IN THE OLD WEST 85 



their daily hunts to the brightly-burning camp- 

 fire, where one always remained to guard the ani- 

 mals, and unloading their packs of meat (all choic- 

 est portions), ate late into the night, and, smok- 

 ing, wiled away the time in narrating scenes in 

 their hard-spent lives, and fighting their battles 

 o'er again. 



The younger of the trappers, he who has fig- 

 ured under the name of La Bonte, had excited, by 

 scraps and patches from his history, no little curi- 

 osity in the stranger's mind to learn the ups and 

 downs of his career ; and one night, when they as- 

 sembled earlier than usual at the fire, he pre- 

 vailed upon the modest trapper to " unpack " 

 some passages in his wild adventurous life. 



" Maybe," commenced the mountaineer, " you 

 both remember when old Ashley went out with the 

 biggest kind of band to trap the Columbia and 

 head-waters of Missoura and Yellow Stone. Well, 

 that was the time this nigger first felt like taking 

 to the mountains." 



This brings us back to the year of our Lord 

 1825; and perhaps it will be as well, in order to 

 render La Bonte's mountain language intelligible, 

 to translate it at once into tolerable English, and 

 to tell in the third person, but from his own lips, 

 the scrapes which befell him in a sojourn of more 

 than twenty years in the Far West, and the causes 

 that impelled him to quit the comfort and civili- 

 zation of his home, to seek the perilous but en- 



