LIFE IN THE FAR WEST 231 



In the corral, groups of leather-clad mountaineers, 

 with "decks" of "euker" and "seven up," gamble 

 away their hard-earned peltries. The employes 

 mostly St Louis Frenchmen and Canadian voyageurs 

 are pressing packs of buffalo skins, beating robes, or 

 engaged in other duties of a trading fort. Indian 

 squaws, the wives of mountaineers, strut about in all 

 the pride of beads and fofarrow, jingling with bells and 

 bugles, and happy as paint can make them. Hunters 

 drop in with animals packed with deer or buffalo meat 

 to supply the fort ; Indian dogs look anxiously in at the 

 gateway, fearing to enter and encounter their natural 

 enemies, the whites ; and outside the fort, at any hour 

 of the day or night, one may safely wager to see a 

 dozen cayeutes or prairie wolves loping round, or seated 

 on their haunches, and looking gravely on, waiting 

 patiently for some chance offal to be cast outside. 

 Against the walls, groups of Indians, too proud to 

 enter without an invitation, lean, wrapped in their 

 buffalo robes, sulky and evidently ill at ease to be so 

 near the whites without a chance of fingering their 

 scalp-locks ; their white lodges shining in the sun, at a 

 little distance from the river-banks ; their horses feed- 

 ing in the plain beyond. 



The appearance of the fort is very striking, standing 

 as it does hundreds of miles from any settlement, on 

 the vast and lifeless prairie, surrounded by hordes of 

 hostile Indians, and far out of reach of intercourse 

 with civilised man ; its mud-built walls enclosing a 

 little garrison of a dozen hardy men, sufficient to hold 



