54 LIFE IN THE FAR WEST 



stranger's mind to learn the ups and downs of his career ; 

 and one night, when they assembled earlier than usual 

 at the fire, he prevailed 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 niggur 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 civilisation of his home, to seek the perilous 

 but engaging life of a trapper of the Rocky Mountains. 



La Bonte was raised in the state of Mississippi, not 

 far from Memphis, on the left bank of that huge and 

 snag-filled river. His father was a Saint Louis French- 

 man, his mother a native of Tennessee. When a boy, 

 our trapper was " some," he said, with the rifle, and 

 always had a hankering for the West ; particularly when, 

 on accompanying his father to Saint Louis every spring, 

 he saw the different bands of traders and hunters start 

 upon their annual expeditions to the mountains. 

 Greatly did he envy the independent insouciant 

 trappers, as, in all the glory of beads and buckskin, 

 they shouldered their rifles at Jake Hawkin's door, (the 



