and the grandson of one-eyed Concomoly,
chief of the Chinooks, the marriage of
whose daughter to the factor of Astor is so
amusingly related, trudged side by side
with me for many a summer's day.
Captain Bonneville was not, to me, as he is to
many, a shadowy abstraction, invented
by the novelist, on which to hang many a
quaint tale of love and war; but was a
hearty, genial veteran, no way backward
to fight his battles over again, when he
got a ready listener.

It was in the palmy days of the fur
trade, when beaver was thirty shillings or
two pounds per pound, and a good beaver
skin would weigh a pound and a quarter,
or when Rocky Mountain martens worth
three or four guineas apiece piled on either
side of it was the price of a trade musket,
worth fifteen shillings, that the free trapper
flourished. He trapped for no particular
company, but was courted by the bourgeois,
as the head men of the traders were called,
of all, and sold to whom he pleased. In
the summer these men would start out in
bands, and, as convenient places for their
business presented themselves, would drop
off in twos and threes, with their squaws
and horses, until they came to some great
valley, when they would set their traps in
the streams, and if sport presented itself,
camp there for the whole summer. Their
camp usually consisted merely of an Indian
leather lodge, or some brush rudely thrown
together. If the neighbourhood were
infested by Indians they would have to keep
concealed during the day, as it was rarely
that some high-handed act, or the jealousies
of business, did not render a meeting
between the trappers and redskins a matter of
life and death. For the same reason he would
generally visit his beaver traps at night,
and, fearful of the echo of his rifle alarming
the prowling savage, would subsist on
beaver flesh: even though buffalo, elk,
deer, or antelope were abundant in the
neighbourhood, and the Rocky Mountain
goat and sheep skipped on the cliffs
around his haunt. Beavers, either smoked
or fresh, formed the staple article of
food of these mountain men; and to this
day a beaver's tail is looked upon as a
prime luxury. " He is a devil of a fellow,"
you will hear old grizzled hunters remark
of some acquaintance of theirs: "he can
eat two beaver tails!" And I quite agree
in the estimate put upon a man who could
devour so much of what is about as easily
masticated, and not half so digestible, as a
mess of whipcord seasoned with train oil and
castoreum! If the trapper were ordinarily
successful, he would load his horses with
the " packs" of beaver skins, and make for
the "rendezvous:" generally some trading
port, or sometimes some quiet valley where
game and grass abounded. Here, the
traders, would meet the trappers,
business would commence, and the winter
would be spent in riotous living and
debauchery. Duels were common; the
general bone of contention being the
relative merits and reputation for virtue
of the respective squaws. Every trapper
had his wife selected from one of the
Indian tribes with whom he was on
ordinarily decent terms, and to whom he was
united in Indian fashion. To be a trapper's
bride was looked upon, by an Indian or
half-breed damsel, as the height of all
good fortune; and a pretty life she led her
husband. Nothing in the trader's stores
was too fine or too expensive for her; and
next to being decked out herself in all
sorts of finery, her horse was her object of
solicitude. She was always fretting and
running away to her tribe, with her
infatuated husband in hot pursuit; or
sometimes she would, to the scandal and delight
of the gossips in the rendezvous, elope
with some Indian buck, or more favoured
trapper.

Often, these men, even despite the
exorbitant charges of the traders and their
winter debauches, made large sums; but
they never saved. Indeed they thought
themselves lucky if they were able to
"pull through the winter," and enough
remained to them to start out for another
summer's campaign. Even that didn't
trouble them much; for a good trapper of
acknowledged reputation had never any
trouble—to such an extent had competition
gone, and so large were the traders'
profits—in getting credit for all he wanted.
Trappers were not in the habit of insuring
their lives, otherwise learned actuaries
would no doubt have been able to tell
us exactly what were the risks of their
business; but some western statistician
estimated the life of the Rocky Mountain
trapper at an average, after he had fairly
entered the business, of only three years
and a half! His life was continually in
danger from Indians, from hunger and
thirst, from exposure and mode of life.
While floating down some turbulent river
in his " dug-out," or travelling through
a Rocky Mountain pass in the depth of
winter in an endeavour to reach the rendezvous,
he carried his life in his hands. He