242 THE FUR TRADE OF AMERICA 



owed allegiance to no man, hunted where and how they chose, 

 and refused to carry their furs to any fort but the one that paid the 

 highest prices. For the mangeurs de lard, as they called the fur com- 

 pany raftsmen, they had a supreme contempt. For the methods 

 of the fur companies, putting rivals to sleep with laudanum or 

 bullet and ever stirring the savages up to warfare, the free trappers 

 had a rough and emphatically expressed loathing. 



The crime of corrupting natives can never be laid to the free 

 trapper. He carried neither poison, nor what was worse than 

 poison to the Indian — whiskey — among the native tribes. The 

 free trapper lived on good terms with the Indian, because his safety 

 depended on the Indian. Renegades like Bird, the deserter from 

 the Hudson's Bay Company, or Rose, who abandoned the Astorians, 

 or Beckwourth of apocryphal fame, might cast off civilization and 

 become Indian chiefs ; but, after all, these men were not guilty 

 of half so hideous crimes as the great fur companies of boasted 

 respectability. Wyeth of Boston, and Captain Bonneville of the 

 army, whose underlings caused such murderous slaughter among 

 the Root Diggers, were not free trappers in the true sense of the 

 term. Wyeth was an enthusiast who caught the fever of the 

 wilds ; and Captain Bonneville, a gay adventurer, whose men 

 shot down more Indians in one trip than all the free trappers of 

 America shot in a century. As for the desperado Harvey, whom 

 Larpenteur reports shooting Indians like dogs, his crimes were 

 committed under the walls of the American Fur Company's fort. 

 MacLellan and Crooks and John Day — before they joined the 

 Astorians — and Boone and Carson and Colter, are names that 

 stand for the true type of free trapper. 



The free trapper went among the Indians with no defence but 

 good behavior and the keenness of his wit. Whatever crimes 

 the free trapper might be guilty of towards white men, he was 

 guilty of few towards the Indians. Consequently, free trappers 

 were all through Minnesota and the region westward of the Missis- 

 sippi forty years before the fur companies dared to venture among 



