62 LIFE IN THE FAR WEST 



steamboats lying tier upon tier alongside the wharves, 

 its well-stored warehouses, and all the bustling conco- 

 mitants of a great commercial dep6t, they can scarcely 

 realise 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 commerce 

 being the unwieldy bateaux of the Indian traders, laden 

 with peltries from the distant regions of the Platte 

 and Upper Missouri. Where now intelligent and 

 wealthy merchants walk erect, in conscious substan- 

 tiality of purse and credit, and direct the commerce of 

 a vast and well-peopled region, there stalked but the 

 other day, in dress of buckskin, the Indian trader of 

 the West ; and all the evidences of life, mayhap, con- 

 sisted of the eccentric vagaries of the different bands of 

 trappers and hardy mountaineers, who accompanied, 

 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 dif- 

 ferent trading posts in the Far West. 



These, nevertheless, were the men whose hardy 

 enterprise opened to commerce and the plough the vast 

 and fertile regions of the West. Rough and savage 

 though they were, they were the true pioneers of that 

 extraordinary tide of civilisation which has poured its 

 resistless current through tracts large enough for kings 

 to govern, over a country now teeming with cultivation, 

 where, a few short years ago, countless herds of buffalo 

 roamed unmolested, where the bear and deer abounded, 

 and the savage Indian skulked through the woods and 



