas of North-
West canoes quickly followed MacKenzie's lead north
to the arctics, south-west down the Columbia. At
Michilimackinac — one of the most lawless and roaring
of the fur posts — was an association known as the Mack
inaw Company, made up of old French hunters under
English management, trading westward from the Lakes
to the Mississippi. Hudson Bay, Nor' Wester, and
Mackinaw were daily pressing closer and closer to that
vast unoccupied Eldorado — the fur country between
the Missouri and the Saskatchewan, bounded eastward
by the Mississippi, west by the Pacific.

Possession is nine points out of ten. The question
was who would get possession first.

Unfortunately that question presented itself to three
alert rivals at the same time and in the same light.
And the war began.

* This was probably the real motive of the Hudson's Bay
Company sending Hearne to explore the Coppermine in 1769-'71.
Hearne, unfortunately, has never reaped the glory for this, owing
to his too-ready surrender of Prince of Wales Fort to the French
in La Perouse's campaign of 1782.

f To the mouth of the MacKenzie River in 1789, across the
Rockies in 1793, for which feats he was knighted.

GAMESTERS OP THE WILDERNESS 7

The Mackinaw traders had all they could handle
from the Lakes to the Mississippi. Therefore they did
little but try to keep other traders out of the western
preserve. The Hudson's Bay remained in its somno
lent state till the very extremity of outrage brought
such a mighty awakening that it put its rivals to an
eternal sleep. But the Nor' Westers were not asleep.
And John Jacob Astor of New York, who had accumu
lated what was a gigantic fortune in those days as a
purchaser of furs from America and a seller to Europe,
was not asleep. And Manual Lisa, a Spaniard', of New
Orleans, engaged at St. Louis in fur trade with the
Osage tribes, was not asleep.

CHAPTER II

THREE COMPANIES IN CONFLICT

IF only one company had attempted to take posses
sion of the vast fur country west of the Mississippi,
the fur trade would not have become international his
tory; but three companies were at strife for possession
of territory richer than Spanish Eldorado, albeit the
coin was " beaver " — not gold. Each of three compa
nies was determined to use all means fair or foul to ex
clude its rivals from the field; and a fourth company
was drawn into the strife because the conflict menaced
its own existence.

From their Canadian headquarters at Fort William
on Lake Superior, the Nor' Westers had yearly moved
farther down the Columbia towards the mouth, where
Lewis and Clark had wintered on the Pacific. In New
York, Mr. Astor was formulating schemes to add to his
fur empire the territory west of the Mississippi. At
St. Louis was Manuel Lisa, the Spanish fur trader,
already reaching out for the furs of the Missouri. And
leagues to the north on the remote waters of Hudson
Bay, the old English company lazily blinked its eyes
open to the fact that competition was telling heavily on
its returns, and that it would be compelled to take a
hand in the merry game of a fur traders' war, though
the real awakening had not yet come.
8

THREE COMPANIES IN CONFLICT 9

Lisa was the first to act on the information brought
back by Lewis and Clark. Forming a partnership with
Morrison and Menard of Kaskaskia, 111., and engaging
Drouillard, one of Lewis and Clark's men, as interpre
ter, he left St. Louis with a heavily laden keel-boat in
the spring of 1807. Against the turbulent current of
the Missouri in the full flood-tide of spring this un
wieldy craft was slowly hauled or " cordelled," twenty
men along the shore pulling the clumsy barge by means
of a line fastened high enough on the mast to be above
brushwood. Where the water was shallow the voyageurs
poled single file, facing the stern and pushing with
full chest strength. In deeper current oars were used.

Launched for the wilderness, with no certain knowl
edge but that the wilderness was peopled by hostiles,
poor Bissonette deserted when they were only at the
Osage Eiver. Lisa issued orders for Drouillard to
bring the deserter back dead or alive — orders that were
filled to the letter, for the poor fellow was brought
back shot, to die at St. Charles. Passing the mouth
of the Platte, the company descried a solitary white
man drifting down-stream in a dugout. When it was
discovered that this lone trapper was John Colter, who
had left Lewis and Clark on their return trip and
remained to hunt on the Upper Missouri, one can
imagine the shouts that welcomed him. Having now
been in the upper country for three years, he was
the one man fitted to guide Lisa's party, and was
promptly persuaded to turn back with the treasure-
seekers.

Past Blackbird's grave, where the great chief of the
Omahas had been buried astride his war-horse high on
the crest of a hill that his spirit might see the canoes

10 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

of the French voyageurs going up and down the river ;
past the lonely grave of Floyd,* whose death, like that
of many a New World hero marked another milestone
in the westward progress of empire ; past the Aricaras,
with their three hundred warriors gorgeous in vermil
ion, firing volleys across the keel-boat with fusees got
from rival traders ; f past the Mandans, threatening
death to the intruders; past five thousand Assiniboine
hostiles massed on the bank with weapons ready; up
the Yellowstone to the mouth of the Bighorn — went
Lisa, stopping in the very heart of the Crow tribe, those
thieves and pirates and marauders of the western wil
derness. Stockades were hastily stuck in the ground,
banked up with a miniature parapet, flanked with the
two usual bastions that could send a raking fire along
all four walls; and Lisa was ready for trade.

In 1808 the keel-boat returned to St. Louis, loaded
to the water-line with furs. The Missouri Company
was formally organized, J and yearly expeditions were
sent not only to the Bighorn, but to the Three Forks
of the Missouri, among the ferocious Blackfeet. Of
the two hundred and fifty men employed, fifty were
trained riflemen for the defence of the trappers; but
this did not prevent more than thirty men losing their
lives at the hands of the Blackfeet within two years.
Among the victims was Drouillard, struck down wheel-

* Of the Lewis and Clark expedition.

f Either the Nor' Westers or the Mackinaws, for the H. B. C.
were not yet so far south.

£ In it were the two original partners, Clark, the Chouteaus
of Missouri fame, Andrew Henry, the first trader to cross the
northern continental divide, and others of whom Chittenden
gives full particulars.

THREE COMPANIES IN CONFLICT 11

ing his horse round and round as a shield, literally
torn to pieces by the exasperated savages and eaten ac
cording to the hideous superstition that the flesh of a
brave man imparts bravery. All the plundered clothing,
ammunition,, and peltries were carried to the Nor'
Westers' trading posts north of the boundary.* Not
if the West were to be baptized in blood would the
traders retreat. Crippled, but not beaten, the Mis
souri men under Andrew Henry's leadership moved
south-west over the mountains into the region that was
to become famous as Pierre's Hole.

Meanwhile neither the Nor' Westers nor Mr. Astor
remained idle. The same year that Lisa organized his
Missouri Fur Company Mr. Astor obtained a charter
from the State of New York for the American Fur
Company. To lessen competition in the great scheme
gradually framing itself in his mind, he bought out
that half of the Mackinaw Company's trade f which
was within the United States, the posts in the British
dominions falling into the hands of the all-powerful
Nor' Westers. Intimate with the leading partners of
the Nor' Westers, Mr. Astor proposed to avoid rivalry
on the Pacific coast by giving the Canadians a third
interest in his plans for the capture of the Pacific trade.

Lords of their own field, the Nor' Westers rejected
Mr. Astor's proposal with a scorn born of unshaken

* This on the testimony of a North -West partner, Alexander
Henry, a copy of whose diary is in the Parliamentary Library,
Ottawa. Both Coues and Chittenden, the American historians,
note the corroborative testimony of Henry's journal.

f Henceforth known as the South-West Company, in distinc
tion to the North-West.

12 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

confidence,, and at once prepared to anticipate Ameri
can possession of the Pacific coast. Mr. Astor coun
tered by engaging the best of the dissatisfied Nor' West
ers for his Pacific Fur Company. Duncan MacDougall,
a little pepper-box of a Scotchman, with a bumptious
idea of authority which was always making other eyes
smart, was to be Mr. Astor's proxy on the ship to
round the Horn and at the headquarters of the com
pany on the Pacific. Donald MacKenzie was a relative
of Sir Alexander of the Nor' Westers, and must have
left the northern traders from some momentary pique;
for he soon went back to the Canadian companies, be
came chief factor at Fort Garry,* the headquarters of
the Hudson's Bay Company, and was for a time gover
nor of Red River. Alexander MacKay had accompanied
Sir Alexander MacKenzie on his famous northern
trips, and was one Nor' Wester who served Mr. Astor
with fidelity to the death. The elder Stuart was a
rollicking winterer from The Labrador, with the hail-
fellow-well-met-air of an equal among the mercurial
French-Canadians. The younger Stuart was of the
game, independent spirit that made Nor' Westers
famous.

Of the Tonquin's voyage round the Horn — with its
crew of twenty, and choleric Captain Thorn, and four f
partners headed by the fussy little MacDougall in mu
tiny against the captain's discipline, and twelve clerks
always getting their landlubber clumsiness in the sail
ors' way, and thirteen voyageurs ever grumbling at the
ocean swell that gave them qualms unknown on inland

* The modern Winnipeg.

f MacKay, MacDougall, and the two Stuarts

THREE COMPANIES IN CONFLICT 13

waters — little need be said. Washington Irving has
told this story ; and what Washington Irving leaves un
told, Captain Chittenden has recently unearthed from
the files of the Missouri archives.

The Tonquin sailed from New York, September 6,
1810. The captain had been a naval officer, and cursed
the partners for their easy familiarity with the men
before the mast, and the note-writing clerks for a lot
of scribbling blockheads, and the sea-sick voyageurs for
a set of fresh-water braggarts. And the captain's ami
able feelings were reciprocated by every Nor' Wester
on board.

Cape Horn was doubled on Christmas Day, Hawaii
sighted in February, some thirty Sandwich Islanders
engaged for service in the new company, and the Co
lumbia entered at the end of March, 1811. Eight lives
were lost attempting to run small boats against the
turbulent swell of tide and current. The place to land,
the site to build, details of the new fort, Astoria — all
were subjects for the jangling that went on between
the fuming little Scotchman MacDougall and Captain
Thorn, till the Tonquin weighed anchor on the 1st of
June and sailed away to trade on the north coast, ac
companied by only one partner, Alexander MacKay,
and one clerk, James Lewis.

The obstinacy that had dominated Captain Thorn
continued to dictate a wrong-headed course. In spite
of Mr. Astor's injunction to keep Indians off the ship
and MacKay's warning that the Nootka tribes were
treacherous, the captain allowed natives to swarm over
his decks. Once, when MacKay was on shore, Thorn
lost his temper, struck an impertinent chief in the face
with a bundle of furs, and expelled the Indian from the

14: THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

ship. When MacKay came back and learned what had
happened, he warned the captain of Indian vengeance
and urged him to leave the harbour. These warnings
the captain scorned, welcoming back the Indians, and
no doubt exulting to see that they had become almost
servile.

One morning, when Thorn and MacKay were yet
asleep, a pirogue with twenty Indians approached the
ship. The Indians were unarmed, and held up furs to
trade. They were welcomed on deck. Another canoe
glided near and another band mounted the ship's lad
der. Soon the vessel was completely surrounded with
canoes, the braves coming aboard with furs, the squaws
laughing and chatting and rocking their crafts at the
ship's side. This day the Indians were neither perti
nacious nor impertinent in their trade. Matters went
swimmingly till some of the Tonquin's crew noticed
with alarm that all the Indians were taking knives and
other weapons in exchange for their furs and that
groups were casually stationing themselves at positions
of wonderful advantage on the deck. MacKay and
Thorn were quickly called.

This is probably what the Indians were awaiting.

MacKay grasped the fearful danger of the situation
and again warned the captain. Again Thorn slighted
the warning. But anchors were hoisted. The Indians
thronged closer, as if in the confusion of hasty trade.
Then the dour-headed Thorn understood. With a
shout he ordered the decks cleared. His shout was an
swered by a counter-shout — the wild, shrill shriekings
of the Indian war-cry ! All the newly-bought weapons
flashed in the morning sun. Lewis, the clerk, fell first,
bending over a pile of goods, and rolled down the com-

THREE COMPANIES IN CONFLICT 15

panion-way with a mortal stab in his back. MacKay
was knocked from his seat on the taffrail by a war-club
and pitched overboard to the canoes, where the squaws
received him on their knives. Thorn had been roused
so suddenly that he had no weapon but his pocket-knife.
With this he was trying to fight his way to the fire
arms of the cabin, when he was driven, faint from loss
of blood, to the wheel-house. A tomahawk clubbed
down, and he, too, was pitched overboard to the knives
of the squaws.

While the officers were falling on the quarter-deck,
sailors and Sandwich Islanders were fighting to the
death elsewhere. The seven men who had been sent
up the ratlins to rig sails came shinning down ropes
and masts to gain the cabin. Two were instantly killed.
A third fell down the main hatch fatally wounded ; and
the other four got into the cabin, where they broke
holes and let fly with musket and rifle. This sent the
savages scattering overboard to the waiting canoes.
The survivors then fired charge after charge from the
deck cannon, which drove the Indians to land with tre
mendous loss of life.

All day the Indians watched the Tonquin' s sails flap
ping to the wind ; but none of the ship's crew appeared
on the deck. The next morning the Tonquin still lay
rocking to the tide; but no white men emerged from
below. Eager to plunder the apparently deserted
ship, the Indians launched their canoes and cautiously
paddled near. A white man — one of those who had
fallen down the hatch wounded — staggered up to the
deck, waved for the natives to come on board, and
dropped below. Gluttonous of booty, the savages beset
the sides of the Tonquin like flocks of carrion-birds.

16 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

Barely were they on deck when sea and air were rent
with a terrific explosion as of ten thousand cannon !
The ship was blown to atoms, bodies torn asunder, and
the sea scattered with bloody remnants of what had been
living men but a moment before.

The mortally wounded man, thought to be Lewis,
the clerk,* had determined to effect the death of his
enemies on his own pyre. Unable to escape with the
other four refugees under cover of night, he had
put a match to four tons of powder in the hold. But
the refugees might better have perished with the Ton-
quin; for head-winds drove them ashore, where they
were captured and tortured to death with all the pro
longed cruelty that savages practise. Between twenty
and thirty lives were lost in this disaster to the Pacific
Fur Company; and MacDougall was left at Astoria
with but a handful of men and a weakly-built fort to
wait the coming of the overland traders whom Mr.
Astor was sending by way of the Missouri and Co
lumbia.

* Franchere, one of the scribbling clerks whom Thorn so
detested, says this man was Weekes, who almost lost his life
entering the Columbia. Irving, who drew much of his material
from Franchere, says Lewis, and may have had special informa
tion from Mr. Astor ; but all accounts — Franchere's, and Ross
Cox's, and Alexander Ross's — are from the same source, the
Indian interpreter, who, in the confusion of the massacre, sprang
overboard into the canoes of the squaws, who spared him on
account of his race. Franchere became prominent in Montreal,
Cox in British Columbia, and Ross in Red River Settlement of
Winnipeg, where the story of the fur company conflict became
folk-lore to the old settlers. There is scarcely a family but has
some ancestor who took part in the contest among the fur com
panies at the opening of the nineteenth century, and the tale is
part of the settlement's tcaditions.

THREE COMPANIES IN CONFLICT 17

Indian runners brought vague rumours of thirty
white men building a fort on the Upper Columbia. If
these had been the overland party, they would have
come on to Astoria. Who they were, MacDougall, who
had himself been a Nor' Wester, could easily guess. As
a countercheck, Stuart of Labrador was preparing to
go up-stream and build a fur post for the Pacific Com
pany; but Astoria was suddenly electrified by the ap
parition of nine white men in a canoe flying a British
flag.

The North- West Company arrived just three months
too late !

David Thompson, the partner at the head of the
newcomers, had been delayed in the mountains by the
desertion of his guides. Much to the disgust of Labra
dor Stuart, who might change masters often but was
loyal to only one master at a time, MacDougall and
Thompson hailed each other as old friends. Every
respect is due Mr. Thompson as an explorer, but to the
Astorians living under the ruthless code of fur-trading
rivalry, he should have been nothing more than a
North- West spy, to be guardedly received in a Pacific
Company fort. As a matter of fact, he was welcomed
with open arms, saw everything, and set out again with
a supply of Astoria provisions.

History is not permitted to jump at conclusions,
but unanswered questions will always cling round
Thompson's visit. Did he bear some message from the
Nor1 Westers to MacDougall? Why was Stuart, an
honourable, fair-minded man, in such high dudgeon
that he shook free of Thompson's company on their
way back up the Columbia ? Why did MacDougall lose
his tone of courage with such surprising swiftness?
3

18 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

How could the next party of Xor' Westers take him
hack into the fold and grant him a partnership osten
sibly without the knowledge of the Xorth-West annual
council, held in Fort William on Lake Superior?

Early in August wandering tribes brought news
of the Tonquin's destruction, and Astoria bestirred it
self to strengthen pickets, erect bastions, mount four-
pounders, and drill for war. MacDougall's ]STorth-West
training now came out, and he entered on a policy
of conciliation with the Indians that culminated in his
marrying Comcomly's daughter. He also perpetrated
the world-famous threat of letting small-pox out of a
bottle exhibited to the chiefs unless they maintained
good behaviour. Traders established inland posts, the
schooner Dolly was built, and ISTew Year's Day of 1812
ushered in with a firing of cannon and festive allowance
of rum. On January 18th arrived the forerunners of
the overland party, ragged, wasted, starving, with a tale
of blundering and mismanagement that must have been
gall to MacKenzie, the old NOT' Wester accompanying
them. The main body under Hunt reached Astoria iu
February, and two other detachments later.

The management of the overlanders had been in
trusted to Wilson Price Hunt of Xew Jersey, who at
once proceeded to Montreal with Donald MacKenzie,
the Xor' Wester. Here the fine hand of the North-
West Company was first felt. Eum, threats, prom
ises, and sudden orders whisking them away prevented
capable voyageurs from enlisting under the Pacific
Company. Only worthless fellows could be engaged,
which explains in part why these empty braggarts so
often failed Mr. Hunt. Pushing up the Ottawa in

THREE COMPANIES IN CONFLICT 19

a birch canoe, Hunt and MacKenzie crossed the lake
to Michilimackinac.

Here the hand of the North-West Company was
again felt. Tattlers went from man to man telling
yarns of terror to frighten engages back. Did a man
enlist ? Sudden debts were remembered or manufac
tured, and the bill presented to Hunt. Was a voyageur
on the point of embarking? A swarm of naked brats
with a frouzy Indian wife set up a howl of woe. Hunt
finally got off with thirty men, accompanied by Mr.
Ramsay Crooks, a distinguished Nor' Wester, who af
terward became famous as the president of the Amer
ican Fur Company. Going south by way of Green Bay
and the Mississippi, Hunt reached St. Louis, where
the machinations of another rival were put to work.

Having rejected Mr. Astor's suggestion to take part
in the Pacific Company, Mr. Manuel Lisa of the Mis
souri traders did not propose to see his field invaded.
The same difficulties were encountered at St. Louis in
engaging men as at Montreal, and when Hunt was
finally ready in March, 1811, to set out with his sixty
men up the Missouri, Lisa resurrected a liquor debt
against Pierre Dorion, Hunt's interpreter, with the
fluid that cheers a French-Canadian charged at ten
dollars a quart. Pierre slipped Lisa's coil by going
overland through the woods and meeting Hunt's party
farther up-stream, beyond the law.

Whatever his motive, Lisa at once organized a
search party of twenty picked voyageurs to go up the
Missouri to the rescue of that Andrew Henry who had
fled from the Blackfeet over the mountains to Snake
River. Traders too often secured safe passage through
hostile territory in those lawless days by giving the

20 THE STORY OP THE TRAPPER

savages muskets enough to blow out the brains of the
next comers. Lisa himself was charged with this by
Crooks and MacLellan.* Perhaps that was his reason
for pushing ahead at all speed to overtake Hunt before
either party had reached Sioux territory.

Hunt got wind of the pursuit. The faster Lisa
came,, the harder Hunt fled. This curious race lasted
for a thousand miles and ended in Lisa coming up with
the Astorians on June 2d. For a second time the Span
iard tampered with Dorion. Had not two English
travellers intervened, Hunt and Lisa would have set
tled their quarrel with pistols for two. Thereafter the
rival parties proceeded in friendly fashion, Lisa helping
to gather horses for Hunt's party to cross the
mountains.

That overland journey was one of the most pitiful,
fatuous, mismanaged expeditions in the fur trade.
Why a party of sixty-four well-armed, well-provisioned
men failed in doing what any two voyageurs or trappers
were doing every day, can only be explained by compari
son to a bronco in a blizzard. Give the half-wild
prairie creature the bit, and it will carry its rider
through any storm. Jerk it to right, to left, east, and
west till it loses its confidence, and the bronco is as
helpless as the rider. So with the voyageur. Crossing
the mountains alone in his own way, he could evade
famine and danger and attack by lifting a brother
trader's cache — hidden provisions — or tarrying in In
dian lodges till game crossed his path, or marrying the
daughter of a hostile chief, or creeping so quietly

* A partner in trade with Crooks, both of whom lost every
thing going up the Missouri in Lisa's wake.

THREE COMPANIES IN CONFLICT 21

through the woods neither game nor Indian scout
could detect his presence. With a noisy cavalcade of
sixty-four all this was impossible. Broken into de
tachments, weak, emaciated, stripped naked, on the
verge of dementia and cannibalism, now shouting to
each other across a roaring canon, now sinking in de
spair before a blind wall, the overlanders finally reached
Astoria after nearly a year's wanderings.

Mr. Astor's second ship, the Beaver, arrived with
re-enforcements of men and provisions. More posts
were established inland. After several futile attempts,
despatches were sent overland to St. Louis. Under
direction of Mr. Hunt, the Beaver sailed for Alaska
to trade with the Russians. Word came from the
North- West forts on the Upper Columbia of war with
England. Mr. Astor's third ship, the Lark, was
wrecked. Astoria was now altogether in the hands of
men who had been Nor' Westers.

And what was the alert North-West Company
doing ? *

* Doings in the North-West camp have only become known
of late from the daily journals of two North-West partners —
MacDonald of Garth, whose papers were made public by a
descendant of the MacKenzies, and Alexander Henry, whose
account is in the Ottawa Library.

CHAPTER III
THE NOR' WESTERS' COUP

"It had 'been decided in council at Fort William
that the company should send the Isaac Todd to the
Columbia River, where the Americans had established
Astoria, and that a party should proceed from Fort
William (overland) to meet the ship on the coast''
wrote MacDonald of Garth, a North-West partner, for
the perusal of his children.

This was decided at the North- West council of 1812,
held annually on the shores of Lake Superior. It was
just a year from the time that Thompson had discov
ered the American fort in the hands of former Nor'
Westers. At this meeting Thompson's report must
have been read.

The overland party was to be led by the two part
ners, John George MacTavish and Alexander Henry,
the sea expedition on the Isaac Todd by Donald Mac
Tavish, who had actually been appointed governor of
the American fort in anticipation of victory. On the
Isaac Todd also went MacDonald of Garth.*

The overland expedition was to thread that laby
rinth of water-ways connecting Lake Superior and the

* A son of the English officer of the Eighty-fourth Regiment
in the American War of Independence.
22

THE NOR' WESTERS' COUP 23

Saskatchewan, thence across the plains to Athabasca,
over the northern Rockies, past Jasper House, through
Yellow Head Pass, and down half the length of the
Columbia through Kootenay plains to Astoria. One
has only to recall the roaring canons of the northern
Rockies, with their sheer cataracts and bottomless
precipices, to realize how much more hazardous this
route was than that followed by Hunt from St. Louis
to Astoria. Hunt had to cross only the plains and the
width of the Rockies. The Nor' Westers not only did
this, but passed down the middle of the Rockies for
nearly a thousand miles.

Before doubling the Horn the Isaac Todd was to
sail from Quebec to England for convoy of a war-ship.
The Nor' Westers naive assurance of victory was only
exceeded by their utter indifference to danger, diffi
culty, and distance in the attainment of an end. In
view of the terror which the Isaac Todd was alleged to
have inspired in MacDougall's mind, it is interesting
to know what the Nor' Westers thought of their ship.
"A twenty-gun letter of marque with a mongrel crew'*
writes MacDonald of Garth, "a miserable sailor with
a miserable commander and a rascally crew." On the
way out MacDonald transferred to the British convoy
Raccoon, leaving the frisky old Governor MacTavish
with his gay barmaid Jane * drinking pottle deep on
the Isaac Todd, where the rightly disgusted captain
was not on speaking terms with his Excellency. " We
were nearly six weeks before ive could double Cape
Horn, and ivere driven half-way to the Cape of Good

* Jane Barnes, an adventuress from Portsmouth, the first
white woman on the Columbia.

24 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

Hope; . . . at last doubled the cape under topsails,
. . . the deck one sheet of ice for six weeks, . . . our
sails one frozen sheet; . . . lost sight of the Isaac
Todd in a gale" wrote MacDonald on the Raccoon.

It will be remembered that Hunt's overlanders ar
rived at Astoria months after the Pacific Company's
ship. Such swift coasters of the wilderness were the
Nor' Westers, this overland party came sweeping down
the Columbia, ten canoes strong, hale, hearty, sing
ing as they paddled, a month before the Raccoon had
come, six months before their own ship, the Isaac
Todd.

And what did MacDougall do? Threw open his
gates in welcome, let an army of eighty rivals camp
under shelter of his fort guns, demeaned himself into
a pusillanimous, little, running fetch-and-carry at the
beck of the Nor' Westers, instead of keeping sternly
inside his fort, starving rivals into surrender, or train
ing his cannon upon them if they did not decamp.

Alexander Henry, the partner at the head of these
dauntless Nor' Westers, says their provisions were
"nearly all gone." But, oh! the bragging voyageurs
told those quaking Astorians terrible things of what the
Isaac Todd would do. There were to be British con
voys and captures and prize-money and prisoners of
war carried off to Sainte Anne alone knew where. The
American-born scorned these exaggerated yarns, know
ing their purpose, but not so MacDougall. All his
pot-valiant courage sank at the thought of the Isaac
Todd, and when the campers ran up a British flag he
forbade the display of American colours above Astoria.
The end of it was that he sold out Mr. Astor's interests
at forty cents on the dollar, probably salving his con-

THE NOR' WESTERS' COUP 25

science with the excuse that he had saved that percent
age of property from capture by the Eaccoon.

At the end of November a large ship was sighted
standing in over the bar with all sails spread but no
ensign out. Three shots were fired from Astoria.
There was no answer. What if this were the long-lost
Mr. Hunt coming back from Alaskan trade on the
Beaver? The doughty Nor' Westers hastily packed
their furs, ninety-two bales in all, and sent their voy-
ageurs scampering up-stream to hide and await a sig
nal. But MacDougall was equal to the emergency.
He launched out for the ship, prepared to be an Amer
ican if it were the Beaver with Mr. Hunt, a Nor'
Wester if it were the Eaccoon with a company partner.

It was the Eaccoon, and the British captain ad
dressed the Astorians in words that have become his
toric: "Is this the fort I've heard so much about?

D me, I could batter it down in two hours with a

four-pounder! "

Two weeks later the Union Jack was hoisted above
Astoria, with traders and marines drawn up under arms
to fire a volley. A bottle of Madeira was broken against
the flagstaff, the country pronounced a British posses
sion by the captain, cheers given, and eleven guns fired
from the bastions.

At this stage all accounts, particularly American
accounts, have rung down the curtain on the catastro
phe, leaving the Nor' Westers intoxicated with success.
But another act was to complete the disasters of As
toria, for the very excess of intoxication brought swift
judgment on the revelling Nor' Westers.

The Eaccoon left on the last day of 1813. Mac
Dougall had been appointed partner in the North- West

26 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

Company,, and the other Canadians re-engaged under
their own flag. When Hunt at last arrived in the
Pedler, which he had chartered after the wreck of
Mr. Astor's third vessel, the Lark, it was too late to do
more than carry away those Americans still loyal to
Mr. Astor. Farnham was left at Kamtchatka, whence
he made his way to Europe. The others were captured
off California and they afterward scattered to all parts
of the world. Early in April, 1814, a brigade of Nor'
Westers, led by MacDonald of Garth and the younger
MacTavish, set out for the long journey across the
mountains and prairie to the company's headquarters
at Fort William. In the flotilla of ten canoes went
many of the old Astorians. Two weeks afterward came
the belated Isaac Todd with the Nor' Westers' white
flag at its foretop and the dissolute old Governor Mac
Tavish holding a high carnival of riot in the cabin.

No darker picture exists than that of Astoria — or
Fort George, as the British called it — under Governor
MacTavish's regime. The picture is from the hand of
a North- West partner himself. "Not in bed till 2 A. M. ;
. . . the gentlemen and the crew all drunk; ... fa
mous fellows for grog they are; . . . diced for articles
belonging to Mr. M." Alexander Henry had written
when the Eaccoon was in port ; and now under Gover
nor MacTavish's vicious example every pretence to de
cency was discarded.

" Avec les loups il faut liurler " was a common say
ing among Nor' Westers, and perhaps that very assimi
lation to the native races which contributed so much to
success also contributed to the trader's undoing. White
men and Indians vied with each other in mutual de
basement. Chinook and Saxon and Frenchmen alike

THE NOR' WESTERS' COUP 27

lay on the sand sodden with corruption; and if one
died from carousals, companions weighted neck and
feet with stones and pushed the corpse into the river.
Quarrels broke out between the wassailing governor
and the other partners. Emboldened, the underlings
and hangers-on indulged in all sorts of theft. " All the
gentlemen were intoxicated/' writes one who was pres
ent; seven hours rowing one mile., innocently states the
record of another day, the tide running seven feet high
past the fort.

The spring rains had ceased. Mountain peaks
emerged from the empurpled horizon in domes of opal
above the clouds, and the Columbia was running its
annual mill-race of spring floods, waters milky from
the silt of countless glaciers and turbulent from the
rush of a thousand cataracts. Governor MacTavish *
and Alexander Henry had embarked with six voyageurs
to cross the river. A blustering wind caught the sail.
A tidal wave pitched amidships. The craft filled and
sank within sight of the fort.

So perished the conquerors of Astoria !

* In justice to the many descendants of the numerous clan
MacTavish in the service of the fur companies, this MacTavish
should be distinguished from others of blameless lives.

CHAPTER IV

THE ANCIENT HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY WAKENS UP

THOSE eighty f Astorians and Nor' Westers who
set inland with their ten canoes and boats under pro
tection of two swivels encountered as many dangers on
the long trip across the continent as they had left at
Fort George.

Following the wandering course of the Columbia,
the traders soon passed the international boundary
northward into the Arrow Lakes with their towering
sky-line of rampart walls, on to the great bend of the
Columbia where the river becomes a tumultuous tor
rent milky with glacial sediment, now raving through
a narrow canon, now teased into a white whirlpool by
obstructing rocks, now tumbling through vast shadowy
forests, now foaming round the green icy masses of
some great glacier, and always mountain-girt by the
tent-like peaks of the eternal snows.

"A plain, unvarnished tale, my dear Belief euille"
wrote the mighty MacDonald of Garth in his eighty-
sixth year for a son; but the old trader's tale needed
no varnish of rhetoric. " Near ing the mountains we
got scarce of provisions; . . . bought horses for beef.
. . . Here (at the Great Bend) we left canoes and be-

* Some say seventy-four.
28

ANCIENT HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY WAKENS UP 29

gan a mountain pass (Yellow Head Pass). . . . The
river meanders much, . . . and we cut across, . . .
holding by one another's hands, . . . wading to the
hips in water, dashing in, frozen at one point, thawed
at the next, . . . frozen before we dashed in, . . . our
men carrying blankets and provisions on their heads;
. . . four days' hard work before we got to Jasper
House at the source of the Athabasca, sometimes camp
ing on snow twenty feet deep, so that the fires we made
in the evening were fifteen or twenty feet below us in
the morning."

They had now crossed the mountains, and taking to
canoes again paddled down-stream to the portage be
tween Athabasca River and the Saskatchewan. Tramp
ing sixty miles, they reached Fort Augustus (Edmon
ton) on the Saskatchewan, where canoes were made on
the spot, and the voyageurs launched down-stream a
trifling distance of two thousand miles by the windings
of the river, past Lake Winnipeg southward to Fort
William, the Nor' Westers' headquarters on Lake Su
perior.

Here the capture of Astoria was reported, and bales
to the value of a million dollars in modern money sent
east in fifty canoes with an armed guard of three hun
dred men.* Coasting along the north shore of Lake
Superior, the voyageurs came to the Sault and found
Mr. Johnston's establishment a scene of smoking
ruins. It was necessary to use the greatest caution
not to attract the notice of warring parties on the
Lakes.

* The enormous returns made up largely of the Astoria cap
ture. The unusually large guard was no doubt owing to the
W»r of 1812.

30 THE STORY OP THE TRAPPER

" Overhauled a canoe going eastward, . . . a Mack
inaw trader and four Indians with a dozen fresh Ameri
can scalps" writes MacDonald, showing to what a pass
things had come. Two days later a couple of boats
were overtaken and compelled to halt by a shot from
MacDonald's swivels. The strangers proved to be the
escaping crew of a British ship which had been captured
by two American schooners, and the British officer bore
bad news. The American schooners were now on the
lookout for the rich prize of furs being taken east
in the North-West canoes. Slipping under the nose
of these schooners in the dark, the officer hurried to
Mackinac, leaving the Nor' Westers hidden in the
mouth of French Eiver. William MacKay, a Nor'
West partner, at once sallied out to the defence of
the furs.

Determined to catch the brigade, one schooner was
hovering about the Sault, the other cruising into the
countless recesses of the north shore. Against the lat
ter the Mackinaw traders directed their forces, board
ing her, and, as MacDonald tells with brutal frankness,
"pinning the crew with fixed bayonets to the deck."
Lying snugly at anchor, the victors awaited the com
ing of the other unsuspecting schooner, let her cast an
chor, bore down upon her, poured in a broadside, and
took both schooners to Mackinac. Freed from all ap
prehension of capture, the North- West brigade proceed
ed eastward to the Ottawa River, and without further
adventure came to Montreal, where all was wild confu
sion from another cause.

At the very time when war endangered the entire
route of the Nor' Westers from Montreal to the Pacific,
the Hudson's Bay Company awakened from its long

India. n voijayeurs "packing" over long poftage, each packet
containing from fifty to one hundred pounds.

ANCIENT HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY WAKENS UP 31

sleep. While Mr. Astor was pushing his schemes in
the United States, Lord Selkirk was formulating plans
for the control of all Canada's fur trade. Like Mr.
Astor, he too had been the guest at the North-West ban
quets in the Beaver Club, Montreal, and had heard
fabulous things from those magnates of the north about
wealth made in the fur trade. Returning to England,
Lork Selkirk bought up enough stock of the Hudson's
Bay Company to give him full control, and secured
from the shareholders an enormous grant of land
surrounding the mouths of the Red and Assiniboine
rivers.

Where the Assiniboine joins the northern Red were
situated Fort Douglas (later Fort Garry, now Winni
peg), the headquarters of the Hudson's Bay Company,
and Fort Gibraltar, the North- West post whence sup
plies were sent all the way from the Mandans on the
Missouri to the Eskimo in the arctics.

Not satisfied with this coup, Lord Selkirk- engaged
Colin Robertson, an old Nor' Wester, to gather a bri
gade of voyageurs two hundred strong at Montreal and
proceed up the Nor' Westers' route to Athabasca, Mac-
Ivenzie River, and the Rockies. This was the noisy,
blustering, bragging company of gaily-bedizened fel
lows that had turned the streets of Montreal into a
roistering booth when the Astorians came to the end
of their long eastward journey. Poor, fool-happy rev
ellers ! Eighteen of them died of starvation in the far,
cold north, owing to the conflict between Fort Doug
las and Gibraltar, which delayed supplies.

Beginning in 1811, Lord Selkirk poured a stream
of colonists to his newly-acquired territory by way of
Churchill and York Factory on Hudson Bay. These

32 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

people were given lands, and in return expected to de
fend the Hudson's Bay Company from Nor' Westers.
The Nor' Westers struck back by discouraging the col
onists, shipping them free out of the country, and get
ting possession of their arms.

Miles MacDonell, formerly of the King's Royal Regi
ment, New York, governor of the Hudson's Bay Com
pany at Fort Douglas, at once issued proclamations
forbidding Indians to trade furs with Nor' Westers
and ordering Nor' Westers from the country. On the
strength of these proclamations two or three outlying
North- West forts were destroyed and North-West fur
brigades rifled. Duncan Cameron,* the North-West
partner at Fort Gibraltar, countered by letting his
Bois-BruUs, a ragged half-breed army of wild plain
rangers under Cuthbert Grant, canter across the two
miles that separated the rival forts, and pour a vol
ley of musketry into the Hudson Bay houses. To
save the post for the Hudson's Bay Company, Miles
MacDonell gave himself up and was shipped out of
the country.

But the Hudson's Bay fort was only biding its time
till the valiant North- West defenders had scattered to
their winter posts. Then an armed party seized Duncan
Cameron not far from the North- West fort, and with
pistol cocked by one man, publicly horsewhipped the
Nor' Wester. Afterward, when Semple, the new Hud
son's Bay governor, was absent from Fort Douglas and
could not therefore be held responsible for consequences,
the Hudson's Bay men, led by the same Colin Robertson

* An antecedent of the late Sir Roderick Cameron of New
York.

ANCIENT HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY WAKENS UP 33

who had brought the large brigade from Montreal,
inarched across the prairie to Fort Gibraltar, captured
Mr. Cameron, plundered all the Nor' Westers' stores,
and burned the fort to the ground. By way of retalia
tion for MacDonelPs expulsion, the North- West partner
was shipped down to Hudson Bay, where he might as
well have been on Devil's Island for all the chance of
escape.

One company at fault as often as the other, similar
outrages were perpetrated in all parts of the north fur
country, the blood of rival traders being spilt with
out a qualm of conscience or thought of results. The
effect of this conflict among white men on the blood
thirsty red-skins one may guess. The Bois-Brules were
clamouring for Cuthbert Grant's permission to wipe
the English — meaning the Hudson's Bay men — off the
earth; and the Swampy Crees and Saulteaux undei*
Chief Peguis were urging Governor Semple to let
them defend the Hudson's Bay — meaning kill the Nor'
Westers.

The crisis followed sharp on the destruction of
Fort Gibraltar. That post had sent all supplies to
North- West forts. If Fort Douglas of the Hudson's
Bay Company, past which North- West canoes must pad
dle to turn westward to the plains, should intercept the
incoming brigade of Nor' Westers' supplies, what
would become of the two thousand North- West traders
and voyageurs and engages inland? Whether the Hud
son's Bay had such intentions or not, the Nor' Westers
were determined to prevent the possibility.

Like the red cross that called ancient clans to arms,
fccouts went scouring across the plains to rally the Bois-
f rules from Portage la Prairie and Souris and Qu'Ap-
4

34 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

pelle.* Led by Cuthbert Grant, they skirted north, of
the Hudson's Bay post to meet and disembark supplies
above Fort Douglas. It was but natural for the settlers
to mistake this armed cavalcade, red with paint and
chanting war-songs, for hostiles.

Rushing to Fort Douglas, the settlers gave the
alarm. Ordering a field-piece to follow, Governor
Semple marched out with a little army of twenty-eight
Hudson's Bay men. The Kor' Westers thought that he
meant to obstruct their way till his other forces had
captured their coming canoes. The Hudson's Bay
thought that Cuthbert Grant meant to attack the Sel
kirk settlers.

It was in the evening of June 19, 1816. The two
parties met at the edge of a swamp beside a cluster of
trees, since called Seven Oaks. Nor' Westers say that
Governor Semple caught the bridle of their scout and
tried to throw him from his horse. The Hudson's Bay
say that the governor had no sooner got within range
than the half-breed scout leaped down and fired from
the shelter of his horse, breaking Semple's thigh.

It is well known how the first blood of battle has
the same effect on all men of whatever race. The hu
man is eclipsed by that brute savagery which comes
down from ages when man was a creature of prey. In
a trice twenty-one of the Hudson's Bay men lay dead.
While Grant had turned to obtain carriers to bear the
wounded governor off the field, poor Semple was bru-

* More of the voyageurs1 romance ; named because of a voice
heard calling and calling across the lake as voyageurs entered
the valley — said to be the spirit of an Indian girl calling her
lover, though prosaic sense explains it was the echo of the
voyageurs' song among the hills.

ANCIENT HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY WAKENS UP 35

tally murdered by one of the Deschamps family, who
ran from body to body, perpetrating the crimes of
ghouls. It was in vain for Grant to expostulate. The
wild blood of a savage race had been roused. The soft
velvet night of the summer prairie, with the winds
crooning the sad monotone of a limitless sea, closed
over a scene of savages drunk with slaughter, of men
gone mad with the madness of murder, of warriors
thinking to gain courage by drinking the blood of the
slain.

Grant saved the settlers' lives by sending them
down-stream to Lake Winnipeg, where dwelt the friend
ly Chief Peguis. On the river they met the indomitable
Miles MacDonell, posting back to resume authority. He
brought news that must have been good cheer. Moved
by the expelled governor's account of disorders, Lord
Selkirk was hastening north, armed with the authority
of a justice of the peace, escorted by soldiers in full
regalia as became his station, with cannon mounted
on his barges and stores of munition that ill agreed
with the professions of a peaceful justice.

The time has gone past for quibbling as to the
earl's motives in pushing north armed like a lord of
war. MacDonell hastened back and met him with his
army of Des Meurons * at the Sault. In August Lord
Selkirk appeared before Fort William with uniformed
soldiers in eleven boats. The justice of the peace set
his soldiers digging trenches opposite the Nor' West
ers' fort. As for the Nor' Westers, they had had
enough of blood. They capitulated without one blow.
Selkirk took full possession.

* Continental soldiers disbanded after the Napoleonic wars.

36 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

Six months later (1817), when ice had closed the
rivers, he sent Captain d'Orsennens overland westward
to Red River, where Fort Douglas was captured back
one stormy winter night by the soldiers scaling the
fort walls during a heavy snowfall. The conflict had
been just as ruthless on the Saskatchewan. Nor7 West
ers were captured as they disembarked to pass Grand
Rapids and shipped down to York Factory, where
Franklin the explorer saw four Nor' Westers maltreat
ed. One of them was the same John George MacTavish
who had helped to capture Astoria ; another, Frobisher,
a partner, was ultimately done to death by the abuse.
The Deschamps murderers of Seven Oaks fled south,
where their crimes brought terrible vengeance from
American traders.

Victorious all along the line, the Hudson's Bay
Company were in a curious quandary. Suits enough
were pressing in the courts to ruin both companies ; and
for the most natural reason in the world, neither Hud
son Bay nor Nor' Wester could afford to have the truth
told and the crimes probed. There was only one way
out of the dilemma. In March, 1821, the companies
amalgamated under the old title of Hudson's Bay. In
April, 1822, a new fort was built half-way between the
sites of Gibraltar and Fort Douglas, and given the new
name of Fort Garry by Sir George Simpson, the gov
ernor, to remove all feeling of resentment. The thou
sand men thrown out of employment by the union at
once crossed the line and enlisted with American
traders.

The Hudson's Bay was now strong with the strength
that comes from victorious conflict — so strong, indeed,
that it not only held the Canadian field, but in spite

ANCIENT HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY WAKENS UP 37

of the American law * forbidding British traders in
the United States, reached as far south as Utah and
the Missouri, where it once more had a sharp brush with
lusty rivals.

* A law that could not, of course, be enforced, except as to
the building of permanent forts, in regions beyond the reach of
law's enforcement.

CHAPTER V

MR. ASTOR'S COMPANY ENCOUNTERS NEW OPPONENTS

THAT Andrew Henry whom Lisa had sought when
he pursued the Astorians up the Missouri continued to
be dogged by misfortune on the west side of the moun
tains. Game was scarce and his half-starving follow
ers were scattered, some to the British posts in the
north, some to the Spaniards in the south, and some
to the nameless graves of the mountains. Henry forced
his way back over the divide and met Lisa in the Ari-
cara country. The British war broke out and the Mis
souri Company were compelled to abandon the danger
ous territory of the Blackfeet, who could purchase arms
from the British traders, raid the Americans, and
scurry back to Canada.

When Lisa died in 1820 more than three hundred
Missouri men were again in the mountains; but they
suffered the same ill luck. Jones and Immel's party
were annihilated by the Blackfeet; and Pilcher, who
succeeded to Lisa's position and dauntlessly crossed
over to the Columbia,, had all his supplies stolen,
reaching the Hudson's Bay post, Fort Colville, almost
destitute. The British rivals received him with
that hospitality for which they were renowned when
trade was not involved, and gave him escort up the
Columbia, down the Athabasca and Saskatchewan to
38

ASTOE ENCOUNTERS NEW OPPONENTS 39

Red River, thence overland to the Mandan country and
St. Louis.

These two disasters marked the wane of the Mis
souri Company.

But like the shipwrecked sailor, no sooner safe on
land than he must to sea again, the indomitable Andrew
Henry linked his fortunes with General Ashley of St.
Louis. Gathering to the new standard Campbell,
Bridger, Fitzpatrick, Beckworth, Smith, and the Sub-
lettes — men who made the Rocky Mountain trade
famous — Ashley and Henry led one hundred men to
the mountains the first year and two hundred the
next. In that time not less than twenty-five lives were
lost among Aricaras and Blackfeet. Few pelts were
obtained and the expeditions were a loss.

But in 1824 came a change. Smith met Hudson's
Bay trappers loaded with beaver pelts in the Columbia
basin, west of the Rockies. They had become separated
from their leader, Alexander Ross, an old Astorian.
Details of this bargain will never be known ; but when
Smith came east he had the Hudson's Bay furs. This
was the first brush between Rocky Mountain men and
the Hudson's Bay, and the mountain trappers scored.

Henceforth, to save time, the active trappers met
their supplies annually at a rendezvous in the moun
tains, in Pierre's Hole, a broad valley below the Tetons,
or Jackson's Hole, east of the former, or Ogden's Hole
at Salt Lake. Seventeen Rocky Mountain men had been
massacred by the Snake Indians in the Columbia basin ;
but that did not deter General Ashley himself from
going up the Platte, across the divide to Salt Lake.
Here he found Peter Ogden, a Hudson's Bay trapper,
with an enormous prize of beaver pelts. When the Hud-

40 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

son's Bay man left Salt Lake, he had no furs ; and when
General Ashley came away, his packers were laden with
a quarter of a million dollars worth of pelts. This
was the second brush between Rocky Mountain and
Hudson's Bay, and again the mountaineers scored.

The third encounter was more to the credit of both
companies. After three years' wanderings, Smith
found himself stranded and destitute at the British post
of Fort Vancouver. Fifteen of his men had been killed,
his horses taken and peltries stolen. The Hudson's Bay
sent a punitive force to recover his property, gave him
a $20,000 draft for the full value of the recovered furs,
and sent him up the Columbia. Thenceforth Rocky
Mountain trappers and Hudson's Bay respected each
other's rights in the valley of the Columbia, but south
ward the old code prevailed. Fitzpatrick, a Rocky
Mountain trader, came on the same poor Peter Ogdcn
at Salt Lake trading with the Indians, and at once
plied the argument of whisky so actively that the furs
destined for Red River went over the mountains to St.
Louis.

The trapper probably never heard of a Nemesis;
but a curious retribution seemed to follow on the heels
of outrage.

Lisa had tried to balk the Astorians, and the Mis
souri Company went down before Indian hostility.
The Nor' Westers jockeyed the Astorians out of their
possessions and were in league with murderers at the
massacre of Seven Oaks; but the Nor' Westers were
jockeyed out of existence by the Hudson's Bay under
Lord Selkirk. The Hudson's Bay had been guilty of
rank outrage — particularly on the Saskatchewan, where
North- West partners were seized, manacled, and sent

ASTOR ENCOUNTERS NEW OPPONENTS 41

to a wilderness — and now the Hudson's Bay were cheat
ed, cajoled, overreached by the Rocky Mountain trap
pers. And the Rocky Mountain trappers, in their turn,
met a rival that could outcheat their cheatery.

In 1831 the mountains were overrun with trappers
from all parts of America. Men from every State in
the Union, those restless spirits who have pioneered
every great movement of the race, turned their faces
to the wilderness for furs as a later generation was to
scramble for gold.

In the summer of 1832, when the hunters came down
to Pierre's Hole for their supplies, there were trappers
who had never before summered away from Detroit
and Mackinaw and Hudson Bay.* There were half-
wild Frenchmen from Quebec who had married In
dian wives and cast off civilization as an ill-fitting
garment. There were Indian hunters with the mel
low, rhythmic tones that always betray native blood.
There were lank Xew Englanders under Wyeth of Bos
ton, erect as a mast pole, strong of jaw, angular of mo
tion, taking clumsily to buckskins. There were the
Rocky Mountain men in tattered clothes, with unkempt
hair and long beards, and a trick of peering from their
bushy brows like an enemy from ambush. There were
probably odd detachments from Captain Bonneville's
adventurers on the Platte, where a gay army adventurer
was trying his luck as fur trader and explorer. And
there was a new set of men, not yet weather-worn by
the wilderness, alert, watchful, ubiquitous, scattering
themselves among all groups where they could hear
everything, see all, tell nothing, always shadowing the
Rocky Mountain men who knew every trail of the wilds

* For example, the Deschamps of Red River.

42 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

and should be good pilots to the best hunting-grounds.
By the middle of July all business had been completed,
and the trappers spent a last night round camp-fires,
spinning yarns of the hunt.

Early in the morning when the Rocky Mountain
men were sallying from the valley, they met a cavalcade
of one hundred and iifty Blackfeet. Each party halted
to survey its opponent. In less than ten years the
Rocky Mountain men had lost more than seventy com
rades among hostiles. Even now the Indians were
flourishing a flag captured from murdered Hudson's
Bay hunters.

The number of whites disconcerted the Indians.
Their warlike advance gave place to friendliness. One
chief came forward with the hand of comity extended.
The whites were not deceived. Many a time had Rocky
Mountain trappers been lured to their death by such
overtures.

No excuse is offered for the hunters. The code of
the wilderness never lays the unction of a hypocritical
excuse to conscience. The trappers sent two scouts to
parley with the detested enemy. One trapper, with In
dian blood in his veins and Indian thirst for the avenge-
ment of a kinsman's death in his heart, grasped the
chief's extended hand with the clasp of a steel trap.
On the instant the other scout fired. The powerless
chief fell dead ; and using their horses as a breastwork,
the Blackfeet hastily threw themselves behind some
timber, cast up trenches, and shot from cover.

All the trappers at the rendezvous spurred to the
fight, priming guns, casting off valuables, making their
wills as they rode. The battle lasted all day; and when
under cover of night the Indians withdrew, twelve men

ASTOR ENCOUNTERS NEW OPPONENTS 43

lay dead on the trappers' side, as many more were
wounded; and the Blackfeet's loss was twice as great.
For years this tribe exacted heavy atonement for the
death of warriors behind the trenches of Pierre's
Hole.

Leaving Pierre's Hole the mountaineers scattered
to their rocky fastnesses, but no sooner had they pitched
camp on good hunting-grounds than the strangers who
had shadowed them at the rendezvous came up. Break
ing camp, the Rocky Mountain men would steal awray
by new and unknown passes to another valley. A day
or two later, having followed by tent-poles dragging
the ground, or brushwood broken by the passing pack
ers, the pertinacious rivals would reappear. This went
on persistently for three months.

Infuriated by such tactics, the mountaineers
planned to lead the spies a dance. Plunging into
the territory of hostiles they gave their pursuers the
slip. Neither party 'probably intended that matters
should become serious; but that is always the fault of
the white man when he plays the dangerous game of
war with Indians. The spying party was ambushed, the
leader slain, his flesh torn from his body and his skele
ton thrown into the river. A few months later the
Rocky Mountain traders paid for this escapade. Fitz-
patrick, the same trapper who had " lifted " Ogden's
furs and led this game against the spies, was robbed
among Indians instigated by white men of the American
Fur Company. This marked the beginning of the end
writh the Rocky Mountain trappers.

The American Fur Company, which Mr. Astor had
organized and stuck to through good repute and evil
repute, was now officered by Ramsay Crooks and Farn-

44 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

ham and Robert Stuart, who had remained loyal to Mr.
Astor in Astoria and been schooled in a discipline that
offered no quarter to enemies. The purchase of the
Mackinaw Company gave the American Company all
those posts between the Great Lakes and the height of
land dividing the Mississippi and Missouri. When
Congress excluded foreign traders in 1816, all the Nor
Westers' posts south of the boundary fell to the Ameri
can Fur Company; and sturdy old Nor' Westers, who
had been thrown out by the amalgamation with the
Hudson's Bay, also added to the Americans' strength.
Kenneth MacKenzie, with Laidlaw, Lament, and Kipp,
had a line of posts from Green Bay to the Missouri
held by an American to evade the law, but known as
the Columbia Company.

This organization * the American Fur Company
bought out, placing MacKenzie at the mouth of the Yel
lowstone, where he built Fort Union and became the
Pooh-Bah of the whole region, living in regal style like
his ancestral Scottish chiefs. " King of the Missouri "
white men called him, " big Indian me " the Blackfeet
said ; and " big Indian me " he was to them, for he was
the first trader to win both their friendship and the
Crows'.

Here MacKenzie entertained Prince Maximilian of
Wied and Catlin the artist and Audubon the naturalist,
and had as his constant companion Hamilton, an Eng
lish nobleman living in disguise and working for the
fur company. Many an unmeant melodrama was en-
acter under the walls of Union in MacKenzie's reign.

Once a free trapper came floating down the Mis-

* Chittenden.

ASTOR ENCOUNTERS NEW OPPONENTS 45

eouri with his canoe full of beaver-pelts, which he
quickly exchanged for the gay attire to be obtained at
Fort Union. Oddly enough,, though the fellow was a
French-Canadian, he had long, flaxen hair, of which lie
was inordinately vain. Strutting about the court-yard,
feeling himself a very prince of importance, he saw
MacKenzie's pretty young Indian wife. Each paid the
other the tribute of adoration that was warmer than
it was wise. The denouement was a vision of the flaxen-
haired Siegfried sprinting at the top of his speed
through the fort gate, with the irate MacKenzie flour
ishing a flail to the rear. The matter did not end here.
The outraged Frenchman swore to kill MacKenzie on
sight, and haunted the fort gates with a loaded rifle
till MacKenzie was obliged to hire a mulatto servant to
" wing " the fellow with, a shot in the shoulder, when
he was brought into the fort, nursed back to health, and
sent away.

At another time two Rocky Mountain trappers built
an opposition fort just below Union and lay in wait
for the coming of the Blackfeet to trade with the Amer
ican Fur Company. MacKenzie posted a lookout on his
bastion. The moment the Indians were descried, out
sallied from Fort Union a band in full regalia, with
drum and trumpet and piccolo and fife — wonders that
would have lured the astonished Indians to perdition.
Behind the band came gaudy presents for the savages,
and what was not supposed to be in the Indian country
— liquor. When these methods failed to outbuy rivals,
MacKenzie did not hesitate to pay twelve dollars for
a beaver-skin not worth two. The Rocky Mountain
trappers were forced to capitulate, and their post
passed over to the American Fur Company.

46 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

In the ruins of their post was enacted a fitting finale
to the turbulent conflicts of the American traders. The
Deschamps family, who had perpetrated the worst
butcheries on the field of Seven Oaks, in the fight be
tween Hudson's Bay and Nor' Westers, had acted as in
terpreters for the Rocky Mountain trappers. Boast
ful of their murderous record in Canada, the father,
mother, and eight grown children were usually so vio
lent in their carousals that Hamilton, the English
gentleman, used to quiet their outrage and prevent
trouble by dropping laudanum in their cups. Once they
slept so heavily that the whole fort was in a panic lest
their sleep lasted to eternity; but the revellers came
to life defiant as ever. At Union was a very handsome
young half-breed fellow by the name of Gardepie, whose
life the Deschamps harpies attempted to take from
sheer jealousy and love of crime. Joined by two free
trappers, Gardepie killed the elder Deschamps one
morning at breakfast with all the gruesome mutilation
of Indian custom. He at the same time wounded a
younger son. Spurred by the hag-like mother and
nerved to the deed with alcohol, the Deschamps under
took to avenge their father's death by killing all the
whites of the fur post. One man had fallen when the
alarm was carried to Fort Union.

Twice had the Deschamps robbed Fort Union.
Many trappers had been assassinated by a Deschamps.
Indians had been flogged by them for no other purpose
than to inflict torture. Beating on the doors of Fort
Union, the wife of their last victim called out that the
Deschamps were on the war-path.

The traders of Fort Union solemnly raised hands
and took an oath to exterminate the murderous clan.

ASTOR ENCOUNTERS NEW OPPONENTS 47

The affair had gone beyond MacKenzie's control. Seiz
ing cannon and ammunition, the traders crossed the
prairie to the abandoned fort of the Rocky Mountain
trappers, where the murderers were intrenched. All
valuables were removed from the fort. Time was given
for the family to prepare for death. Then the guns
were turned on the house. Suddenly that old harpy of
crime, the mother, rushed out, holding forward the In
dian pipe of peace and begging for mercy.

She got all the mercy that she had ever given, and
fell shot through the heart.

At last the return firing ceased. Who would enter
and learn if the Deschamps were all dead? Treachery
was feared. The assailants set fire to the fort. In the
light of the flames one man was espied crouching in the
bastion. A trader rushed forward exultant to shoot
the last of the Deschamps; but a shot from the bastion
sent him leaping five feet into the air to fall back dead,
and a yell of fiendish victory burst from the burning
tower.*

Again the assailants fired a volley. No answering
shot came from the fort. Rushing through the smoke
the traders found Francois Deschamps backed up in
a corner like a beast at bay, one wrist broken and all
ammunition gone. A dozen rifle-shots cracked sharp.
The fellow fell and his body was thrown into the
flames. The old mother was buried without shroud
or coffin in the clay bank of the river. A young boy
mortally wounded was carried from the ruins to die
in Union.

* Larpenteur, who was there, has given even a more circum
stantial account of this terrible tragedy.

48 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

This dark act marked the last important episode
in the long conflict among traders. A decline of values
followed the civil war. Settlers were rushing overland
to Oregon, and Fort Union went into the control of the
militia. To-day St. Louis is still a centre of trade in
manufactured furs, and St. Paul yet receives raw pelts
from trappers who wander through the forests of Min
nesota and Idaho and the mountains. Only a year ago
the writer employed as guides in the mountains three
trappers who have spe.it their lives ranging the north
ern wilds and the Upper Missouri; but outside the
mountain and forest wastes, the vast hunting-grounds
of the famous old trappers have been chalked off by
the fences of settlers.

In Canada, too, bloodshed marked the last of the
conflict — once in the seventies when Louis Kiel, a half-
breed demagogue, roused the Metis against the survey
ors sent to prepare Eed Kiver for settlement, and again
in 1885 when this unhanged rascal incited the half-
breeds of the Saskatchewan to rebellion over title-deeds
to their lands. Though the Hudson's Bay Company
had nothing to do with either complaint, the conflict
waged round their forts.

In the first affair the ragged army of rebels took
possession of Fort Garry, and for no other reason than
the love of killing that riots in savage blood as in a
wolf's, shot down Scott outside the fort gates. In the
second rebellion Eiel's allies came down on the far-
isolated Fort Pitt three hundred strong, captured the
fort, and took the factor, Mr. MacLean, and his family
to northern wastes, marching them through swamps
breast-high with spring floods, where General Middle-
ton's troops could not follow. The children of the fam-

ASTOR ENCOUNTERS NEW OPPONENTS 49

ily had been in the habit of bribing old Indian gossips
into telling stories by gifts of tobacco; and the friend
ship now stood the white family in good stead. Day
and night in all the weeks of captivity the friendly In
dians never left the side of the trader's family, slipping
between the hostiles and the young children, standing
guard at the tepee door, giving them weapons of defence
till all were safely back among the whites.

This time Kiel was hanged, and the Hudson's Bay
Company resumed its sway of all that realm between
Labrador and the Pacific north of the Saskatchewan.

Traders' lives are like a white paper with a black
spot. The world looks only at the black spot.

In spite of his faults when in conflict with rivals,
it has been the trader living alone, unprotected and un-
fearing, one voice among a thousand, who has re
strained the Indian tribes from massacres that would
have rolled back the progress of the West a quarter of
a century.

CHAPTER VI

' THE FRENCH TRAPPER

To live hard and die hard, king in the wilderness
and pauper in the town, lavish to-day and penniless
to-morrow — such was the life of the most picturesque
figure in America's history.

Take a map of America. Put your finger on any
point between the Gulf of Mexico and Hudson Bay,
or the Great Lakes and the Rockies. Ask who was the
first man to blaze a trail into this wilderness; and
wherever you may point, the answer is the same — the
French trapper.

Impoverished English noblemen of the seventeenth
century took to freebooting, Spanish dons to piracy
and search for gold ; but for the young French noblesse
the way to fortune was by the fur trade. Freedom from
restraint, quick wealth, lavish spending, and adventur
ous living all appealed to a class that hated the menial
and slow industry of the farm. The only capital re
quired for the fur trade was dauntless courage. Mer
chants were keen to supply money enough to stock
canoes with provisions for trade in the wilderness.
What would be equivalent to $5,000 of modern money
was sufficient to stock four trappers with trade enough
for two years.

At the end of that time the sponsors looked for re-
50

THE FRENCH TRAPPER 51

turns in furs to the value of eight hundred per cent on
their capital. The original investment would be de
ducted, and the enormous profit divided among the
trappers and their outfitters. In the heyday of the fur
trade, when twenty beaver-skins were got for an axe, it
was no unusual thing to see a trapper receive what
would be equivalent to $3,000 of our money as his
share of two years' trapping. But in the days when
the French were only beginning to advance up the
Missouri from Louisiana and across from Michili-
mackinac to the Mississippi vastly larger fortunes were
made.

Two partners * have brought out as much as $200,-
000 worth of furs from the great game preserve be
tween Lake Superior and the head waters of the Mis
souri after eighteen months' absence from St. Louis
or from Montreal. The fur country was to the young
French nobility what a treasure-ship was to a pirate.
In vain France tried to keep her colonists on the land
by forbidding trade without a license. Fines, the gal
leys for life, even death for repeated offence, were the
punishments held over the head of the illicit trader.
The French trapper evaded all these by staying in the
wilds till he amassed fortune enough to buy off pun
ishment, or till he had lost taste for civilized life and
remained in the wilderness, coureur des bois, voyageur,
or leader of a band of half-wild retainers whom he
ruled like a feudal baron, becoming a curious connect
ing link between the savagery of the New World and
the noblesse of the Old.

Duluth, of the Lakes region; La Salle, of the Mis-

* Radisson and Groseillers, from regions westward of Duluth.

52 THE STORY O*1 THE TRAPPER

sissippi; Le Moyne d'Iberville, ranging from Louisiana
to Hudson Bay ; La Mothe Cadillac in Michilimackinac,
Detroit, and Louisiana; La Verendrye exploring from
Lake Superior to the Rockies ; Radisson on Hudson
Bay — all won their fame as explorers and discoverers
in pursuit of the fur trade. A hundred years before
any English mind knew of the Missouri, French voy-
ageurs had gone beyond the Yellowstone. Before the
regions now called Minnesota, Dakota, and Wisconsin
were known to New Englanders, the French were trap
ping about the head waters of the Mississippi; and two
centuries ago a company of daring French hunters went
to New Mexico to spy on Spanish trade.

East of the Mississippi were two neighbours whom
the French trapper shunned — the English colonists and
the Iroquois. North of the St. Lawrence was a power
that he shunned still more — the French governor, who
had legal right to plunder the peltries of all who traded
and trapped without license. But between St. Louis
and MacKenzie River was a great unclaimed wilder
ness, whence came the best furs.

Naturally, this became the hunting-ground of the
French trapper.

There were four ways by which he entered his hunt
ing-ground: (1) Sailing from Quebec to the mouth of
the Mississippi, he ascended the river in pirogue or
dugout, but this route was only possible for a man with
means to pay for the ocean voyage. (2) From Detroit
overland to the Illinois, or Ohio, which he rafted down
to the Mississippi, and then taking to canoe turned
north. (3) From Michilimackinac, which was always
a grand rendezvous for the French and Indian hunters,
to Green Bay on Lake Michigan, thence up-stream to

THE FRENCH TRAPPER 53

Fox Elver, overland to the Wisconsin, and down-stream
to the Mississippi. (4) Up the Ottawa through "the
Soo " to Lake Superior and westward to the hunting-
ground. Whichever way he went his course was mainly
up-stream and north: hence the name Pays d'en Haut
vaguely designated the vast hunting-ground that lay
between the Missouri and the MacKenzie River.

The French trapper was and is to-day as different
from the English as the gamester is from the merchant.
Of all the fortunes brought from the Missouri to St.
Louis, or from the Pays d'en Haut to Montreal, few
escaped the gaming-table and dram-shop. Where the
English trader saves his returns, Pierre lives high and
plays high, and lords it about the fur post till he must
pawn the gay clothing he has bought for means to ex
ist to the opening of the next hunting season.

It is now that he goes back to some birch tree
marked by him during the preceding winter's hunt,
peels the bark off in a great seamless rind, whittles out
ribs for a canoe from cedar, ash, or pine, and shapes
the green bark to the curve of a canoe by means of
stakes and stones down each side. Lying on his back
in the sun spinning yarns of the great things he has
done and will do, he lets the birch harden and dry to
the proper form, when he fits the gunwales to the rag
ged edge, lines the inside of the keel with thin pine
boards, and tars the seams where the bark has crinkled
and split at the junction with the gunwale.

It is in the idle summer season that he and his
squaw — for the Pierre adapts, or rather adopts, him
self to the native tribes by taking an Indian wife —
design the wonderfully bizarre costumes in which the

54 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

French trapper appears: the beaded toque for festive
occasions, the gay moccasins, the buckskin suit fringed
with horse-hair and leather in lieu of the Indian scalp-
locks, the white caribou capote with horned head-gear
to deceive game on the hunter's approach, the powder-
case made of a buffalo-horn, the bullet bag of a young
otter-skin, the musk-rat or musquash cap, and great
gantlets coming to the elbow.

None of these things does the English trader do.
If he falls a victim to the temptations awaiting the
man from the wilderness in the dram-shop of the trad
ing-post, he takes good care not to spend his all on
the spree. He does not affect the hunter's decoy dress,
for the simple reason that he prefers to let the Indians
do the hunting of the difficult game, while he attends
to the trapping that is gain rather than game. For
clothes, he is satisfied with cheap material from the
shops. And if, like Pierre, the Englishman marries
an Indian wife, he either promptly deserts her when he
leaves the fur country for the trading-post or sends
her to a convent to be educated up to .his own level.
With Pierre the marriage means that he has cast off
the last vestige of civilization and henceforth identi
fies himself with the life of the savage.

After the British conquest of Canada and the Amer
ican Declaration of Independence came a change in the
status of the French trapper. Before, he had been
lord of the wilderness without a rival. Now, powerful
English companies poured their agents into his hunt
ing-grounds. Before, he had been a partner in the
fur trade. Now, he must either be pushed out or en
list as servant to the newcomer. He who had once
come to Montreal and St. Louis with a fortune of pel-

THE FRENCH TRAPPER 55

tries on his rafts and canoes, now signed with the great
English companies for a paltry one, two, and three
hundred dollars a year.

It was but natural in the new state of things that
the French trapper, with all his knowledge of forest
and stream, should become courewr des lois and voy-
agcur, while the Englishman remained the barterer.
In the Mississippi basin the French trappers mainly
enlisted with four companies : the Mackinaw Company,
radiating from Michilimackinac to the Mississippi ; the
American Company, up the Missouri; the Missouri
Company, officered by St. Louis merchants, westward
to the Kockies; and the South- West Company, which
was John Jacob Astor's amalgamation of the American
and Mackinaw. In Canada the French sided with the
Nor' Westers and X. Y/s, who had sprung up in oppo
sition to the great English Hudson's Bay Company.

Though he had become a burden-carrier for his
quondam enemies, the French trapper still saw life
through the glamour of la gloire and noblesse, still
lived hard and died game, still feasted to-day and
starved to-morrow, gambled the clothes off his back
and laughed at hardship; courted danger and trolled
off one of his chansons brought over to America by
ancestors of Normandy, uttered an oath in one breath
at the whirlpool ahead and in the next crossed himself
reverently with a prayer to Sainte Anne, the voyageurs'
saint, just before his canoe took the plunge.

Your Spanish grandee of the Missouri Company,
like Manuel Lisa of St. Louis, might sit in a counting-
house or fur post adding up rows of figures, and your
Scotch merchant chaffer with Indians over the value

56 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

of a beaver-skin. As for Pierre, give him a canoe
eliding past wooded banks with a throb of the keel to
the current and the whistle of wild-fowl overhead;
clear sky above with a feathering of wind clouds, clear
sky below with a feathering of wind clouds, and the
canoe between like a bird at poise. Sometimes a fair
wind livens the pace ; for the voyageurs hoist a blanket
sail, and the canoe skims before the breeze like a sea-
gull.

Where the stream gathers force and whirls for
ward in sharp eddies and racing leaps each voyageur
knows what to expect. No man asks questions. The
bowman stands up with his eyes to the fore and steel-
shod pole ready. Every eye is on that pole. Presently
comes a roar, and the green banks begin to race. The
canoe no longer glides. It vaults — springs — bounds,
with a shiver of live waters under the keel and a buoy
ant rise to her prow that mounts the crest of each
wave fast as wave pursues wave. A fanged rock thrusts
up in mid-stream. One deft push of the pole. Each
paddler takes the cue; and the canoe shoots past the
danger straight as an arrow, righting herself to a new
course by another lightning sweep of the pole and
paddles.

But the waters gather as if to throw themselves for
ward. The roar becomes a crash. As if moved by one
mind the paddlers brace back. The lightened bow lifts.
A white dash of spray. She mounts as she plunges;
and the voyageurs are whirling down-stream below a
small waterfall. Not a word is spoken to indicate that
it is anything unusual to sauter Us rapides, as the voy
ageurs say. The men are soaked. Now, perhaps, some
one laughs; for Jean, or Ba'tiste, or the dandy of the

THE FRENCH TRAPPER 57

crew, got his moccasins wet when the canoe took water.
They all settle forward. One paddler pauses to bail
out water with his hat.

Thus the lowest waterfalls are run without a port
age. Coming back this way with canoes loaded to the
water-line, there must be a disembarking. If the rapids
be short, with water enough to carry the loaded
canoe high above rocks that might graze the bark, all
hands spring out in the water, but one man who re
mains to steady the craft ; and the canoe is " tracked "
up-stream, hauled along by ropes. If the rapids be at
all dangerous, each voyageur lands, with pack on his
back and pack-straps across his forehead, and runs
along the shore. A long portage is measured by the
number of pipes the voyageur smokes, each lighting
up meaning a brief rest; and a portage of many
" pipes " will be taken at a running gait on the hottest
days without one word of complaint. Nine miles is
the length of one famous portage opposite the Chau-
diere Falls on the Ottawa.

In winter the voyageur becomes coureur des bois
to his new masters. Then for six months endless reach
es, white, snow-padded, silent ; forests wreathed and
bossed with snow; nights in camp on a couch of pines
or rolled in robes with a roaring fire to keep the wolves
off, melting snow steaming to the heat, meat sputter
ing at the end of a skewered stick; sometimes to the
mar die done! mar die done! of the driver, with crisp
tinkling of dog-bells in frosty air, a long journey over
land by dog-sled to the trading-post; sometimes that
blinding fury which sweeps over the northland, turn
ing earth and air to a white darkness; sometimes a
belated traveller cowering under a snow-drift for

58 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

warmth and wrapping his blanket about him to cross
life's Last Divide.

These things were the every-day life of the French
trapper.

At present there is only one of the great fur com
panies remaining — the Hudson's Bay of Canada. In
the United States there are only two important centres
of trade in furs which are not imported — St. Paul and
St. Louis. For both the Hudson's Bay Company and
the fur traders of the Upper Missouri the French trap
per still works as his ancestors did for the great com
panies a hundred years ago.

The roadside tramp of to-day is a poor representa
tive of Robin Hoods and Rob Roys; and the French
trapper of shambling gait and baggy clothes seen at
the fur posts of the north to-day is a poor type of the
class who used to stalk through the baronial halls * of
Montreal's governor like a lord and set the rafters of
Fort William's council chamber ringing, and make the
wine and the money and the brawls of St. Louis a
by-word.

And yet, with all his degeneracy, the French trap
per retains a something of his old traditions. A few
years ago I was on a northern river steamer going
to one of the Hudson's Bay trading-posts. A brawl
seemed to sound from the steerage passengers. What
was the matter ? " Oh," said the captain, " the French
trappers going out north for the winter, drunk as
usual ! "

* Especially the Chateau de Ramezay, where great under
ground vaults were built for the storing of pelts in case of attack
from New Englander and Iroquois. These vaults may still be
geen under Chateau de Ramezay.

THE FRENCH TRAPPER 59

As he spoke, a voice struck up one of those chansons
populaires, which have been sung by every generation
of voyageurs since Frenchmen came to America, A La
Claire Fontaine., a song which the French trappers'
ancestors brought from Normandy hundreds of years
ago, about the fickle lady and the faded roses and the
vain regrets. Then — was it possible? — these grizzled
fellows, dressed in tinkers' tatters, were singing —
what? A song of the Grand Monarque which has led
armies to battle, but not a song which one would ex
pect to hear in northern wilds —

" Malbrouck s'on va-t-en guerre
Mais quand reviendra a-t-il ? "

Three foes assailed the trapper alone in the wilds.
The first danger was from the wolf-pack. The sec
ond was the Indian hostile egged on by rival traders.
This danger the French trapper minimized by identi
fying himself more completely with the savage than
any other fur trader succeeded in doing. The third
foe was the most perverse and persevering thief known
outside the range of human criminals.

Perhaps the day after the trapper had shot his
first deer he discovered fine footprints like a child's
hand on the snow around the carcass. He recognises
the trail of otter or pekan or mink. It would be
useless to bait a deadfall with meat when an unpolluted
feast lies on the snow. The man takes one of his small
traps and places it across the line of approach. This
trap is buried beneath snow or brush. Every trace of
man-smell is obliterated. The fresh hide of a deer
may be dragged across the snow. Pomatum or casto-
reum may be daubed on everything touched. He may

rr -

UNIVERSITY

or

/

X

60 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

even handle the trap with deer-hide. Pekan travel in
pairs. Besides, the dead deer will be likely to attract
more than one forager; so the man sets a circle of
traps round the carcass.

The next morning he comes back with high hope.
Very little of the deer remains. All the flesh-eaters
of the forest, big and little, have been there. Why,
then, is there no capture? One trap has been pulled
up, sprung, and partly broken. Another carried a little
distance off and dumped into a hollow. A third had
caught a pekan; but the prisoner had been worried and
torn to atoms. Another was tampered with from be
hind and exposed for very deviltry. Some have dis
appeared altogether.

Among forest creatures few are mean enough to
kill when they have full stomachs, or to eat a trapped
brother with untrapped meat a nose-length away.

The French trapper rumbles out some maledictions
on le sacre carcajou. Taking a piece of steel like a
cheese-tester's instrument, he pokes grains of strych
nine into the remaining meat. He might have saved
himself the trouble. The next day he finds the poi
soned meat mauled and spoiled so that no animal will
touch it. There is nothing of the deer but picked bones.
So the trapper tries a deadfall for the thief. Again he
might have spared himself the trouble. His next visit
shows the deadfall torn from behind and robbed with
out danger to the thief.

Several signs tell the trapper that the marauder is
the carcajou or wolverine. All the stealing was done
at night; and the wolverine is nocturnal. All the traps
had been approached from behind. The wolverine will
not cross man's track. The poison in the meat had

THE FRENCH TRAPPER 61

been scented. Whether the wolverine knows poison,
he is too wary to experiment on doubtful diet. The
exposing of the traps tells of the curiosity which char
acterizes the wolverine. Other creatures would have
had too much fear. The tracks run back to cover, and
not across country like the badger's or the fox's.

Fearless, curious, gluttonous, wary, and suspicious,
the mischief-maker and the freebooter and the criminal
of the animal world, a scavenger to save the northland
from pollution of carrion, and a scourge to destroy
wounded, weaklings, and laggards — the wolverine has
the nose of a fox, with long, uneven, tusk-like teeth
that seem to be expressly made for tearing. The eyes
are well set back, greenish, alert with almost human
intelligence of the type that preys. Out of the fulness
of his wrath one trapper gave a perfect description of
the wolverine. He didn't object, he said, to being out
run by a wolf, or beaten by a respectable Indian, but to
be outwitted by a little beast the size of a pig with the
snout of a fox, the claws of a bear, and the fur of a
porcupine's quills, was more than he could stand.

In the economy of nature the wolverine seems to
have but one design — destruction. Beaver-dams two
feet thick and frozen like rock yield to the ripping on
slaught of its claws. He robs everything: the musk-
rats' haycock houses; the gopher burrows; the cached
elk and buffalo calves under hiding of some shrub
while the mothers go off to the watering-place; the
traps of his greatest foe, man; the cached provisions of
the forest ranger; the graves of the dead; the very
tepees and lodges and houses of Indian, half-breed, and
white man. While the wolverine is averse to crossing

O

man's track, he will follow it for days, like a shark

62 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

behind a ship ; for he knows as well as the man knows
there will be food in the traps when the man is in his
lodge, and food in the lodge when the man is at the
traps.

But the wolverine has two characteristics by which
he may be snared — gluttony and curiosity.

After the deer has disappeared the trapper finds
that the wolverine has been making as regular rounds
of the traps as he has himself. It is then a question
whether the man or the wolverine is to hold the hunt
ing-ground. A case is on record at Moose Factory, on
James Bay, of an Indian hunter and his wife who were
literally brought to the verge of starvation by a wolver
ine that nightly destroyed their traps. The contest
ended by the starving Indians travelling a hundred
miles from the haunts of that " bad devil — oh — he —
bad devil — carcajou ! " Eemembering the curiosity and
gluttony of his enemy, the man sets out his strongest
steel-traps. He takes some strong-smelling meat, bacon
or fish, and places it where the wolverine tracks run.
Around this he sets a circle of his traps, tying them
securely to poles and saplings and stakes. In all like
lihood he has waited his chance for a snowfall which
will cover traces of the man-smell.

Night passes. In the morning the man comes to
his traps. The meat has been taken. All else is as
before. Not a track marks the snow ; but in midwinter
meat does not walk off by itself. The man warily feels
for the hidden traps. Then he notices that one of the
stakes has been pulled up and carried off. That is a
sign. He prods the ground expectantly. It is as he
thought. One trap is gone. It had caught the wolver
ine; but the cunning beast had pulled with all his

THE FRENCH TRAPPER 63

strength, snapped the attached sapling, and escaped.
A fox or beaver would have gnawed the imprisoned
limb off. The wolverine picks the trap up in his teeth
and hobbles as hard as three legs will carry him to the
hiding of a bush, or better still, to the frozen surface
of a river, hidden by high banks, with glare ice which
will not reveal a trail. But on the river the man finds
only a trap wrenched out of all semblance to its proper
shape, with the spring opened to release the impris
oned leg.

The wolverine had been caught, and had gone to the
river to study out the problem of unclinching the
spring.

One more device remains to the man. It is a gun
trick. The loaded weapon is hidden full-cock under
leaves or brush. Directly opposite the barrel is the
bait, attached by a concealed string to the trigger.
The first pull will blow the thief s head off.

The trap experience would have frightened any
other animals a week's run from man's tracks ; but the
wolverine grows bolder, and the trapper knows he will
find his snares robbed until carcajou has been killed.

Perhaps he has tried the gun trick before, to have
the cord gnawed through and the bait stolen. A
wolverine is not to be easily tricked; but its gluttony
and curiosity bring it within man's reach.

The man watches until he knows the part of the
woods where the wolverine nightly gallops. He then
procures a savoury piece of meat heavy enough to bal
ance a cocked trigger, not heavy enough to send it off.
The gun is suspended from some dense evergreen,
which will hide the weapon. The bait hangs from the
trigger above the wolverine's, reach.

64 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

Then a curious game begins.

One morning the trapper sees the wolverine tracks
round and round the tree as if determined to ferret
out the mystery of the meat in mid-air.

The next morning the tracks have come to a stand
below the meat. If the wolverine could only get up to
the bait, one whiff would tell him whether the man-
smell was there. He sits studying the puzzle till his
mark is deep printed in the snow.

The trapper smiles. He has only to wait.

The rascal may become so bold in his predatory
visits that the man may be tempted to chance a shot
without waiting.

But if the man waits Nemesis hangs at the end of
the cord. There comes a night when the wolverine's
curiosity is as rampant as his gluttony. A quick
clutch of the ripping claws and a blare of fire-smoke
blows the robber's head into space.

The trapper will hold those hunting-grounds.

He has got rid of the most unwelcome visitor a
solitary man ever had; but for the consolation of those
whose sympathies are keener for the animal than the
man, it may be said that in the majority of such con
tests it is the wolverine and not the man that wins.

CHAPTER VII

THE BUFFALO-RUNNERS

IF the trapper had a crest like the knights of the
wilderness who lived lives of daredoing in olden times,
it should represent a canoe, a snow-shoe, a musket, a
beaver, and a buffalo. While the beaver was his quest
and the coin of the fur-trading realm, the buffalo was
the great staple on which the very existence of the
trapper depended.

Bed and blankets and clothing, shields for war
time, sinew for bows, bone for the shaping of rude
lance-heads, kettles and bull-boats and saddles, roof
and rug and curtain wall for the hunting lodge, and,
most important of all, food that could be kept in any
climate for any length of time and combined the lightest
weight with the greatest nourishment — all these were
supplied by the buffalo.

From the Gulf of Mexico to the Saskatchewan and
from the Alleghanies to the Rockies the buffalo was to
the hunter what wheat is to the farmer. Moose and
antelope and deer were plentiful in the limited area of
a favoured habitat. Provided with water and grass
the buffalo could thrive in any latitude south of the
sixties, with a preference for the open ground of the
great central plains except when storms and heat drove
the herds to the shelter of woods and valleys.
6 65

66 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

Besides, in that keen struggle for existence which
goes on in the animal world, the buffalo had strength
to defy all enemies. Of all the creatures that prey,
only the full-grown grisly was a match against the
buffalo ; and according to old hunting legends, even the
grisly held back from attacking a beast in the prime
of its power and sneaked in the wake of the roving
herds, like the coyotes and timber-wolves, for the chance
of hamstringing a calf, or breaking a young cow's neck,
or tackling some poor old king worsted in battle and
deposed from the leadership of the herd, or snapping
up some lost buffalo staggering blind on the trail of
a prairie fire. The buffalo, like the range cattle, had a
quality that made for the persistence of the species.
When attacked by a beast of prey, they would line up
for defence, charge upon the assailant, and trample
life out. Adaptability to environment, strength excel
ling all foes, wonderful sagacity against attack — these
were factors that partly explained the vastness of the
buffalo herds once roaming this continent.

Proofs enough remain to show that the size of the
herds simply could not be exaggerated. In two great
areas their multitude exceeded anything in the known
world. These were : ( 1 ) between the Arkansas and the
Missouri, fenced in, as it were, by the Mississippi and
the Rockies ; (2) between the Missouri and the Saskatch
ewan, bounded by the Rockies on the west and on the
east, that depression where lie Lakes Winnipeg, Mani
toba, and Winnipegoosis. In both regions the prairie
is scarred by trails where the buffalo have marched sin
gle file to their watering-places — trails trampled by
such a multitude of hoofs that the groove sinks to the
depth of a rider's stirrup or the hub of a wagon-wheel.

THE BUFFALO-RUNNERS 67

At fording-places on the Qu'Appelle and Saskatchewan
in Canada, and on the Upper Missouri, Yellowstone,
and Arkansas in the Western States, carcasses of buf
falo have been found where the stampeding herd
trampled the weak under foot, virtually building a
bridge of the dead over which the vast host rushed.

Then there were " the fairy rings," ruts like the
water trail, only running in a perfect circle, with the
hoofprints of countless multitudes in and outside the
ring. Two explanations were given of these. When
the calves were yet little, and the wild animals raven
ous with spring hunger, the bucks and old leaders
formed a cordon round the mothers and their young.
The late Colonel Bedson of Stony Mountain, Manitoba,
who had the finest private collection of buffalo in
America until his death ten years ago, when the herd
was shipped to Texas, observed another occasion when
the buffalo formed a circle. Of an ordinary winter
storm the herd took small notice except to turn backs
to the wind; but if to a howling blizzard were added
a biting north wind, with the thermometer forty de
grees below zero, the buffalo lay down in a crescent as
a wind-break to the young. Besides the " fairy rings "
and the fording-places, evidences of the buffaloes' num
bers are found at the salt-licks, alkali depressions on
the prairie, soggy as paste in spring, dried hard as
rock in midsummer and retaining footprints like a
plaster cast; while at the wallows, where the buffalo
have been taking mud-baths as a refuge from vermin
and summer heat, the ground is scarred and ploughed
as if for ramparts.

The comparison of the buffalo herds to the north-
land caribou has become almost commonplace; but it

68 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

is the sheerest nonsense. From Hearne, two hundred
years ago, to Mr. Tyrrel or Mr. Whitney in the Barren
Lands in 1894-'96, no mention is ever made of a cari
bou herd exceeding ten thousand. Few herds of one
thousand have ever been seen.

What are the facts regarding the buffalo?

In the thirties, when the American Fur Company
was in the heyday of its power, there were sent from St.
Louis alone in a single year one hundred thousand
robes. The company bought only the perfect robes.
The hunter usually kept an ample supply for his own
needs; so that for every robe bought by the company,
three times as many were taken from the plains. St.
Louis was only one port of shipment. Equal quanti
ties of robes were being sent from Mackinaw, Detroit,
Montreal, and Hudson Bay. A million would not cover
the number of robes sent east each year in the thirties
and forties. In 1868 Inman, Sheridan, and Ouster
rode continuously for three days through one herd in
the Arkansas region. In 1869 trains on the Kansas
Pacific were held from nine in the morning till six at
night to permit the passage of one herd across the
tracks. Army officers related that in 1862 a herd moved
north from the Arkansas to the Yellowstone that cov
ered an area of seventy by thirty miles. Catlin and
Inman and army men and employees of the fur compa
nies considered a drove of one hundred thousand buffalo
a common sight along the line of the Santa Fe trail.
Inman computes that from St. Louis alone the bones
of thirty-one million buffalo were shipped between
1868 and 1881. Northward the testimony is the same.
John MacDonell, a partner of the North-West Com
pany, tells how at the beginning of the last century a

THE BUFFALO-RUNNERS 69

herd stampeded across the ice of the Qu'Appelle val
ley. In some places the ice broke. When the thaw
came, a continuous line of drowned buffalo drifted
past the fur post for three days. Mr. MacDonell
counted up to seven thousand three hundred and
sixty: there his patience gave out. And the number
of the drowned was only a fringe of the travelling
herd.

To-day where are the buffalo ? A few in the public
parks of the United States and Canada. A few of
Colonel Bedsons old herd on Lord Strathcona's farm
in Manitoba and the rest on a ranch in Texas. The
railway more than the pot-hunter was the power that
exterminated the buffalo. The railway brought the
settlers; and the settlers fenced in the great ranges
where the buffalo could have galloped away from all the
pot-hunters of earth combined. Without the railway
the buffalo could have resisted the hunter as they re
sisted Indian hunters from time immemorial ; but when
the iron line cut athwart the continent the herds only
stampeded from one quarter to rush into the fresh
dangers of another.

Much has been said about man's part in the destruc
tion of the buffalo; and too much could not be said
against those monomaniacs of slaughter who went into
the buffalo-hunt from sheer love of killing, hiring the
Indians to drive a herd over an embankment or into
soft snow, while the valiant hunters sat in some shel
tered spot, picking off the helpless quarry. This was
not hunting. It was butchery, which none but hungry
savages and white barbarians practised. The plains
man — who is the true type of the buffalo-runner — en
tered the lists on a fair field with the odds a hundred

70 THE STORY OP THE TRAPPER

to one against himself, and the only advantages over
brute strength the dexterity of his own aim.

Man was the least cruel of the buffalo's foes. Far
crueler havoc was worked by the prairie fire and the
fights for supremacy in the leadership of the herd and
the sleuths of the trail and the wild stampedes often
started by nothing more than the shadow of a cloud on
the prairie. Natural history tells of nothing sadder
than a buffalo herd overtaken by a prairie fire. Flee
as they might, the fiery hurricane was fleeter ; and when
the flame swept past, the buffalo were left staggering
over blackened wastes, blind from the fire, singed of
fur to the raw, and mad with a thirst they were help
less to quench.

In the fights for leadership of the herd old age
went down before youth. Colonel Bedson's daughter
has often told the writer of her sheer terror as a child
when these battles took place among the buffalo. The
first intimation of trouble was usually a boldness
among the young fellows of maturing strength. On
the rove for the first year or two of their existence
these youngsters were hooked and butted back into place
as a rear-guard; and woe to the fellow whose vanity
tempted him within range of the leader's sharp, prun-
ing-hook horns ! Just as the wolf aimed for the
throat or leg sinews of a victim, so the irate buffalo
struck at the point most vulnerable to his sharp, curved
horn — the soft flank where a quick rip meant torture
and death.

Comes a day when the young fellows refuse to be
hooked and hectored to the rear ! Then one of the bold
est braces himself, circling and guarding and wheeling
and keeping his lowered horns in line with the head

THE BUFFALO-RUNNERS 71

of the older rival. That is the buffalo challenge ! And
there presently follows a bellowing like the rumbling
of distant thunder, each keeping his eye on the other,
circling and guarding and countering each other's
moves, like fencers with foils. When one charges, the
other wheels to meet the charge straight in front;
and with a crash the horns are locked. It is then a
contest of strength against strength, dexterity against
dexterity. Not unusually the older brute goes into a
fury from sheer amazement at the younger's presump
tion. His guarded charges become blind rushes, and
he soon finds himself on the end of a pair of
piercing horns. As soon as the rumbling and paw
ing began, Colonel Bedson used to send his herders out
on the fleetest buffalo ponies to part the contestants;
for, like the king of beasts that he is, the buffalo does
not know how to surrender. He fights till he can fight
no more; and if he is not killed, is likely to be man
gled, a deposed king, whipped and broken-spirited and
relegated to the fag-end of the trail, where he drags
lamely after the subjects he once ruled.

Some day the barking of a prairie-dog, the rustle
of a leaf, the shadow of a cloud, startles a giddy young
cow. She throws up her head and is off. There is a
stampede — myriad forms lumbering over the earth
till the ground rocks and nothing remains of the buffalo
herd but the smoking dust of the far horizon — nothing
but the poor, old, deposed king, too weak to keep up
the pace, feeble with fear, trembling at his own shadow,
leaping in terror at a leaf blown by the wind.

After that the end is near, and the old buffalo must
realize that fact as plainly as a human being would.
Has he roamed the plains and guarded the calves from

72 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

sleuths of the trail and seen the devourers leap on a
fallen comrade before death has come, and yet does
not know what those vague, gray forms are, always
hovering behind him, always sneaking to the crest of a
hill when he hides in the valley, always skulking
through the prairie grass when he goes to a lookout
on the crest of the hill, always stopping when he stops,
creeping closer when he lies down, scuttling when he
wheels, snapping at his heels when he stoops for a drink ?
If the buffalo did not know what these creatures meant,
he would not have spent his entire life from calfhood
guarding against them. But he does know ; and there
in lies the tragedy of the old king's end. He invaria
bly seeks out some steep background where he can
take his last stand against the wolves with a face to
the foe.

But the end is inevitable.

While the main pack baits him to the fore, skulkers
dart to the rear; and when, after a struggle that lasts
for days, his hind legs sink powerless under him, ham
strung by the snap of some vicious coyote, he still keeps
his face to the foe. But in sheer horror of the tragedy
the rest is untellable; for the hungry creatures that
prey do not wait till death comes to the victim.

Poor old king ! Is anything that man has ever done
to the buffalo herd half as tragically pitiful as nature's
process of deposing a buffalo leader?

Catlin and Inman and every traveller familiar with
the great plains region between the Arkansas and Sas
katchewan testify that the quick death of the bullet was,
indeed, the mercy stroke compared to nature's end of
her wild creatures. In Colonel Bedson's herd the
fighters were always parted before either was disabled;

THE BUFFALO-RUNNERS 73

but it was always at the sacrifice of two or three ponies'
lives.

In the park specimens of buffalo a curious deterio
ration is apparent. On Lord Strathcona's farm in
Manitoba, where the buffalo still have several hundred
acres of ranging-ground and are nearer to their wild
state than elsewhere, they still retain their leonine
splendour of strength in shoulders and head; but at
Banff only the older ones have this appearance, the
younger generation, like those of the various city parks,
gradually assuming more dwarfed proportions about
the shoulders, with a suggestion of a big, round-headed,
clumsy sheep.

Between the Arkansas and the Saskatchewan buf
falo were always plentiful enough for an amateur's
hunt ; but the trapper of the plains, to whom the hunt
meant food and clothing and a roof for the coming year,
favoured two seasons: (1) the end of June, when he
had brought in his packs to the fur post and the win
ter's trapping was over and the fort full of idle hunters
keen for the excitement of the chase; (2) in midwinter,
when that curious lull came over animal life, before
the autumn stores had been exhausted and before the
spring forage began.

In both seasons the buffalo-robes were prime : sleek
and glossy in June before the shedding of the fleece,
with the fur at its greatest length ; fresh and clean and
thick in midwinter. But in midwinter the hunters
were scattered, the herds broken in small battalions,
the climate perilous for a lonely man who might be
tempted to track fleeing herds many miles from a
known course. South of the Yellowstone the individual

74: THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

hunter pursued the buffalo as he pursued deer — by still-
hunting; for though the buffalo was keen of scent, he
was dull of sight, except sideways on the level, and was
not easily disturbed by a noise as long as he did not see
its cause.

Behind the shelter of a mound and to leeward of
the herd the trapper might succeed in bringing down
what would be a creditable showing in a moose or
deer hunt ; but the trapper was hunting buffalo for their
robes. Two or three robes were not enough from a
large herd; and before he could get more there was
likely to be a stampede. Decoy work was too slow for
the trapper who was buffalo-hunting. So was track
ing on snow-shoes, the way the Indians hunted north
of the Yellowstone. A wounded buffalo at close range
was quite as vicious as a wounded grisly; and it did
not pay the trapper to risk his life getting a pelt for
which the trader would give him only four or five
dollars' worth of goods.

The Indians hunted buffalo by driving them over
a precipice where hunters were stationed on each side
below, or by luring the herd into a pound or pit by
means of an Indian decoy masking under a buffalo-hide.
But the precipice and pit destroyed too many hides ; and
if the pound were a sort of cheval-de-frise or corral con
verging at the inner end, it required more hunters than
were ever together except at the incoming of the spring
brigades.

When there were many hunters and countless buf
falo, the white blood of the plains' trapper preferred
a fair fight in an open field — not the indiscriminate
carnage of the Indian hunt; so that the greatest buf
falo-runs took place after the opening of spring. The

THE BUFFALO-RUNNERS 75

greatest of these were on the Upper Missouri. This
was the Mandan country, where hunters of the Macki
naw from Michilimackinac, of the Missouri from St.
Louis, of the Nor' Westers from Montreal, of the Hud
son Bay from Fort Douglas (Winnipeg), used to con
gregate before the War of 1812, which barred out Cana
dian traders.

At a later date the famous, loud-screeching Ecd
River ox-carts were used to transport supplies to the
scene of the hunt; but at the opening of the last cen
tury all hunters, whites, Indians, and squaws, rode to
field on cayuse ponies or broncos, with no more sup
plies than could be stowed away in a saddle-pack, and
no other escort than the old-fashioned muskets over
each white man's shoulder or attached to his holster.

The Indians were armed with bow and arrow only.
The course usually led north and westward, for the
reason that at this season the herds were on their great
migrations north, and the course of the rivers headed
them westward. From the first day out the hunter
best fitted for the captainship was recognised as leader,
and such discipline maintained as prevented unruly
spirits stampeding the buffalo before the cavalcade had
closed near enough for the wild rush.

At night the hunters slept under open sky with
horses picketed to saddles, saddles as pillows, and mus
ket in hand. When the course led through the country
of hostiles, sentinels kept guard ; but midnight usually
saw all hunters in the deep sleep of outdoor life, bare
faces upturned to the stars, a little tenuous stream of
uprising smoke where the camp-fire still glowed red,
and on the far, shadowy horizon, with the moonlit sky
line meeting the billowing prairie in perfect circle,

76 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

vague, whitish forms — the coyotes keeping watch,
stealthy and shunless as death.

The northward movement of the buffalo began with
the spring. Odd scattered herds might have roamed
the valleys in the winter; but as the grass grew deeper
and lush with spring rains, the reaches of the prairie
land became literally covered with the humpback, furry
forms of the roving herds. Indian legend ascribed
their coming directly to the spirits. The more prosaic
white man explained that the buffalo were only emer
ging from winter shelter, and their migration was a
search for fresh feeding-ground.

Be that as it may, northward they came, in strag
gling herds that covered the prairie like a flock of
locusts; in close-formed battalions, with leaders and
scouts and flank guards protecting the cows and the
young; in long lines, single file, leaving the ground,
soft from spring rains, marked with a rut like a ditch ;
in a mad stampede at a lumbering gallop that roared
like an ocean tide up hills and down steep ravines,
sure-footed as a mountain-goat, thrashing through the
swollen water-course of river and slough, up embank
ments with long beards and fringed dewlaps dripping
— on and on and on — till the tidal wave of life had
hulked over the sky-line beyond the heaving horizon.
Here and there in the brownish-black mass were white
and gray forms, light-coloured buffalo, freaks in the
animal world.

The age of the calves in each year's herd varied.
The writer remembers a sturdy little buffalo that ar
rived on the scene of this troublous life one freezing
night in January, with a howling blizzard and the ther
mometer at forty below — a combination that is suffi-

THE BUFFALO-RUNNERS 77

cicnt to set the teeth of the most mendacious northerner
chattering. The young buffalo spent the first three
days of his life in this gale and was none the worse,
which seems to prove that climatic apology, " though
it is cold, you don't feel it." Another spindly-legged,
clumsy bundle of fawn and fur in the same herd count
ed its natal day from a sweltering afternoon in August.

Many signs told the buffalo-runners which way to
ride for the herd. There was the trail to the watering-
place. There were the salt-licks and the wallows and
the crushed grass where two young fellows had been
smashing each other's horns in a trial of strength.
There were the bones of the poor old deposed king,
picked clear by the coyotes, or, perhaps, the lonely out
cast himself, standing at bay, feeble and frightened,
a picture of dumb woe ! To such the hunter's shot
was a mercy stroke. Or, most interesting of all signs
and surest proof that the herd was near — a little bun
dle of fawn-coloured fur lying out flat as a door-mat
under hiding of sage-brush, or against a clay mound,
precisely the colour of its own hide.

Poke it ! An ear blinks, or a big ox-like eye opens !
It is a buffalo calf left cached by the mother, who has
gone to the watering-place or is pasturing with the
drove. Lift it up ! It is inert as a sack of wool. Let
it go! It drops to earth flat and lifeless as a door
mat. The mother has told it how to escape the co
yotes and wolverines ; and the little rascal is " playing
dead." But if you fondle it and warm it — the Indians
say, breathe into its face — it forgets all about the
mother's warning and follows like a pup.

At the first signs of the herd's proximity the squaws

78 THE STORY OP THE TRAPPER

parted from the cavalcade and all impedimenta re
mained behind. The best-equipped man was the man
with the best horse, a horse that picked out the largest
buffalo from one touch of the rider's hand or foot, that
galloped swift as wind in pursuit, that jerked to a stop
directly opposite the brute's shoulders and leaped from
the sideward sweep of the charging horns. No sound
came from the hunters till all were within close range.
Then the captain gave the signal, dropped a flag, waved
his hand, or fired a shot, and the hunters charged.

Arrows whistled through the air, shots clattered
with the fusillade of artillery volleys. Bullets fell to
earth with the dull ping of an aim glanced aside by the
adamant head bones or the heaving shoulder fur of the
buffalo. The Indians shouted their war-cry of " Ah —
oh, ah — oh ! " Here and there French voices screamed
" Voila ! Les bceuf s ! Les bceufs ! Sacre ! Tonnerre !
Tir — tir — tir — done ! By Gar ! " And Missouri tra
ders called out plain and less picturesque but more
forcible English.

Sometimes the suddenness of the attack dazed the
herd; but the second volley with the smell of powder
and smoke and men started the stampede. Then fol
lowed such a wild rush as is unknown in the annals
of any other kind of hunting, up hills, down embank
ments, over cliffs, through sloughs, across rivers, hard
and fast and far as horses had strength to carry riders
in a boundless land !

Eiders were unseated and went down in the melee;
horses caught on the horns of charging bulls and ripped
from shoulder to flank; men thrown high in mid-air to
alight on the back of a buffalo ; Indians with dexterous
aim bringing down the great brutes with one arrow; un-

THE BUFFALO-RUNNERS 79

wary hunters trampled to death under a multitude of
hoofs; wounded buffalo turning with fury on their
assailants till the pursuer became pursued and only the
fleetness of the pony saved the hunter's life.

A retired officer of the North-West mounted police,
who took part in a Missouri buffalo-run forty years ago,
described the impression at the time as of an earth
quake. The galloping horses, the rocking mass of flee
ing buffalo, the rumbling and quaking of the ground
under the thunderous pounding, were all like a violent
earthquake. The same gentleman tells how he once
saw a wounded buffalo turn on an Indian hunter. The
man's horse took fright. Instead of darting sideways
to give him a chance to send a last finishing shot home,
the horse became wildly unmanageable and fled. The
buffalo pursued. Off they raced, rider and buffalo, the
Indian craning over his horse's neck, the horse blown
and fagged and unable to gain one pace ahead of the
buffalo, the great beast covered with foam, his eyes
like fire, pounding and pounding — closer and closer to
the horse till rider and buffalo disappeared over the
horizon.

" To this day I have wondered what became of that
Indian," said the officer, " for the horse was losing and
the buffalo gaming when they went over the bluff."

The incident illustrates a trait seldom found in wild
animals — a persistent vindictiveness.

In a word, buffalo-hunting was not all boys' play.

After the hunt came the gathering of skins and
meat. The tongue was first taken as a delicacy for the
great feast that celebrated every buffalo-hunt. To this
was sometimes added the fleece fat or hump. White
hunters have been accused of waste, because they used

80 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

only the skin, tongue, and hump of the buffalo. But
what the white hunter left the Indian took, making
pemmican by pounding the meat with tallow, drying
thinly-shaved slices into " jerked " meat, getting thread
from the buffalo sinews and implements of the chase
from the bones.

The gathering of the spoils was not the least dan
gerous part of the buffalo-hunt. Many an apparently
lifeless buffalo has lunged up in a death-throe that has
cost the hunter dear. The mounted police officer of
whom mention has been made was once camping with
a patrol party along the international line between
Idaho and Canada. Among the hunting stories told
over the camp-fire was that of the Indian pursued by
the wounded buffalo. Scarcely had the colonel finished
his anecdote when a great hulking buffalo rose to the
crest of a hillock not a gunshot away.

" Come on, men ! Let us all have a shot," cried the
colonel, grasping his rifle.

The buffalo dropped at the first rifle-crack, and the
men scrambled pell-mell up the hill to see whose bullet
had struck vital. Just as they stooped over the fallen
buffalo it lunged up with an angry snort.

The story of the pursued Indian was still fresh in
all minds. The colonel is the only man of the party
honest enough to tell what happened next. He de
clares if breath had not given out every man would have
run till he dropped over the horizon, like the Indian and
the buffalo.

And when they plucked up courage to go back, the
buffalo was dead as a stone.

CHAPTER VIII

THE MOUNTAINEERS

IT was in the Rocky Mountains that American trap
ping attained its climax of heroism and dauntless dar
ing and knavery that out-herods comparison.

The War of 1812 had demoralized the American fur
trade. Indians from both sides of the international
boundary committed every depredation, and evaded
punishment by scampering across the line to the protec
tion of another flag. Alexander MacKenzie of the
North- West Company had been the first of the Canadian
traders to cross the Rockies, reaching the Pacific in
1793. The result was that in less than fifteen years
the fur posts of the North-West and Hudson's Bay
Companies were dotted like beads on a rosary down
the course of the mountain rivers to the boundary. Of
the American traders, the first to follow up Lewis and
Clark's lead from the Missouri to the Columbia were
Manuel Lisa the Spaniard and Major Andrew Henry,
the two leading spirits of the Missouri Company. John
Jacob Astor sent his Astorians of the Pacific Company
across the continent in 1811, and a host of St. Louis
firms had prepared to send free trappers to the moun
tains when the war broke out. The end of the war saw
Astoria captured by the Nor' Westers, the Astorians
scattered to all parts of the world, Lisa driven down
7 81

82 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

the Missouri to Council Bluffs, Andrew Henry a fugi
tive from the Blackfeet of the Yellowstone, and all the
free trappers like an idle army waiting for a captain.

Their captain came.

Mr. Astor's influence secured the passage of a law
barring out British fur traders from the United States.
That threw all the old Hudson's Bay and North-West
posts south of the boundary into the hands of Mr.
Astor's American Fur Company. He had already
bought out the American part of the Mackinaw Com
pany's posts, stretching west from Michilimackinac
beyond the Mississippi towards the head waters of the
Missouri. And now to his force came a tremendous
accession — all those dissatisfied Nor' Westers thrown
out of employment when their company amalgamated
with the Hudson's Bay.

If Mr. Astor alone had held the American fur trade,
there would have been none of that rivalry which ended
in so much bloodshed. But St. Louis, lying like a
gateway to the mountain trade, had always been jealous
of those fur traders with headquarters in New York.
Lisa had refused to join Mr. Astor's Pacific Company,
and doubtless the Spaniard chuckled over his own wis
dom when that venture failed with a loss of nearly half
a million to its founder. When Lisa died the St. Louis
traders still held back from the American Fur Com
pany. Henry and Ashley and the Sublettes and Camp
bell and Fitzpatrick and Bridger — subsequently known
as the Eocky Mountain traders — swept up the Mis
souri with brigades of one hundred, two hundred, and
three hundred men, and were overrunning the moun
tains five years before the American Company's slowly
extending line of forts had reached as far west as the

THE MOUNTAINEERS 83

Yellowstone. A clash was bound to ensue when these
two sets of rivals met on a hunting-field which the
Rocky Mountain men regarded as pre-empted by them
selves.

The clash came from the peculiarities of the hunt
ing-ground.

It was two thousand miles by trappers' trail from
the reach of law. It was too remote from the fur posts
for trappers to go down annually for supplies. Sup
plies were sent up by the fur companies to a mountain
rendezvous, to Pierre's Hole under the Tetons, or Jack
son's Hole farther east, or Ogden's Hole at Salt Lake,
sheltered valleys with plenty of water for men and
horses when hunters and traders and Indians met at
the annual camp.

Elsewhere the hunter had only to follow the wind
ings of a river to be carried to his hunting-ground.
Here, streams were too turbulent for canoes ; and boats
were abandoned for horses; and mountain canons with
sides sheer as a wall drove the trapper back from the
river-bed to interminable forests, where windfall and
underbrush and rockslide obstructed every foot of prog
ress. The valley might be shut in by a blind wall
which cooped the hunter up where was neither game nor
food. Out of this valley, then, he must find a way for
himself and his horses, noting every peak so that he
might know this region again, noting especially the
peaks with the black rock walls; for where the rock
is black snow has not clung, and the mountain face will
not change; and where snow cannot stick, a man can
not climb; and the peak is a good one for the trapper
to shun.

One, two, three seasons have often slipped away be-

84: THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

fore the mountaineers found good hunting-ground.
Ten years is a short enough time to learn the lie of the
land in even a small section of mountains. It was
twenty years from the time Lewis and Clark first
crossed the mountains before the traders of St. Louis
could be sure that the trappers sent into the Eockies
would find their way out. Seventy lives were lost in
the first two years of mountain trapping, some at the
hands of the hostile Blackfeet guarding the entrance
to the mountains at the head waters of the Missouri,
some at the hands of the Snakes on the Upper Columbia,
others between the Platte and Salt Lake. Time and
money and life it cost to learn the hunting-grounds of
the Rockies; and the mountaineers would not see
knowledge won at such a cost wrested away by a spy
ing rival.

Then, too, the mountains had bred a new type of
trapper, a new style of trapping.

Only the most daring hunters would sign contracts
for the " Up-Country/' or Pays d'en Haul as the
French called it. The French trappers, for the most
part, kept to the river valleys and plains; and if one
went to the mountains for a term of years, when he
came out he was no longer the smug, indolent, laughing,
chattering voyageur. The great silences of a life hard
as the iron age had worked a change. To begin with,
the man had become a horseman, a climber, a scout, a
fighter of Indians and elements, lank and thin and
lithe, silent and dogged and relentless.

In other regions hunters could go out safely in
pairs or even alone, carrying supplies enough for the
season in a canoe, and drifting down-stream with a

THE MOUNTAINEERS 85

canoe-load of pelts to the fur post. But the mountains
were so distant and inaccessible, great quantities of
supplies had to be taken. That meant long cavalcades
of pack-horses, which Blackfeet were ever on the alert
to stampede. Armed guards had to accompany the
pack-train. Out of a party of a hundred trappers sent
to the mountains by the Rock Mountain Company,
thirty were always crack rifle-shots for the protection
of the company's property. One such party, properly
officered and kept from crossing the animal's tracks,
might not drive game from a valley. Two such bands
of rival traders keen to pilfer each other's traps would
result in ruin to both.

That is the way the clash came in the early thirties
of the last century.

All winter bands of Rocky Mountain trappers under
Fitzpatrick and Bridger and Sublette had been sweep
ing, two hundred strong, like foraging bandits, from
the head waters of the Missouri, where was one moun
tain pass to the head waters of the Platte, where was
a second pass much used by the mountaineers. Sum
mer came with the heat that wakens all the mountain
silences to a roar of rampant life. Summer came with
the fresh-loosened rocks clattering down the mountain
slopes in a landslide, and the avalanches booming over
the precipices in a Niagara of snow, and the swollen
torrents shouting to each other in a thousand voices
till the valleys vibrated to that grandest of all music
— the voice of many waters. Summer came with
the heat that drives the game up to the cool heights
of the wind-swept peaks; and the hunters of the
game began retracing their way from valley to

86 ME STORY OF THE THAPPE&

valley, gathering the furs cached during the winter
hunt.

Then the cavalcade set out for the rendezvous : griz
zled men in tattered buckskins, with long hair and un
kempt beards and bronzed skin, men who rode as if
they were part of the saddle, easy and careless but
always with eyes alert and one hand near the thing in
their holsters; long lines of pack-horses laden with
furs climbing the mountains in a zigzag trail like a
spiral stair, crawling along the face of cliffs barely wide
enough to give a horse footing, skirting the sky-line
between lofty peaks in order to avoid the detour round
the broadened bases, frequently swimming raging tor
rents whose force carried them half a mile off their
trail; always following the long slopes, for the long
slopes were most easily climbed; seldom following a
water-course, for mountain torrents take short cuts
over precipices ; packers scattering to right and left at
the fording-places, to be rounded back by the collie-dog
and the shouting drivers, and the old bell-mare darting
after the bolters with her ears laid flat.

Not a sign by the way escaped the mountaineers
eye. Here the tumbling torrent is clear and sparkling
and cold as champagne. He knows that stream comes
from snow. A glacial stream would be milky blue or
milky green from glacial silts; and while game seeks
the cool heights in summer, the animals prefer the
snow-line and avoid the chill of the iced masses in a
glacier. There will be game coming down from the
source of that stream when he passes back this way in
the fall. Ah! what is that little indurated line run
ning up the side of the cliff — just a displacement of the
rock chips here, a hardening of the earth that winds

THE MOUNTAINEERS 87

in and out among the devil's-club and painter's-brush
and mountain laurel and rock crop and heather?

" Something has been going up and down here to
a drinking-place," says the mountaineer.

Funky yellow logs lie ripped open and scratched
where bruin has been enjoying a dainty morsel of
ants' eggs ; but the bear did not make that track. It is
too dainty, and has been used too regularly. Neither
has the bighorn made it; for the mountain-sheep sel
dom stay longer above tree-line,, resting in the high,
meadowed Alpine valleys with the long grasses and
sunny reaches and larch shade.

Presently the belled leader tinkles her way round
an elbow of rock where a stream trickles down. This
is the drinking-place. In the soft mould is a little
cleft footprint like the ace of hearts, the trail of the
mountain-goat feeding far up at the snow-line where
the stream rises.

Then the little cleft mark unlocks a world of hunt
er's yarns: how at such a ledge, where the cataract
falls like wind-blown mist, one trapper saw a mother
goat teaching her little kid to take the leap, and how
when she scented human presence she went jump —
jump — jump — up and up and up the rock wall, where
the man could not follow, bleating and calling the
kid ; and how the kid leaped and fell back and leaped,
and cried as pitifully as a child, till the man, having
no canned milk to bring it up, out of very sympathy
went away.

Then another tells how he tried to shoot a goat
running up a gulch, but as fast as he sighted his rifle
— " drew the bead " — the thing jumped from side to
side, criss-crossing up the gulch till she got above dan-

88 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPEK

ger and away. And some taciturn oracle comes out
with the dictum that " men hadn't ought to try to shoot
goat except from above or in front."

Every pack-horse of the mountains knows the trick
of planting legs like stanchions and blowing his sides
out in a balloon when the men are tightening cinches.
No matter how tight girths may be, before every climb
and at the foot of every slope there must be re-tighten
ing. And at every stop the horses come shouldering
up for the packs to be righted, or try to scrape the
things off under some low-branched tree.

Night falls swiftly in the mountains, the long,
peaked shadows etching themselves across the valleys.
Shafts of sunlight slant through the mountain gaps
gold against the endless reaches of matted forest, red
as wine across the snowy heights. With the purpling
shadows comes a sudden chill, silencing the roar of
mountain torrents to an all-pervading ceaseless pro
longed h — u — s — h — !

Mountaineers take no chances on the ledges after
dark. It is dangerous enough work to skirt narrow
precipices in daylight; and sunset is often followed by
a thick mist rolling across the heights in billows of fog.
These are the clouds that one sees across the peaks at
nightfall like banners. How does it feel benighted
among those clouds ?

A few years ago I was saving a long detour round
the base of a mountain by riding along the saddle of
rock between two peaks. The sky-line rounded the
convex edge of a sheer precipice for three miles. Mid
way the inner wall rose straight, the outer edge above
blackness — seven thousand feet the mountaineer guid
ing us said it was, though I think it was nearer

THE MOUNTAINEERS 89

five. The guide's horse displaced a stone the size of
a pail from the path. If a man had slipped in the
same way he would have fallen to the depths; but
when one foot slips, a horse has three others to regain
himself; and with a rear-end flounder the horse
got his footing. But down — down — down went the
stone, bouncing and knocking and echoing as it struck
against the precipice wall — down — down — down till it
was no larger than a spool — then out of sight — and
silence ! The mountaineer looked back over his
shoulder.

" Always throw both your feet over the saddle to
the inner side of the trail in a place like this/' he di
rected, with a curious meaning in his words.

" What do you do when the clouds catch you on this
sort of a ledge ? "

" Get off — knock ahead with your rifle to feel where
the edge is — throw bits of rock through the fog so you
can tell where you are by the sound."

"And when no sound comes back?"

" Sit still," said he. Then to add emphasis, " You
bet you sit still ! People can say what they like, but
when no sound comes back, or when the sound's muf
fled as if it came from water below, you bet it gives
you chills ! "

So the mountaineers take no chances on the ledges
after dark. The moon riding among the peaks rises
over pack-horses standing hobbled on the lee side of a
roaring camp-fire that will drive the sand-flies and
mosquitoes away, on pelts and saddle-trees piled care
fully together, on men sleeping with no pillow but a
pack, no covering but the sky.

If a sharp crash breaks the awful stillness of a

90 THE STORY OF THE TKAPPER

mountain night, the trapper is unalarmed. He knows
it is only some great rock loosened by the day's thaw
rolling down with a landslide. If a shrill, fiendish
laugh shrieks through the dark, he pays no heed. It
is only the cougar prowling cattishly through the under
brush perhaps still-hunting the hunter. The lonely call
overhead is not the prairie-hawk, but the eagle lilting
and wheeling in a sort of dreary enjoyment of utter
loneliness.

Long before the sunrise has drawn the tented shad
ows across the valley the mountaineers are astir, with
the pack-horses snatching mouthfuls of bunch-grass
as they travel off in a way that sets the old leader's bell
tinkling.

The mountaineers usually left their hunting-
grounds early in May. They seldom reached their
rendezvous before July or August. Three months
travelling a thousand miles ! Three hundred miles a
month ! Ten miles a day ! It is not a record that shows
well beside our modern sixty miles an hour — a thousand
miles a day. And yet it is a better record; for if our
latter-day fliers had to build the road as they went
along, they would make slower time than the mountain
eers of a century ago.

Rivers too swift to swim were rafted on pine logs,
cut and braced together while the cavalcade waited.
Muskegs where the industrious little beaver had flood
ed a valley by damming up the central stream often
mired the horses till all hands were called to haul out
the unfortunate; and where the mire was very treach
erous and the surrounding mountains too steep for
foothold, choppers went to work and corduroyed a trail
across, throwing the logs on branches that kept them

THE MOUNTAINEERS 91

afloat, and overlaying with moss to save the horses'
feet.

But the greatest cause of delay was the windfall,
pines and spruce of enormous girth pitched down by
landslide and storm into an impassable cheval-de-frise.
Turn to the right ! A matted tangle of underbrush
higher than the horses' head bars the way ! Turn to
the left ! A muskeg where horses sink through quaking
moss to saddle-girths ! If the horses could not be
driven around the barrier, the mountaineers would try
to force a high jump. The high jump failing except
at risk of broken legs, there was nothing to do but
chop a passage through.

And were the men carving a way through the wil
derness only the bushwhackers who have pioneered
other forest lands? Of the prominent men leading
mountaineers in 1831, Vanderburgh of the American
Fur Company was a son of a Fifth New York Regi
ment officer in the Revolutionary War, and himself a
graduate of West Point. One of the Rocky Mountain
leaders was a graduate from a blacksmith-shop. An
other leader was a descendant of the royal blood of
France. All grades of life supplied material for the,
mountaineer; but it was the mountains that bred the
heroism, that created a new type of trapper — the most
purely American type, because produced by purely
American conditions.

Green River was the rendezvous for the mountain
eers in 1831 ; and to Green River came trappers of the
Columbia, of the Three Forks, of the Missouri, of the
Bighorn and Yellowstone and Platte. From St. Louis
came the traders to exchange supplies for pelts ; and
from every habitable valley of the mountains native

92 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

tribes to barter furs, sell horses for transport, carouse
at the merry meeting and spy on what the white hunt
ers were doing. For a month all was the confusion
of a gipsy camp or Oriental fair.

French-Canadian voyageurs who had come up to
raft the season's cargo down-stream to St. Louis jostled
shoulders with mountaineers from the Spanish settle
ments to the south and American trappers from the
Columbia to the north and free trappers who had
ranged every forest of America from Labrador to Mex
ico.* Merchants from St. Louis, like General Ashley,
the foremost leader of Rocky Mountain trappers, de
scendants from Scottish nobility like Kenneth Mac-
Kenzie of Fort Union, miscellaneous gentlemen of ad
venture like Captain Bonneville, or Wyeth of Boston,
or Baron Stuart — all with retinues of followers like
medieval lords — found themselves hobnobbing at the
rendezvous with mighty Indian sachems, Crows or
Pend d'Oreilles or Flat Heads, clad in little else than
moccasins, a buffalo-skin blanket, and a pompous
dignity.

Among the underlings was a time of wild revel,
drinking daylight out and daylight in, decking them
selves in tawdry finery for the one dress occasion of the
year, and gambling sober or drunk till all the season's
earnings, pelts and clothing and horses and traps, were
gone.

The partners — as the Rocky Mountain men called
themselves in distinction to the bourgeois of the French,
the factors of the Hudson's Bay, the partisans of the

* This is no exaggeration. Smith's trappers, who were scat
tered from Fort Vancouver to Monterey, the Astorians, Major
Andrew Henry's party — had all been such wide-ranging foresters.

THE MOUNTAINEERS 93

American Fur Company — held confabs over crumpled
maps, planning the next season's hunt, drawing in
roughly the fresh information brought down each year
of new regions, and plotting out all sections of the
mountains for the different brigades.

This year a new set of faces appeared at the ren
dezvous, from thirty to fifty men with full quota of
saddle-horses, pack-mules, and traps. On the traps
were letters that afterward became magical in all the
Up-Country — A. F. C. — American Fur Company.
Leading these men were Vanderburgh, who had already
become a successful trader among the Aricaras and
had to his credit one victory over the Blackfeet; and
Drips, who had been a member of the old Missouri Fur
Company and knew the Upper Platte well. But the
Eocky Mountain men, who knew the cost of life and
time and money it had taken to learn the hunting-
grounds of the Rockies, doubtless smiled at these ten-
derfeet who thought to trap as successfully in the hills
as they had on the plains.

Two things counselled caution. Vanderburgh
would stop at nothing. Drips had married a native
woman of the Platte, whose tribe might know the
hunting-grounds as well as the mountaineers. Hunters
fraternize in friendship at holidaying ; but they no more
tell each other secrets than rival editors at a banquet.
Mountaineers knowing the field like Bridger who had
been to the Columbia with Henry as early as 1822 and
had swept over the ranges as far south as the Platte,
or Fitzpatrick * who had made the Salt Lake region

* Fitzpatrick was late in reaching the hunting-ground this
year, owing to a disaster with Smith on the way back from
Santa Fe.

94 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

his stamping-ground,, might smile at the newcomers;
but they took good care to give their rivals the slip
when hunters left the rendezvous for the hills.

When the mountaineers scattered, Fitzpatrick led
his brigade to the region between the Black Hills on
the east and the Bighorn Mountains on the west. The
first snowfall was powdering the hills. Beaver were
beginning to house up for the winter. Big game was
moving down to the valley. The hunters had pitched a
central camp on the banks of Powder River, gathered
in the supply of winter meat, and dispersed in pairs
to ,trap all through the valley.

But forest rangers like Vanderburgh and Drips
were not to be so easily foiled. Every axe-mark on
windfall, every camp-fire,, every footprint in the spongy
mould, told which way the mountaineers had gone.
Fitzpatrick's hunters wakened one morning to find
traps marked A. F. C. beside their own in the valley.
The trick was too plain to be misunderstood. The
American Fur Company might not know the hunting-
grounds of the Eockies, but they were deliberately dog
ging the mountaineers to their secret retreats.

Armed conflict would only bring ruin in lawsuits.

Gathering his hunters together under cover of
snowfall or night, Fitzpatrick broke camp, slipped
stealthily out of the valley, over the Bighorn range,
across the Bighorn River, now almost impassable in
winter, into the pathless foldings of the Wind Eiver
Mountains, with their rampart walls and endless snow-
fields, westward to Snake River Valley, three hundred
miles away from the spies. Instead of trapping from
east to west, as he had intended to do so that the re
turn to the rendezvous would lead past the caches,

THE MOUNTAINEERS 95

Fitzpatrick thought to baffle the spies by trapping from
west to east.

Having wintered on the Snake, he moved gradually
up-stream. Crossing southward over a divide, they un
expectedly came on the very rivals whom they were
avoiding, Vanderburgh and Drips, evidently working
northward on the mountaineers' trail. By a quick
reverse they swept back north in time for the summer
rendezvous at Pierre's Hole.

Who had told Vanderburgh and Drips that the
mountaineers were to meet at Pierre's Hole in 1832?
Possibly Indians and fur trappers who had been notified
to come down to Pierre's Hole by the Rocky Mountain
men ; possibly, too, paid spies in the employment of the
American Fur Company.

Before supplies had come up from St. Louis for
the mountaineers Vanderburgh and Drips were at the
rendezvous. Neither of the rivals could flee away to
the mountains till the supplies came. Could the moun
taineers but get away first, Vanderburgh and Drips
could no longer dog a fresh trail. Fitzpatrick at once
set out with all speed to hasten the coming convoy.
Four hundred miles eastward he met the supplies, ex
plained the need to hasten provisions, and with one
swift horse under him and another swift one as a relay,
galloped back to the rendezvous.

But the Blackfeet were ever on guard at the moun
tain passes like cats at a mouse-hole. Fitzpatrick had
ridden into a band of hostiles before he knew the
danger. Vaulting to the saddle of the fresh horse, he
fled to the hills, where he lay concealed for three days.
Then he ventured out. The Indians still guarded the
passes. They must have come upon him at a night

96 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

camp when his horse was picketed, for Fitzpatrick es
caped to the defiles of the mountains with nothing but
the clothes on his back and a single ball in his rifle. By
creeping from shelter to shelter of rugged declivities
where the Indian ponies could not follow,, he at last
got across the divide, living wholly on roots and berries.
Swimming one of the swollen mountain rivers, he lost
his rifle. Hatless — for his hat had been cut up to bind
his bleeding feet and protect them from the rocks—
and starving, he at last fell in with some Iroquois
hunters also bound for the rendezvous.

The convoy under Sublette had already arrived at
Pierre's Hole.

The famous battle between white men and hostile
Blackfeet at Pierre's Hole, which is told elsewhere,
does not concern the story of rivalry between moun
taineers and the American Fur Company. The Rocky
Mountain men now realized that the magical A. F. C.
was a rival to be feared and not to be lightly shaken.
Some overtures were made by the mountaineers for an
equal division of the hunting-ground between the two
great companies. These Vanderburgh and Drips re
jected with the scorn of utter confidence. Meanwhile
provisions had not come for the American Fur Com
pany. The mountaineers not only captured all trade
with the friendly Indians, but in spite of the delay
from the fight with the Blackfeet got away to their
hunting-grounds two weeks in advance of the American
Company.

What the Rocky Mountain men decided when the
American Company rejected the offer to divide the
hunting-ground can only be inferred from what was
done.

THE MOUNTAINEERS 97

Vanderburgh and Drips knew that Fitzpatrick and
Bridger had led a picked body of horsemen northward
from Pierre's Hole.

If the mountaineers had gone east of the lofty
Tetons, their hunting-ground would be somewhere be
tween the Yellowstone and the Bighorn. If they had
gone south, one could guess they would round up some
where about Salt Lake where the Hudson's Bay * had
been so often " relieved " of their furs by the mountain
eers. If they had gone west, their destination must be
on the Columbia or the Snake. If they went north,
they would trap on the Three Forks of the Upper Mis
souri.

Therefore Vanderburgh and Drips cached all im
pedimenta that might hamper swift marching, smiled
to themselves, and headed their horses for the Three
Forks of the Missouri.

There were Blackfeet, to be sure, in that region;
and Blackfeet hated Vanderburgh with deadly venom
because he had once defeated them and slain a great
warrior. Also, the Blackfeet were smarting from the
fearful losses of Pierre's Hole.

But if the Rocky Mountain men could go rmscathed
among the Blackfeet, why, so could the American Fur
Company !

And Vanderburgh and Drips went !

Eival traders might not commit murder. That led
to the fearful ruin of the lawsuits that overtook Nor'

* By law the Hudson's Bay had no right in this region from
the passing of the act forbidding British traders in the United
States. But, then, no man had a right to steal half a million of
another's furs, which was the record of the Rocky Mountain
men.

a

98 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

Westers and Hudson's Bay in Canada only fifteen years
before.

But the mountaineers knew that the Blackfeet
hated Henry Vanderburgh !

Corduroyed muskeg where the mountaineers' long
file of pack-horses had passed, fresh-chopped logs to
make a way through blockades of fallen pine, the green
moss that hangs festooned among the spruce at cloud-
line broken and swinging free as if a rider had passed
that way, grazed bark where the pack-saddle had
brushed a tree-trunk, muddy hoof-marks where the
young packers had balked at fording an icy stream,
scratchings on rotten logs where a mountaineer's pegged
boot had stepped — all these told which way Fitzpatrick
and Bridger had led their brigade.

Oh, it was an easy matter to scent so hot a trail !
Here the ashes of a camp-fire ! There a pile of rock
placed a deal too carefully for nature's work — the
cached furs of the fleeing rivals ! Besides, what with
canon and whirlpool, there are so very few ways by
which a cavalcade can pass through mountains that the
simplest novice could have trailed Fitzpatrick and
Bridger.

Doubtless between the middle of August when Van
derburgh and Drips set out on the chase and the middle
of September when they ran down the fugitives the
American Fur Company leaders had many a laugh at
their own cleverness.

They succeeded in overtaking the mountaineers in
the valley of the Jefferson, splendid hunting-grounds
with game enough for two lines of traps, which Van
derburgh and Drips at once set out. No swift flight
by forced marches this time ! The mountaineers sat

THE MOUNTAINEERS 99

still for almost a week. Then they casually moved
down the Jefferson towards the main Missouri.

The hunting-ground was still good. Weren't the
mountaineers leaving a trifle too soon? Should the
Americans follow or stay? Vanderburgh remained,
moving over into the adjacent valley and spreading his
traps along the Madison. Drips followed the moun
taineers.

Two weeks' chase over utterly gameless ground
probably suggested to Drips that even an animal will
lead off on a false scent to draw the enemy away from
the true trail. At the Missouri he turned back up the
Jefferson.

Wheeling right about, the mountaineers at once
turned back too, up the farthest valley, the Gallatin,
then on the way to the first hunting-ground westward
over a divide to the Madison, where — ill luck ! — they
again met their ubiquitous rival, Vanderburgh!

How Vanderburgh laughed at these antics one may
guess !

Post-haste up the Madison went the mountaineers !

Should Vanderburgh stay or follow ? Certainly the
enemy had been bound back for the good hunting-
grounds when they had turned to retrace their way up
the Madison. If they meant to try the Jefferson, Van
derburgh would forestall the move. He crossed over
to the valley where he had first found them.

Sure enough there were camp-fires on the old hunt
ing-grounds, a dead buffalo, from which the hunters
had just fled to avoid Vanderburgh ! If Vanderburgh
laughed, his laugh was short ; for there were signs that
the buffalo had been slain by an Indian.

The trappers refused to hunt where there were

100 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

Blackfeet about. Vanderburgh refused to believe there
was any danger of Blackfeet. Calling for volunteers,
he rode forward with six men.

First they found a fire. The marauders must be
very near. Then a dead buffalo was seen, then fresh
tracks, unmistakably the tracks of Indians. But buf
falo were pasturing all around undisturbed. There
could not be many Indians.

Determined to quiet the fears of his men, Vander
burgh pushed on, entered a heavily wooded gulch,
paused at the steep bank of a dried torrent, descried
nothing, and jumped his horse across the bank, fol
lowed by the six volunteers.

Instantly the valley rang with rifle-shots. A hun
dred hostiles sprang from ambush. Vanderburgh's
horse went down. Three others cleared the ditch at a
bound and fled; but Vanderburgh was to his feet, aim
ing his gun, and coolly calling out : " Don't run ! Don't
run ! " Two men sent their horses back over the ditch
to his call, a third was thrown to be slain on the spot,
and Vanderburgh's first shot had killed the nearest In
dian, when another volley from the Blackfeet exacted
deadly vengeance for the warrior Vanderburgh had
slain years before.

Panic-stricken riders carried the news to the wait
ing brigade. Eefuge was taken in the woods, where sen
tinels kept guard all night. The next morning, with
scouts to the fore, the brigade retreated cautiously
towards some of their caches. A second night was
passed behind barriers of logs; and the third day a
band of friendly Indians was encountered, who were
sent to bury the dead.

The Frenchman they buried. Vanderburgh had

THE MOUNTAINEERS 101

been torn to pieces and his bones thrown into the
river.

So ended the merry game of spying on the moun
taineers.

As for the mountaineers, they fell into the meshes
of their own snares; for on the way to Snake River,
when parleying with friendly Blackfeet, the accidental
discharge of Bridger's gun brought a volley of arrows
from the Indians, one hooked barb lodging in Bridger's
shoulder-blade, which he carried around for three years
as a memento of his own trickery.

Fitzpatrick fared as badly. Instigated by the Amer
ican Fur Company, the Crows attacked him within a
year, stealing everything that he possessed.

PAET II

CHAPTER IX

THE TAKING OF THE BEAVER

ALL summer long he had hung about the fur com
pany trading-posts waiting for the signs.

And now the signs had come.

Foliage crimson to the touch of night-frosts. Crisp
autumn days, spicy with the smell of nuts and dead
leaves. Birds flying away southward, leaving the woods
silent as the snow-padded surface of a frozen pond.
Hoar-frost heavier every morning; and thin ice edged
round stagnant pools like layers of mica.

Then he knew it was time to go. And through the
Northern forests moved a new presence — the trapper.

Of the tawdry, flash clothing in which popular fancy
is wont to dress him he has none. Bright colours would
be a danger-signal to game. If his costume has any
colour, it is a waist-belt or neck-scarf, a toque or bright
handkerchief round his head to keep distant hunters
from mistaking him for a moose. For the rest, his
clothes are as ragged as any old, weather-worn gar
ments. Sleeping on balsam boughs or cooking over a
smoky fire will reduce the newness of blanket coat and
buckskin jacket to the dun shades of the grizzled forest.
A few days in the open and the trapper has the com
plexion of a bronzed tree-trunk.
102

THE TAKING OF THE BEAVER 103

Like other wild creatures, this foster-child of the
forest gradually takes on the appearance and habits of
woodland life. Nature protects the ermine by turn
ing his russet coat of the grass season to spotless white
for midwinter — except the jet tail-tip left to lure hun
gry enemies and thus, perhaps, to prevent the little
stoat degenerating into a sloth. And the forest looks
after her foster-child by transforming the smartest suit
that ever stepped out of the clothier's bandbox to the
dull tints of winter woods.

This is the seasoning of the man for the work.
But the trapper's training does not stop here.

When the birds have gone south the silence of a
winter forest on a windless day becomes tense enough
to be snapped by either a man's breathing or the break
ing of a small twig ; and the trapper acquires a habit of
moving through the brush with noiseless stealth. He
must learn to see better than the caribou can hear or
the wolf smell — which means that in keenness and ac
curacy his sight outdistances the average field-glass.
Besides, the trapper has learned how to look, how to
see, and seeing — discern; which the average man can
not do even through a field-glass. Then animals have
a trick of deceiving the enemy into mistaking them for
inanimate things by suddenly standing stock-still in
closest peril, unflinching as stone; and to match him
self against them the trapper must also get the knack
of instantaneously becoming a statue, though he feel
the clutch of bruin's five-inch claws.

And these things are only the a b c of the trapper's
woodcraft.

One of the best hunters in America confessed that
the longer he trapped the more he thought every animal

104 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

different enough from the fellows of its kind to be a'
species by itself. Each day was a fresh page in the book
of forest-lore.

It is in the month of May-goosey-geezee, the 0 jib-
ways' trout month, corresponding to the late October
and early November of the white man, that the trapper
sets out through the illimitable stretches of the forest
land and waste prairie south of Hudson Bay, between
Labrador and the Upper Missouri.

His birch canoe has been made during the summer.
Now, splits and seams, where the bark crinkles at the
gunwale, must be filled with rosin and pitch. A light
sled, with only runners and cross frame, is made to
haul the canoe over still water, where the ice first
forms. Sled, provisions, blanket, and fish-net are put
in the canoe, not forgetting the most important part
of his kit — the trapper's tools. Whether he hunts from
point to point all winter, travelling light and taking
nothing but absolute necessaries, or builds a central
lodge, where he leaves full store and radiates out to the
hunting-grounds, at least four things must be in his
tool-bag : a woodman's axe ; a gimlet to bore holes in
his snow-shoe frame ; a crooked knife — not the sheathed
dagger of fiction, but a blade crooked hook-shape,
somewhat like a farrier's knife, at one end — to smooth
without splintering, as a carpenter's plane ; and a small
chisel to use on the snow-shoe frames and wooden con
trivances that stretch the pelts.

If accompanied by a boy, who carries half the pack,
the hunter may take more tools; but the old trapper
prefers to travel light. Fire-arms, ammunition, a com
mon hunting-knife, steel-traps, a cotton-factory tepee,
a large sheet of canvas, locally known as tibuckwan, for

With eye and ear alert the man paddles silently on.

(Sec page /Oo.)

THE TAKING OF THE BEAVER 105

a shed tent, complete the trapper's equipment. His
dog is not part of the equipment : it is fellow-hunter
and companion.

From the moose must come the heavy filling for the
snow-shoes; but the snow-shoes will not be needed for
a month, and there is no haste about shooting an un-
found moose while mink and musk-rat and otter and
beaver are waiting to be trapped. With the dog show
ing his wisdom by sitting motionless as an Indian
bowman, the trapper steps into his canoe and pushes
out.

Eye and ear alert for sign of game or feeding-
place, where traps would be effective, the man paddles
silently on. If he travels after nightfall, the chances
are his craft will steal unawares close to a black head
above a swimming body. With both wind and current
meeting the canoe, no suspicion of his presence catches
the scent of the sharp-nosed swimmer. Otter or beaver,
it is shot from the canoe. With a leap over bow or
stern — over his master's shoulder if necessary, but
never sideways, lest the rebound cause an upset — the
dog brings back his quarry. But this is only an aside,
the hap-hazard shot of an amateur hunter, not the sort
of trapping that fills the company's lofts with fur
bales.

While ranging the forest the former season the
trapper picked out a large birch-tree, free of knots and
underbranching, with the full girth to make the body
of a canoe from gunwale to gunwale without any gus
sets and seams. But birch-bark does not peel well in
winter. The trapper scratched the trunk with a mark
of "first-finder-first-owner," honoured by all hunters;
and came back in the summer for the bark.

106 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

Perhaps it was while taking the bark from this tree
that he first noticed the traces of beaver. Channels,
broader than runnels,, hardly as wide as a ditch, have
been cut connecting pool with pool, marsh with lake.
Here are runways through the grass, where beaver have
dragged young saplings five times their own length
to a winter storehouse near the dam. Trees lie felled
miles away from any chopper. Chips are scattered
about marked by teeth which the trapper knows —
knows, perhaps, from having seen his dog's tail taken
off at a nip, or his own finger amputated almost before
he felt it. If the bark of a tree has been nibbled around,
like the line a chopper might make before cutting, the
trapper guesses whether his coming has not interrupted
a beaver in the very act.

All these are signs which spell out the presence of
a beaver-dam within one night's travelling distance;
for the timid beaver frequently works at night, and will
not go so far away that forage cannot be brought in
before daylight. In which of the hundred water-ways
in the labyrinth of pond and stream where beavers
roam is this particular family to be found?

Kcalizing that his own life depends on the life of
the game, no true trapper will destroy wild creatures
when the mothers are caring for their young. Besides,
furs are not at their prime when birch-bark is peeled,
and the trapper notes the place, so that he may come
back when the fall hunt begins. Beaver kittens stay
under the parental roof for three years, but at the end
of the first summer are amply able to look after their
own skins. Free from nursery duties, the old ones can
now use all the ingenuity and craft which nature gave
them for self-protection. When cold weather comes

THE TAKING OF THE BEAVER 107

the beaver is fair game to the trapper. It is wit against
wit. To be sure, the man has superior strength, a gun,
and a treacherous thing called a trap. But his eyes
are not equal to the beaver's nose. And he hasn't that
familiarity with the woods to enable him to pursue,
which the beaver has to enable it to escape. And he
can't swim long enough under water to throw enemies
off the scent, the way the beaver does.

Now, as he paddles along the network of streams
which interlace Northern forests, he will hardly be like
ly to stumble on the beaver-dam of last summer. Beav
ers do not build their houses where passers-by will
stumble upon them. But all the streams have been
swollen by fall rains ; and the trapper notices the mark
ings on every chip and pole floating down the full cur
rent. A chip swirls past white and fresh cut. Ho
knows that the rains have floated it over the beaver-
dam. Beavers never cut below their houses, but always
above, so that the current will carry the poles down
stream to the dam.

Leaving his canoe-load behind, the trapper guard
edly advances within sight of the dam. If any old
beaver sentinel be swimming about, he quickly scents
the man-smell, upends and dives with a spanking blow
of his trowel tail on the water, which heliographs dan
ger to the whole community. He swims with his webbed
hind feet, the little fore paws being used as carriers
or hanging limply, the flat tail acting the faintest bit
in the world like a rudder; but that is a mooted ques
tion. The only definitely ascertained function of that
bat-shaped appendage is to telegraph danger to com
rades. The beaver neither carries things on his tail,
nor plasters houses with it ; for the simple reason that

108 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

the joints of his caudal appurtenance admit of only
slight sidelong wigglings and a forward sweep between
his hind legs, as if he might use it as a tray for food
while he sat back spooning up mouthfuls with his fore
paws.

Having found the wattled homes of the beaver, the
trapper may proceed in different ways. He may, after
the fashion of the Indian hunter, stake the stream
across above the dam, cut away the obstruction lower
ing the water, break the conical crowns of the houses
on the south side, which is thinnest, and slaughter the
beavers indiscriminately as they rush out. But such
hunting kills the goose that lays the golden egg; and
explains why it was necessary to prohibit the killing
of beaver for some years. In the confusion of a wild
scramble to escape and a blind clubbing of heads there
was bootless destruction. Old and young, poor and in
prime, suffered the same fate. The house had been
destroyed; and if one beaver chanced to escape into
some of the bank-holes under water or up the side
channels, he could be depended upon to warn all beaver
from that country. Only the degenerate white man
practises bad hunting.

The skilled hunter has other methods.

If unstripped saplings be yet about the bank of
the stream, the beavers have not finished laying up
their winter stores in adjacent pools. The trapper gets
one of his steel-traps. Attaching the ring of this to a
loose trunk heavy enough to hold the beaver down and
drown him, he places the trap a few inches under water
at the end of a runway or in one of the channels. He
then takes out a bottle of castoreum. This is a sub
stance from the glands of a beaver which destroys all

THE TAKING OF THE BEAVER 109

traces of the man-smell. For it the beavers have a
curious infatuation, licking everything touched by it,
and said, by some hunters, to be drugged into a crazy
stupidity by the very smell. The hunter daubs this on
his own foot-tracks.

Or, if he finds tracks of the beaver in the grass
back from the bank, he may build an old-fashioned
deadfall, with which the beaver is still taken in Lab
rador. This is the small lean-to, with a roof of branches
and bark — usually covered with snow — slanting to the
ground on one side, the ends either posts or logs, and
the front an opening between two logs wide enough to
admit half the animal's body. Inside, at the back, on
a rectangular stick, one part of which bolsters up the
front log, is the bait. All traces of the hunter are
smeared over with the elusive castoreum. One tug at
the bait usually brings the front log crashing down
across the animal's back, killing it instantly.

But neither the steel-trap nor the deadfall is wholly
satisfactory. When the poor beaver comes sniffing
along the castoreum trail to the steel-trap and on the
first splash into the water feels a pair of iron jaws
close on his feet, he dives below to try and gain the
shelter of his house. The log plunges after him, hold
ing him down and back till he drowns ; and his where
abouts are revealed by the upend of the tree.

But several chances are in the beaver's favour.
With the castoreum licks, which tell them of some
other beaver, perhaps looking for a mate or lost cub,
they may become so exhilarated as to jump clear of
the trap. Or, instead of diving down with the trap,
they may retreat back up the bank and amputate the
imprisoned foot with one nip, leaving only a mutilated

110 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

paw for the hunter. With the deadfall a small beaver
may have gone entirely inside the snare before the front
log falls; and an animal whose teeth saw through logs
eighteen inches in diameter in less than half an hour
can easily eat a way of escape from a wooden trap.
Other things are against the hunter. A wolverine may
arrive on the scene before the trapper and eat the
finest beaver ever taken; or the trapper may discover
that his victim is a poor little beaver with worthless,
ragged fur, who should have been left to forage for
three or four' years.

All these risks can be avoided by waiting till the
ice is thick enough for the trapper to cut trenches.
Then he returns with a woodman's axe and his dog.
By sounding the ice, he can usually find where holes
have been hollowed out of the banks. Here he drives
stakes to prevent the beaver taking refuge in the shore
vaults. The runways and channels, where the beaver
have dragged trees, may be hidden in snow and iced
over; but the man and his dog will presently find
them.

The beaver always chooses a stream deep enough
not to be frozen solid, and shallow enough for it to
make a mud foundation for the house without too much
work. Besides, in a deep, swift stream, rains would
carry away any house the beaver could build. A trench
across the upper stream or stakes through the ice pre
vent escape that way.

The trapper then cuts a hole in the dam. Falling
water warns the terrified colony that an enemy is near.
It may be their greatest foe,, the wolverine, whose claws
will rip through the frost-hard wall as easily as a bear

THE TAKING OP THE BEAVER 111

delves for gophers ; but their land enemies cannot pur
sue them into water; so the panic-stricken family—
the old parents, wise from many such alarms ; the young
three-year-olds, who were to go out and rear families
for themselves in the spring; the two-year-old cubbies,
big enough to be saucy, young enough to be silly; and
the baby kittens, just able to forage for themselves
and know the soft alder rind from the tough old bark
unpalatable as mud — pop pell-mell from the high plat
form of their houses into the water. The water is still
falling. They will presently be high and dry. No use
trying to escape up-stream. They see that in the first
minute's wild scurry through the shallows. Besides,
what's this across the creek? Stakes, not put there
by any beaver ; for there is no bark on. If they only had
time now they might cut a passage through; but no —
this wretched enemy, whatever it is, has ditched the
ice across.

They sniff and listen. A terrible sound comes from
above — a low, exultant, devilish winning. The man
has left his dog on guard above the dam. At that the
little beavers — always trembling, timid fellows — tum
ble over each other in a panic of fear to escape by way
of the flowing water below the dam. But there a new
terror assails them. A shadow is above the ice, a
wraith of destruction — the figure of a man standing
at the dam with his axe and club — waiting.

Where to go now? They can't find their bank
shelters, for the man has staked them up. The little
fellows lose their presence of mind and their heads
and their courage, and with a blind scramble dash up
the remaining open runway. It is a cul-de-sac. But
what does that matter? They run almost to the end.

112 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

They can crouch there till the awful shadow goes away.
Exactly. That is what the man has been counting on.
He will come to them afterward.

The old beavers make no such mistake. They have
tried the hollow-log trick with an enemy pursuing them
to the blind end, and have escaped only because some
other beaver was eaten.

The old ones know that water alone is safety.

That is the first and last law of beaver life. They,
too, see that phantom destroyer above the ice; but a
dash past is the last chance. How many of the beaver
escape past the cut in the dam to the water below, de
pends on the dexterity of the trapper's aim. But cer
tainly, for the most, one blow is the end; and that one
blow is less cruel to them than the ravages of the wolf
or wolverine in spring, for these begin to eat before
they kill.

A signal, and the dog ceases to keep guard above
the dam. Where is the runway in which the others
are hiding? The dog scampers round aimlessly, but
begins to sniff and run in a line and scratch and whim
per. The man sees that the dog is on the trail of sag
ging snow, and the sag betrays ice settling down where
a channel has run dry. The trapper cuts a hole across
the river end of the runway and drives down stakes.
The young beavers are now prisoners.

The human mind can't help wondering why the fool
ish youngsters didn't crouch below the ice above the
dam and lie there in safe hiding till the monster went
away. This may be done by the hermit beavers — fel
lows who have lost their mates and go through life
inconsolable; or sick creatures, infested by parasites
and turned off to house in the river holes ; or fat, selfish

THE TAKING OF THE BEAVER 113

ladies, who don't want the trouble of training a family.
Whatever these solitaries are — naturalists and hunters
differ — they have the wit to keep alive; but the poor
little beavers rush right into the jaws of death. Why
do they? For the same reason probably, if they could
answer, that people trample each other to death when
there is an alarm in a crowd.

They cower in the terrible pen, knowing nothing
at all about their hides being valued all the way from
fifty cents to three dollars, according to the quality;
nothing about the dignity of being a coin of the realm
in the Northern wilderness, where one beaver-skin sets
the value for mink, otter, marten, bear, and all other
skins, one pound of tobacco, one kettle, five pounds of
shot, a pint of brandy, and half a yard of cloth; noth
ing about the rascally Indians long ago bartering forty
of their hides for a scrap of iron and a great com
pany sending one hundred thousand beaver-skins in a
single year to make hats and cloaks for the courtiers
of Europe; nothing about the laws of man forbidding
the killing of beaver till their number increase.

All the little beaver remembers is that it opened
its eyes to daylight in the time of soft, green grasses;
and that as soon as it got strong enough on a milk diet
to travel, the mother led the whole family of kittens —
usually three or four — down the slanting doorway of
their dim house for a swim; and that she taught them
how to nibble the dainty, green shrubs along the bank ;
and then the entire colony went for the most glorious,
pell-mell splash up-stream to fresh ponds. No more
sleeping in that stifling lodge; but beds in soft grass
like a goose-nest all night, and tumbling in the water

114 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

all day, diving for the roots of the lily-pads. But the
old mother is always on guard, for the wolves and bears
are ravenous in spring. Soon the cubs can cut the
hardening bark of alder and willow as well as their
two-year-old brothers; and the wonderful thing is —
if a tooth breaks, it grows into perfect shape inside of
a week.

By August the little fellows are great swimmers,
and the colony begins the descent of the stream for
their winter home. If unmolested, the old dam is
chosen ; but if the hated man-smell is there, new water
ways are sought. Burrows and washes and channels
and retreats are cleaned out. Trees are cut and a great
supply of branches laid up for winter store near the
lodge, not a chip of edible bark being wasted. Just
before the frost they begin building or repairing the
dam. Each night's frost hardens the plastered clay
till the conical wattled roof — never more than two
feet thick — will support the weight of a moose.

All work is done with mouth and fore paws, and
not the tail. This has been finally determined by ob
serving the Marquis of Bute's colony of beavers. If
the family — the old parents and three seasons' off
spring — be too large for the house, new chambers are
added. In height the house is seldom more than five
feet from the base, and the width varies. In building
a new dam they begin under water, scooping out clay,
mixing this with stones and sticks for the walls, and
hollowing out the dome as it rises, like a coffer-dam,
except that man pumps out water and the beaver scoops
out mud. The domed roof is given layer after layer
of clay till it is cold-proof. Whether the houses have
one door or two is disputed; but the door is always at

THE TAKING OF THE BEAVER 115

the end of a sloping incline away from the land side,
with a shelf running round above, which serves as the
living-room. Differences in the houses, breaks below
water, two doors instead of one, platforms like an oven
instead of a shelf, are probably explained by the con
tinual abrasion of the current. By the time the ice
forms the beavers have retired to their houses for the
winter, only coming out to feed on their winter stores
and get an airing.

But this terrible thing has happened ; and the young
beavers huddle together under the ice of the canal,
bleating with the cry of a child. They are afraid to
run back; for the crunch of feet can be heard. They
are afraid to go forward; for the dog is whining with
a glee that is fiendish to the little beavers. Then a
gust of cold air comes from the rear and a pole prods
forward.

The man has opened a hole to feel where the hiding
beavers are, and with little terrified yelps they scuttle
to the very end of the runway. By this time the dog
is emitting howls of triumph. For hours he has been
boxing up his wolfish ferocity, and now he gives vent
by scratching with a zeal that would burrow to the
middle of earth.

The trapper drives in more stakes close to the blind
end of the channel, and cuts a hole above the prison
of the beaver. He puts down his arm. One by one
they are dragged out by the tail ; and that finishes the
little beaver — sacrificed, like the guinea-pigs and rab
bits of bacteriological laboratories, to the necessities
of man. Only, this death is swifter and less painful.
A prolonged death-struggle with the beaver would
probably rob the trapper of half his fingers. Very

116 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

often the little beavers with poor fur are let go. If
the dog attempts to capture the frightened runaways
by catching at the conspicuous appendage to the rear,
that dog is likely to emerge from the struggle minus a
tail, while the beaver runs off with two.

Trappers have curious experiences with beaver kit
tens which they take home as pets. When young they
are as easily domesticated as a cat, and become a nuis
ance with their love of fondling. But to them, as to
the hunter, comes what the Indians call " the-sickness-
of-long-thinking," the gipsy yearning for the wilds.
Then extraordinary things happen. The beaver are apt
to avenge their comrades' death. One old beaver trap
per of New Brunswick related that by June the beavers
became so restless, he feared their escape and put them
in cages. They bit their way out with absurd ease.

He then tried log pens. They had eaten a hole
through in a night. Thinking to get wire caging, he
took them into his lodge, and they seemed contented
enough while he was about ; but one morning he
wakened to find a hole eaten through the door, and
the entire round of birch-bark, which he had staked
out ready for the gunwales and ribbing of his canoe —
bark for which he had travelled forty miles — chewed
into shreds. The beavers had then gone up-stream,
which is their habit in spring.

CHAPTER X

THE MAKING OF THE MOCCASINS

IT is a grim joke of the animal world that the lazy
moose is the moose that gives wings to the feet of the
pursuer. When snow comes the trapper must have
snow-shoes and moccasins. For both, moose supplies
the best material.

Bees have their drones, beaver their hermits, and
moose a ladified epicure who draws off from the feed
ing-yards of the common herd, picks out the sweetest
browse of the forest, and gorges herself till fat as a
gouty voluptuary. While getting the filling for his
snow-shoes, the trapper also stocks his larder; and if
he can find a spinster moose, he will have something
better than shredded venison and more delicately fla
voured than finest teal.

Sledding his canoe across shallow lakelets, now
frozen like rock, still paddling where there is open way,
the trapper continues to guide his course up the water
ways. Big game, he knows, comes out to drink at sun
rise and sunset ; and nearly all the small game frequents
the banks of streams either to fish or to prey on the
fisher.

Each night he sleeps in the open with his dog on
guard; or else puts up the cotton tepee, the dog curl
ing outside the tent flap, one ear awake. And each

117

118 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

night a net is set for the white-fish that are to supply
breakfast, feed the dog, and provide heads for the traps
placed among rocks in mid-stream, or along banks
where dainty footprints were in the morning's hoar
frost. Brook trout can still be got in the pools below
waterfalls; but the trapper seldom takes time now to
use the line, depending on his gun and fish-net.

During the Indian's white-fish month — the white
man's November — the weather has become colder and
colder; but the trapper never indulges in the big log
fire that delights the heart of the amateur hunter.
That would drive game a week's tracking from his
course. Unless he wants to frighten away nocturnal
prowlers, a little, chip fire, such as the fishermen of
the Banks use in their dories, is all the trapper allows
himself.

First snow silences the rustling leaves. First frost
quiets the flow of waters. Except for the occasional
splitting of a sap-frozen tree, or the far howl of a
wolf -pack, there is the stillness of death. And of all
quiet things in the quiet forest, the trapper is the
quietest.

As winter closes in the ice-skim of the large lakes
cuts the bark canoe like a knife. The canoe is aban
doned for snow-shoes and the cotton tepee for more
substantial shelter.

If the trapper is a white man he now builds a lodge
near the best hunting-ground he has found. Around
this he sets a wide circle of traps at such distances
their circuit requires an entire day, and leads the trap
per out in one direction and back in another, without
retracing the way. Sometimes such lodges run from
valley to valley. Each cabin is stocked ; and the hunter

THE MAKING OF THE MOCCASINS 119

sleeps where night overtakes him. But this plan needs
two men; for if the traps are not closely watched, the
wolverine will rifle away a priceless fox as readily as he
eats a worthless musk-rat. The stone fire-place stands
at one end. Moss, clay, and snow chink up the logs.
Parchment across a hole serves as window. Poles and
brush make the roof, or perhaps the remains of the
cotton tent stretched at a steep angle to slide off the
accumulating weight of snow.

But if the trapper is an Indian, or the white man
has a messenger to carry the pelts marked with his
name to a friendly trading-post, he may not build a
lodge ; but move from hunt to hunt as the game changes
feeding-ground. In this case he uses the abuckwan —
canvas — for a shed tent, with one side sloping to the
ground, banked by brush and snow, the other facing the
fire, both tent and fire on such a slope that the smoke
drifts out while the heat reflects in. Pine and balsam
boughs, with the wood end pointing out like sheaves
in a stook, the foliage converging to a soft centre, form
the trapper's bed.

The snow is now too deep to travel without snow-
shoes. The frames for these the trapper makes of ash,
birch, or best of all, the mackikwatick — tamarack —
curving the easily bent green wood up at one end,
canoe shape, and smoothing the barked wood at the
bend, like a sleigh runner, by means of the awkward
couteau croche, as the French hunter calls his crooked
knife.

In style, the snow-shoe varies with the hunting-
ground. On forested, rocky, hummocky land, the shoe
is short to permit short turns without entanglement.
Oval and broad, rather than long and slim, it makes

120 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

up in width what it lacks in length to support the hunt
er's weight above the snow. And the toe curve is
slight; for speed is impossible on bad ground. To save
the instep from jars, the slip noose may be padded like
a cowboy's stirrup.

On the prairie, where the snowy reaches are un
broken as air, snow-shoes are wings to the hunter's
heels. They are long, and curved, and narrow, and
smooth enough on the runners for the hunter to sit
on their rear ends and coast downhill as on a toboggan.
If a snag is struck midway, the racquets may bounce
safely over and glissade to the bottom; or the toe may
catch, heels fly over head, and the hunter land with his
feet noosed in frames sticking upright higher than his
neck.

Any trapper can read the story of a hunt from snow-
shoes. Round and short: east of the Great Lakes.
Slim and long: from the prairie. Padding for the
instep : either rock ground or long runs. Filling of
hide strips with broad enough interspaces for a small
foot to slip through: from the wet, heavily packed,
snow region of the Atlantic coast, for trapping only,
never the chase, small game, not large. Lace ties, in
stead of a noose to hold the foot : the amateur hunter.
Atibisc, a fine filling taken from deer or caribou for the
heel and toe; with askimoneidb, heavy, closely inter
laced, membraneous filling from the moose across the
centre to bear the brunt of wear ; long enough for speed,
short enough to turn short : the trapper knows he is
looking at the snow-shoe of the craftsman. This is
the sort he must have for himself.

The first thing, then — a moose for the heavy fill
ing; preferably a spinster moose; for she is too lazy

THE MAKING OF THE MOCCASINS 121

to run from a hunter who is not yet a Mercury; and
she will furnish him with a banquet fit for kings.

Neither moose call nor birch horn, of which won
ders are told, will avail now. The mating season is
well past. Even if an old moose responded to the call,
the chances are his flesh would be unfit for food. It
would be a wasted kill, contrary to the principles of
the true trapper.

Every animal has a sign language as plain as print.
The trapper has hardly entered the forest before he
begins to read this language. Broad hoof-marks are
on the muskeg — quaking bog, covered with moss — over
which the moose can skim as if on snow-shoes, where
a horse would sink to the saddle. Park-like glades at
the heads of streams, where the moose have spent the
summer browsing on twigs and wallowing in water
holes to get rid of sand flies, show trampled brush and
stripped twigs and rubbed bark.

Coming suddenly on a grove of quaking aspens, a
saucy jay has fluttered up with a noisy call — an alarm
note; and something is bounding off to hiding in a
thicket on the far side of the grove. The wis-lcat-jan,
or whisky jack, as the white men call it, who always
hangs about the moose herds, has seen the trapper and
sounded the alarm.

In August, when the great, palmated horns, which
budded out on the male in July, are yet in the velvet,
the trapper finds scraps of furry hair sticking to young
saplings. The vain moose has been polishing his ant
lers, preparatory to mating. Later, there is a great
whacking of horns among the branches. The moose,
spoiling for a fight, in moose language is challenging

122 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

his rivals to battle. Wood-choppers have been inter
rupted by the apparition of a huge, palmated head
through a thicket. Mistaking the axe for his rival's
defiance, the moose arrives on the scene in a mood of
blind rage that sends the chopper up a tree, or back
to the shanty for his rifle.

But the trapper allows these opportunities to pass.
He is not ready for his moose until winter compels
the abandoning of the canoe. Then the moose herds
are yarding up in some sheltered feeding-ground.

It is not hard for the trapper to find a moose yard.
There is the tell-tale cleft footprint in the snow. There
are the cast-off antlers after the battles have been
fought — the female moose being without horns and en
tirely dependent on speed and hearing and smell for
protection. There is the stripped, overhead twig,
where a moose has reared on hind legs and nibbled a
branch above. There is the bent or broken sapling
which a moose pulled down with his mouth and then
held down with his feet while he browsed. This and
more sign language of the woods — too fine for the
language of man — lead the trapper close on the haunts
of a moose herd. But he does not want an ordinary
moose. He is keen for the solitary track of a haughty
spinster. And he probably comes on the print when he
has almost made up his mind to chance a shot at one
of the herd below the hill, where he hides. He knows
the trail is that of a spinster. It is unusually heavy;
and she is always fat. It drags clumsily over the
snow; for she is lazy. And it doesn't travel straight
away in a line like that of the roving moose; for she
loiters to feed and dawdle out of pure indolence.

And now the trapper knows how a hound on a hot

THE MAKING OF THE MOCCASINS 123

scent feels. He may win his prize with the ease of put
ting out his hand and taking it — sighting his rifle and
touching the trigger. Or, by the blunder of a hair's
breadth, he may daily track twenty weary miles for a
week and come back empty at his cartridge-belt, empty
below his cartridge-belt, empty of hand, and full, full
of rage at himself, though his words curse the moose.
He may win his prize in one of two ways : ( 1 ) by run
ning the game to earth from sheer exhaustion; (2) or
by a still hunt.

The straightaway hunt is more dangerous to the
man than the moose. Even a fat spinster can outdis
tance a man with no snow-shoes. And if his persever
ance lasts longer than her strength — for though a moose
swings out in a long-stepping, swift trot, it is easily
tired — the exhausted moose is a moose at bay; and a
moose at bay rears on her hind legs and does defter
things with the flattening blow of her fore feet than
an exhausted man can do with a gun. The blow of a
cleft hoof means something sharply split, wherever that
spreading hoof lands. And if the something wriggles
on the snow in death-throes, the moose pounds upon
it with all four feet till the thing is still. Then she
goes on her way with eyes ablaze and every shaggy hair
bristling.

The contest was even and the moose won.

Apart from the hazard, there is a barbarism about
this straightaway chase, which repels the trapper. It
usually succeeds by bogging the moose in crusted snow,
or a waterhole — and then, Indian fashion, a slaughter;
and no trapper kills for the sake of killing, for the
simple practical reason that his own life depends on
the preservation of game.

124 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

A slight snowfall and the wind in his face are
ideal conditions for a still hunt. One conceals him.
The other carries the man-smell from the game.

Which way does the newly-discovered footprint run ?
More flakes are in one hole than the other. He fol
lows the trail till he has an idea of the direction the
moose is taking; for the moose runs straightaway, not
circling and doubling back on cold tracks like the deer,
but marching direct to the objective point, where it
turns, circles slightly — a loop at the end of a line —
and lies down a little off the trail. When the pursuer,
following the cold scent, runs past, the moose gets
wind and is off in the opposite direction like a vanish
ing streak.

Having ascertained the lie of the land, the trapper
leaves the line of direct trail and follows in a circling
detour. Here, he finds the print fresher, not an hour
old. The moose had stopped to browse and the mark
ings are moist on a twig. The trapper leaves the trail,
advancing always by a detour to leeward. He is sure,
now, that it is a spinster. If it had been any other,
the moose would not have been alone. The rest would
be tracking into the leader's steps; and by the fresh
trail he knows for a certainty there is only one. But
his very nearness increases the risk. The wind may
shift. The snowfall is thinning. This time, when he
comes back to the trail, it is fresher still. The hunter
now gets his rifle ready. He dare not put his foot down
without testing the snow, lest a twig snap. He parts
a way through the brush with his hand and replaces
every branch. And when next he comes back to the
line of the moose's travel, there is no trail. This is
what he expected. He takes off his coat; his leggings,

THE MAKING OF THE MOCCASINS 125

if they are loose enough to rub with a leathery swish;
his musk-rat fur cap, if it has any conspicuous colour;
his boots, if they are noisy and given to crunching. If
only he aim true, he will have moccasins soon enough.
Leaving all impedimenta, he follows back on his own
steps to the place where he last saw the trail. Perhaps
the saucy jay cries with a shrill, scolding shriek that
sends cold shivers down the trapper's spine. He wishes
he could get his hands on its wretched little neck ; and
turning himself to a statue, he stands stone-still till the
troublesome bird settles down. Then he goes on.

Here is the moose trail.!

He dare not follow direct. That would lead past
her hiding-place and she would bolt. He resorts to
artifice; but, for that matter, so has the moose resorted
to artifice. The trapper, too, circles forward, cutting
the moose's magic guard with transverse zigzags. But
he no longer walks. He crouches, or creeps, or glides
noiselessly from shelter to shelter, very much the way
a cat advances on an unwary mouse. He sinks to his
knees and feels forward for snow-pads every pace.
Then he is on all-fours, still circling. His detour has
narrowed and narrowed till he knows she must be in
that aspen thicket. The brush is sparser. She has
chosen her resting-ground wisely. The man falls for
ward on his face, closing in, closing in, wiggling and
watching till — he makes a horrible discovery. That
jay is perched on the topmost bough of the grove ; and
the man has caught a glimpse of something buff-col
oured behind the aspens. It may be a moose, or only
a log. The untried hunter would fire. Not so the trap
per. Hap-hazard aim means fighting a wounded moose,
or letting the creature drag its agony off to inaccessible

126 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

haunts. The man worms his way round the thicket,
sighting the game with the noiseless circling of a hawk
"before the drop. An ear blinks. But at that instant
the jay perks his head to one side with a curious look
at this strange object on the ground. In another sec
ond it will be off with a call and the moose up.

His rifle is aimed !

A blinding swish of aspen leaves and snow and
smoke ! The jay is off with a noisy whistle. And the
trapper has leather for moccasins, and heavy filling
for his snow-shoes, and meat for his larder.

But he must still get the fine filling for heel and
toe; and this comes from caribou or deer. The deer,
he will still hunt as he has still hunted the moose, with
this difference: that the deer runs in circles, jumping
back in his own tracks leaving the hunter to follow a
cold scent, while it, by a sheer bound — five — eight —
twenty feet off at a new angle, makes for the hiding
of dense woods. No one but a barbarian would attempt
to run down a caribou; for it can only be done by the
shameless trick of snaring in crusted snow, or inter
cepting while swimming, and then — butchery.

The caribou doesn't run. It doesn't bound. It
floats away into space.

One moment a sandy-coloured form, with black
nose, black feet, and a glory of white statuary above
its head, is seen against the far reaches of snow. The
next, the form has shrunk — and shrunk — and shrunk,
antlers laid back against its neck, till there is a van
ishing speck on the horizon. The caribou has not been
standing at all. It has skimmed out of sight; and if
there is any clear ice across the marshes, it literally

THE MAKING OF THE MOCCASINS 127

glides beyond vision from very speed. But, provided
no man-smell crosses its course, the caribou is vulner
able in its habits. Morning and evening, it comes back
to the same watering-place; and it returns to the same
bed for the night. If the trapper can conceal himself
without crossing its trail, he easily obtains the fine
filling for his snow-shoes.

Moccasins must now be made.

The trapper shears off the coarse hair with a sharp
knife. The hide is soaked; and a blunter, blade tears
away the remaining hairs till the skin is white and
clean. The flesh side is similarly cleaned and the skin
rubbed with all the soap and grease it will absorb. A
process of beating follows till the hide is limber. Care
lessness at this stage makes buckskin soak up water
like a sponge and dry to a shapeless board. The skin
must be stretched and pulled till it will stretch no
more. Frost helps the tanning, drying all moisture
out; and the skin becomes as soft; as down, without a
crease. The smoke of punk from a rotten tree gives
the dark yellow colour to the hide and prevents hard
ening. The skin is now ready for the needle; and all
odd bits are hoarded away.

Equipped with moccasins and snow-shoes, the trap
per is now the winged messenger of the tragic fates
to the forest world.

CHAPTER XI

THE INDIAN TRAPPER

IT is dawn when the Indian trapper leaves his lodge.

In midwinter of the Far North, dawn conies late.
Stars, which shine with a hard, clear, crystal radiance
only seen in northern skies, pale in the gray morning
gloom ; and the sun comes over the horizon dim through
mists of frost-smoke. In an hour the frost-mist, lying
thick to the touch like clouds of steam, will have
cleared ; and there will be nothing from sky-line to sky
line but blinding sunlight and snowglare.

The Indian trapper must be far afield before mid
day. Then the sun casts no man-shadow to scare
game from his snares. Black is the flag of betrayal
in northern midwinter. It is by the big liquid eye,
glistening on the snow like a black marble, that the
trapper detects the white hare ; and a jet tail-tip streak
ing over the white wastes in dots and dashes tells him
the little ermine, whose coat must line some emperor's
coronation robe, is alternately scudding over the drifts
and diving below the snow with the forward wriggling
of a snake under cover. But the moving man-shadow
is bigger and plainer on the snow than the hare's eye
or the ermine's jet tip; so the Indian trapper sets out
in the gray darkness of morning and must reach his
hunting-grounds before high noon.
128

THE INDIAN TRAPPER 129

With long snow-shoes, that carry him over the drifts
in swift, coasting strides, he swings out in that easy,
ambling, Indian trot, which gives never a jar to the
runner, nor rests long enough for the snows to crunch
beneath his tread.

The old musket, which he got in trade from the
fur post, is over his shoulder, or swinging lightly in
one hand. A hunter's knife and short-handled wood
man's axe hang through the beaded scarf, belting in
his loose, caribou capote. Powder-horn and heavy
musk-rat gantlets are attached to the cord about his
neck ; so without losing either he can fight bare-handed,
free and in motion, at a moment's notice. And some
where, in side pockets or hanging down his back, is his
skipertogan — a skin bag with amulet against evil,
matches, touchwood, and a scrap of pemmican. As he
grows hot, he throws back his hood, running bare
headed and loose about the chest.

Each breath clouds to frost against his face till
hair and brows and lashes are fringed with frozen
moisture. The white man would hugger his face up
with scarf and collar the more for this; but the
Indian knows better. Suddenly chilled breath would
soak scarf and collar wet to his skin; and his face
would be frozen before he could go five paces. But
with dry skin and quickened blood, he can defy the
keenest cold ; so he loosens his coat and runs the faster.

As the light grows, dim forms shape themselves in
the gray haze. Pine groves emerge from the dark,
wreathed and festooned in snow. Cones and domes
and cornices of snow heap the underbrush and spread
ing larch boughs. Evergreens are edged with white.
Naked trees stand like limned statuary with an ant-
10

130 THE STOEY OF THE TEAPPER

lered crest etched against the white glare. The snow
stretches away in a sea of billowed, white drifts that
seem to heave and fall to the motions of the runner,
mounting and coasting and skimming over the un
broken waste like a bird winging the ocean. And
against this endless stretch of drifts billowing away to
a boundless circle, of which the man is the centre, his
form is dwarfed out of all proportion, till he looks no
larger than a bird above the sea.

When the sun rises, strange colour effects are
caused by the frost haze. Every shrub takes fire; for
the ice drops are a prism, and the result is the same as
if there had been a star shower or rainfall of brilliants.
Does the Indian trapper see all this ? The white man
with white man arrogance doubts whether his tawny
brother of the wilds sees the beauty about him, because
the Indian has no white man's terms of expression.
But ask the bronzed trapper the time of day; and he
tells you by the length of shadow the sun casts, or the
degree of light on the snow. Inquire the season of the
year; and he knows by the slant sunlight coming up
through the frost smoke of the southern horizon.
And get him talking about his Happy Hunting-
Grounds; and after he has filled it with the imple
ments and creatures and people of the chase, he will
describe it in the metaphor of what he has seen at sun
rise and sunset and under the Northern Lights. He
does not see these things with the gabbling exclama-
tories of a tourist. He sees them because they sink
into his nature and become part of his mental furni
ture. The most brilliant description the writer ever
heard of the Hereafter was from an old Cree squaw,
toothless, wrinkled like leather, belted at the waist

THE INDIAN TRAPPER 131

like a sack of wool, with hands of dried parchment,
and moccasins some five months too odoriferous. Her
version ran that Heaven would be full of the music of
running waters and south winds; that there would al
ways be warm gold sunlight like a midsummer after
noon, with purple shadows, where tired women could
rest; that the trees would be covered with blossoms,
and all the pebbles of the shore like dewdrops.

Pushed from the Atlantic seaboard back over the
mountains, from the mountains to the Mississippi,
west to the Rockies, north to the Great Lakes, all that
was to be seen of nature in America the Indian trapper
has seen; though he has not understood.

But now he holds only a fringe of hunting-grounds,
in the timber lands of the Great Lakes, in the canons
of the Rockies, and across that northern land which
converges to Hudson Bay, reaching west to Athabasca,
east to Labrador. It is in the basin of Hudson Bay
regions that the Indian trapper will find his last hunt
ing-grounds. Here climate excludes the white man,
and game is plentiful. Here Indian trappers were
snaring before Columbus opened the doors of the New
World to the hordes of the Old; and here Indian trap
pers will hunt as long as the race lasts. When there
is no more game, the Indian's doom is sealed ; but that
day is far distant for the Hudson Bay region.

The Indian trapper has set few large traps. It is
midwinter; and by December there is a curious lull
in the hunting. All the streams are frozen like rock;
but the otter and pekan and mink and marten have not
yet begun to forage at random across open field. Some
foolish fish always dilly-dally up-stream till the ice

132 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

shuts them in. Then a strange thing is seen — a kettle
of living fish; fish gasping and panting in ice-hemmed
water that is gradually lessening as each day's frost
freezes another layer to the ice walls of their prison.
The banks of such a pond hole are haunted by the otter
and his fisher friends. By-and-bye, when the pond is
exhausted, these lazy fishers must leave their safe bank
and forage across country. Meanwhile, they are quiet.

The bear, too, is still. After much wandering and
fastidious choosing — for in trapper vernacular the bear
takes a long time to please himself — bruin found an
upturned stump. Into the hollow below he clawed
grasses. Then he curled up with his nose on his toes
and went to sleep under a snow blanket of gathering
depth. Deer, moose, and caribou, too, have gone off
to their feeding-grounds. Unless they are scattered by
a wolf -pack or a hunter's gun, they will not be likely to
move till this ground is eaten over. Nor are many
beaver seen now. They have long since snuggled into
their warm houses, where they will stay till their win
ter store is all used; and their houses are now hidden
under great depths of deepening snow. But the fox
and the hare and the ermine are at run ; and as long as
they are astir, so are their rampant enemies, the lynx
and the wolverine and the wolf-pack, all ravenous from
the scarcity of other game and greedy as spring crows.

That thought gives wings to the Indian trapper's
heels. The pelt of a coyote — or prairie wolf — would
scarcely be worth the taking. Even the big, gray tim
ber-wolf would hardly be worth the cost of the shot,
except for service as a tepee mat. The white arctic
wolf would bring better price. The enormous black or
brown arctic wolf would be more valuable; but the

THE INDIAN TRAPPER 133

value would not repay the risk of the hunt. But all
these worthless, ravening rascals are watching the traps
as keenly as the trapper does ; and would eat up a silver
fox, that would be the fortune of any hunter.

The Indian comes to the brush where he has set
his rabbit snares across a runway. His dog sniffs the
ground, whining. The crust of the snow is broken by
a heavy tread. The twigs are all trampled and rabbit
fur is fluffed about. The game has been rifled away.
The Indian notices several things. The rabbit has been
devoured on the spot. That is unlike the wolverine.
He would have carried snare, rabbit and all off for a
guzzle in his own lair. The footprints have the appear
ance of having been brushed over; so the thief had a
bushy tail. It is not the lynx. There is no trail away
from the snare. The marauder has come with a long
leap and gone with a long leap. The Indian and his
dog make a circuit of the snare till they come on the
trail of the intruder; and its size tells the Indian
whether his enemy be fox or wolf.

He sets no more snares across that runway, for
the rabbits have had their alarm. Going through the
brush he finds a fresh runway and sets a new snare.

Then his snow-shoes are winging him over the
drifts to the next trap. It is a deadfall. Nothing is
in it. The bait is untouched and the trap left undis
turbed. A wolverine would have torn the thing to
atoms from very wickedness, chewed the bait in two,
and spat it out lest there should be poison. The fox
would have gone in and had his back broken by the
front log. And there is the same brush work over the
trampled snow, as if the visitor had tried to sweep out
his own trail ; and the same long leap away, clearing ob-

134 THE STORY OP THE TRAPPER

struction of log and drift, to throw a pursuer off the
scent. This time the Indian makes two or three cir
cuits ; but the snow is so crusted it is impossible to tell
whether the scratchings lead out to the open or back
to the border of snow-drifted woods. If the animal
had followed the line of the traps by running just inside
the brush,, the Indian would know. But the midwinter
day is short, and he has no time to explore the border
of the thicket.

Perhaps he has a circle of thirty traps. Of that
number he hardly expects game in more than a dozen.
If six have a prize, he has done well. Each time he
stops to examine a trap he must pause to cover all
trace of the man-smell, daubing his own tracks with
castoreum, or pomatum, or bears' grease ; sweeping the
snow over every spot touched by his hand; dragging
the flesh side of a fresh pelt across his own trail.

Mid-day comes, the time of the short shadow; and
the Indian trapper has found not a thing in his traps.
He only knows that some daring enemy has dogged the
circle of his snares. That means he must kill the ma
rauder, or find new hunting-grounds. If he had doubt
about swift vengeance for the loss of a rabbit, he has
none when he comes to the next trap. He sees what is
too much for words: what entails as great loss to the
poor Indian trapper as an exchange crash to the white
man. One of his best steel-traps lies a little distance
from the pole to which it was attached. It has been
jerked up with a great wrench and pulled as far as
the chain would go. The snow is trampled and stained
and covered with gray fur as soft and silvery as chin
chilla. In the trap is a little paw, fresh cut, scarce
ly frozen. He had caught a silver fox, the fortune of

THE INDIAN TRAPPER 135

which hunters dream, as prospectors of gold, and specu
lators of stocks, and actors of fame. But the wolves,
the great, black wolves of the Far North, with eyes
full of a treacherous green fire and teeth like tusks,
had torn the fur to scraps and devoured the fox not
an hour before the trapper came.

He knows now what his enemy is ; for he has come
so suddenly on their trail he can count four different
footprints, and claw-marks of different length. They
have fought about the little fox; and some of the
smaller wolves have lost fur over it. Then, by the
blood-marks, he can tell they have got under cover of
the shrub growth to the right.

The Indian says none of the words which the white
man might say; but that is nothing to his credit; for
just now no words are adequate. But he takes prompt
resolution. After the fashion of the old Mosaic law,
which somehow is written on the very face of the wil
derness as one of its necessities, he decides that only
life for life will compensate such loss. The danger of
hunting the big, brown wolf — he knows too well to at
tempt it without help. He will bait his small traps
with poison ; take out his big, steel wolf traps to-mor
row; then with a band of young braves follow the
wolf-pack's trail during this lull in the hunting season.

But the animal world knows that old trick of draw
ing a herring scent across the trail of wise intentions ;
and of all the animal world, none knows it better than
the brown arctic wolf. He carries himself with less
of a hang-dog air than his brother wolves, with the
same pricking forward of sharp, erect ears, the same
crouching trot, the same sneaking, watchful green
eyes; but his tail, which is bushy enough to brush out

136 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

every trace of his tracks, has not the skulking droop
of the gray wolf's; and in size he is a giant among
wolves.

The trapper shoulders his musket again, and keep
ing to the open, where he can travel fast on the long
snow-shoes, sets out for the next trap. The man-shad
ow grows longer. It is late in the afternoon. Then
all the shadows merge into the purple gloom of early
evening ; but the Indian travels on ; for the circuit of
traps leads back to his lodge.

The wolf thief may not be far off ; so the man takes
his musket from the case. He may chance a shot at
the enemy. Where there are woods, wolves run under
cover, keeping behind a fringe of brush to windward.
The wind carries scent of danger from the open, and
the brush forms an ambuscade. Man tracks, where
man's dog might scent the trail of a wolf, the wolf
clears at a long bound. He leaps over open spaces, if
he can; and if he can't, crouches low till he has passed
the exposure.

The trapper swings forward in long, straight strides,
wasting not an inch of ground, deviating neither to
right nor left by as much space as a white man takes
to turn on his heels. Suddenly the trapper's dog utters
a low whine and stops with ears pricked forward to
wards the brush. At the same moment the Indian, who
has been keeping his eyes on the woods, sees a form
rise out of the earth among the shadows. He is not
surprised; for he knows the way the wolf travels, and
the fox trap could not have been robbed more than an
hour ago. The man thinks he has come on the thieves
going to the next trap. That is what the wolf means

THE INDIAN TRAPPER 137

him to think. And the man, too, dissembles; for as
he looks the form fades into the gloom, and he decides
to run on parallel to the brushwood, with his gun ready.
Just ahead is a break in the shrubbery. At the clear
ing he can see how many wolves there are, and as he
is heading home there is little danger.

But at the clearing nothing crosses. The dog dashes
off to the woods with wild barking, and the trapper
scans the long, white stretch leading back between the
bushes to a horizon that is already dim in the steel
grays of twilight.

Half a mile down this openway, off the homeward
route of his traps, a wolfish figure looms black against
the snow — and stands ! The dog prances round and
round as if he would hold the creature for his master's
shot ; and the Indian calculates — " After all, there is
only one."

What a chance to approach it under cover, as it has
approached his traps ! The stars are already prick
ing the blue darkness in cold, steel points ; and the
Northern Lights are swinging through the gloom like
mystic censers to an invisible Spirit, the Spirit of the
still, white, wide, northern wastes. It is as clear as day.

One thought of his loss at the fox trap sends the
Indian flitting through the underwoods like a hunted
partridge. The sharp barkings of the dog increase in
fury, and when the trapper emerges in the open, he
finds the wolf has straggled a hundred yards farther.
That was the meaning of the dog's alarm. Going back
to cover, the hunter again advances. But the wolf
keeps moving leisurely, and each time the man sights
his game it is still out of range for the old-fashioned
musket. The man runs faster now, determined to get

138 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

abreast of the wolf and utterly heedless of the increas
ing danger, as each step puts greater distance between
him and his lodge. He will pass the wolf, come out in
front and shoot.

But when he comes to the edge of the woods to get
his aim, there is no wolf, and the dog is barking furi
ously at his own moonlit shadow. The wolf, after the
fashion of his kind, has apparently disappeared into
the ground, just as he always seems to rise from the
earth. The trapper thinks of the " loup-garou," but
no wolf-demon of native legend devoured the very real
substance of that fox.

The dog stops barking, gives a whine and skulks
to his master's feet, while the trapper becomes sud
denly aware of low-crouching forms gliding through
the underbrush. Eyes look out of the dark in the flash
of green lights from a prism. The figures are in hiding,
but the moon is shining with a silvery clearness that
throw's moving wolf shadows on the snow to the trap
per's very feet.

Then the man knows that he has been tricked.

The Indian knows the wolf-pack too well to at
tempt flight from these sleuths of the forest. He
knows, too, one thing that wolves of forest and prairie
hold in deadly fear — fire. Two or three shots ring into
the darkness followed by a yelping howl, which tells
him there is one wolf less, and the others will hold off
at a safe distance. Contrary to the woodman's tra
ditions of chopping only on a windy day, the Indian
whips out his axe and chops with all his might till he
has wood enough for a roaring fire. That will keep
the rascals away till the pack goes off in full cry, or
da}light comes.

THE INDIAN TRAPPER 139

Whittling a limber branch from a sapling, the In
dian hastily makes a bow, and shoots arrow after
arrow with the tip in flame to high mid-air, hoping to
signal the far-off lodges. But the night is too clear.
The sky is silver with stars, and moonlight and re
flected snowglare, and the Northern Lights flicker and
wane and fade and flame with a brilliancy that dims
the tiny blaze of the arrow signal. The smoke rising
from his fire in a straight column falls at the height
of the trees, for the frost lies on the land heavy, pal
pable, impenetrable. And for all the frost is thick to
the touch, the night is as clear as burnished steel.
That is the peculiarity of northern cold. The air
seems to become absolutely compressed with the cold ;
but that same cold freezes out and precipitates every
particle of floating moisture till earth and sky, moon
and stars shine with the glistening of polished metal.

A curious crackling, like the rustling of a flag in a
gale, comes through the tightening silence. The intel
ligent half-breed says this is from the Northern Lights.
The white man says it is electric activity in compressed
air. The Indian says it is a spirit, and he may mutter
the words of the braves in death chant :

"If I die, I die valiant,
I go to death fearless.
I die a brave man.
I go to those heroes who died without fear."

Hours pass. The trapper gives over shooting fire
arrows into the air. He heaps his fire and watches,
musket in hand. The light of the moon is white like
statuary. The snow is pure as statuary. The snow-
edged trees are chiselled clear like statuary; and the

140 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

silence is of stone. Only the snap of the blaze, the
crackling of the frosted air, the break of a twig back
among the brush, where something has moved, and the
little, low, smothered barkings of the dog on guard.

By-and-bye the rustling through the brush ceases ;
and the dog at last lowers his ears and lies quiet. The
trapper throws a stick into the woods and sends the
dog after it. The dog comes back without any bark
ings of alarm. The man knows that the wolves have
drawn off. Will he wait out that long Northern night ?
He has had nothing to eat but the piece of pemmican.
The heavy frost drowsiness will come presently; and
if he falls asleep the fire will go out. An hour's run
will carry him home ; but to make speed with the snow-
shoes he must run in the open, exposed to all watchers.

When an Indian balances motives, the motive of
hunger invariably prevails. Pulling up his hood, belting
in the caribou coat and kicking up the dog, the trapper
strikes out for the open way leading back to the line
of his traps, and the hollow where the lodges have been
built for shelter against wind. There is another rea
son for building lodges in a hollow. Sound of the
hunter will not carry to the game; but neither will
sound of the game carry to the hunter.

And if the game should turn hunter and the man
turn hunted ! The trapper speeds down the snowy
slope, striding, sliding, coasting, vaulting over hum
mocks of snow, glissading down the drifts, leaping
rather than running. The frosty air acts as a con
ductor to sound, and the frost films come in stings
against the face of the man whose eye, ear, and touch
are strained for danger. It is the dog that catches the

THE INDIAN TRAPPER 141

first breath of peril, uttering a smothered "wool
woo!" The trapper tries to persuade himself the
alarm was only the far scream of a wolf -hunted lynx;
but it comes again, deep and faint, like an echo in a
dome. One glance over his shoulder shows him black
forms on the snow-crest against the sky.

He has been tricked again, and knows how the fox
feels before the dogs in full cry.

The trapper is no longer a man. He is a hunted
thing with terror crazing his blood and the sleuth-
hounds of the wilds on his trail. Something goes
wrong with his snow-shoe. Stooping to right the slip-
strings, he sees that the dog's feet have been cut by
the snow crust and are bleeding. It is life for life now ;
the old, hard, inexorable Mosaic law, that has no new
dispensation in the northern wilderness, and demands
that a beast's life shall not sacrifice a man's.

One blow of his gun and the dog is dead.

The far, faint howl has deepened to a loud, exult
ant bay. The wolf -pack are in full cry. The man has
rounded the open alley between the trees and is speed
ing down the hillside winged with fear. He hears the
pack pause where the dog fell. That gives him respite.
The moon is behind, and the man-shadow flits before
on the snow like an enemy heading him back. The
deep bay comes again, hard, metallic, resonant, nearer !
He feels the snow-shoe slipping, but dare not pause.
A great drift thrusts across his way and the shadow
in front runs slower. They are gaining on him. He
hardly knows whether the crunch of snow and pantings
for breath are his own or his pursuers'. At the crest
of the drift he braces himself and goes to the bottom
with the swiftness of a sled on a slide.

142 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

The slant moonlight throws another shadow on
the snow at his heels.

It is the leader of the pack. The man turns, and
tosses up his arms — an Indian trick to stop pursuit.
Then he fires. The ravening hunter of man that
has been ambushing him half the day rolls over with
a piercing howl.

The man is off and away.

If he only had the quick rifle, with which white men
and a body-guard of guides hunt down a single quarry,
he would be safe enough now. But the old musket is
slow loading, and speed will serve him better than an
other shot.

Then the snow-shoe noose slips completely over his
instep to his ankle, throwing the racquet on edge and
clogging him back. Before he can right it they are
upon him. There is nothing for it now but to face
and fight to the last breath. His .hood falls back, and
he wheels with the moonlight full in his eyes and the
Northern Lights waving their mystic flames high over
head. On one side, far away, are the tepee peaks of the
lodges; on the other, the solemn, shadowy, snow-
wreathed trees, like funeral watchers — watchers of
how many brave deaths in a desolate, lonely land where
no man raises a cross to him who fought well and died
without fear !

The wolf-pack attacks in two ways. In front, by
burying the red-gummed fangs in the victim's throat;
in the rear, by snapping at sinews of the runner's legs
— called hamstringing. Who taught them this devilish
ingenuity of attack? The same hard master who teach
es the Indian to be as merciless as he is brave — hunger !

Catching the muzzle of his gun, he beats back the

OF THE

UNIVERSITY

OF

They dodge the coining sweep of the uplifted arm

THE INDIAN TRAPPER 143

snapping red mouths with the butt of his weapon;
and the foremost beasts roll under.

But the wolves are fighting from zest of the chase
now, as much as from hunger. Leaping over their dead
fellows, they dodge the coming sweep of the uplifted
arm, and crouch to spring. A great brute is reaching
for the forward bound; but a mean, small wolf sneaks
to the rear of the hunter's fighting shadow. When the
man swings his arm and draws back to strike, this
miserable cur, that could not have worried the trapper's
dog, makes a quick snap at the bend of his knees.

Then the trapper's feet give below him. The wolf
has bitten the knee sinews to the bone. The pack leap
up, and the man goes down.

And when the spring thaw came, to carry away the
heavy snow that fell over the northland that night,
the Indians travelling to their summer hunting-grounds
found the skeleton of a man. Around it were the bones
of three dead wolves ; and farther up the hill were the
bleaching remains of a fourth.*

* A death almost similar to that on the shores of Hudson
Bay occurred in the forests of the Boundary, west of Lake Supe
rior, a few years ago. In this case eight wolves were found
round the body of the dead trapper, and eight holes were empty
in his cartridge-belt — which tells its own story.

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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA— BERKELEY

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