94 IN THE OLD WEST 



forty years in the growth of a metropolis? its 

 founders are now scarcely past middle life, re- 

 garding with astonishment the growing works of 

 their hands; and whilst gazing upon its busy 

 quays, piled with grain and other produce of the 

 West, its fleets of huge steamboats lying tier upon 

 tier alongside the wharves, its well-stored ware- 

 houses, and all the bustling concomitants of a 

 great commercial depot, they can scarcely realize 

 the memory of a few short years, when on the same 

 spot nothing was to be seen but the miserable 

 hovels of a French village the only sign of com- 

 merce being the unwieldy bateaux of the Indian 

 traders, laden with peltries from the distant re- 

 gions of the Platte and Upper Missouri. Where 

 now intelligent and wealthy merchants walk erect, 

 in conscious substantiality of purse and credit, 

 and direct the commerce of a vast and well-peo- 

 pled region, there stalked but the other day, in 

 dress of buckskin, the Indian trader of the West; 

 and all the evidences of life, mayhap, consisted of 

 the eccentric vagaries of the different bands of 

 trappers and hardy mountaineers who accom- 

 panied, some for pleasure and some as escort, the 

 periodically arriving bateaux, laden with the 

 beaver-skins and buffalo-robes collected during the 

 season at the different trading-posts in the Far 

 West.* 



These, nevertheless, were the men whose hardy 



* Written in 1848. (Ed.") 



