84: THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 



fore the mountaineers found good hunting-ground. 

 Ten years is a short enough time to learn the lie of the 

 land in even a small section of mountains. It was 

 twenty years from the time Lewis and Clark first 

 crossed the mountains before the traders of St. Louis 

 could be sure that the trappers sent into the Eockies 

 would find their way out. Seventy lives were lost in 

 the first two years of mountain trapping, some at the 

 hands of the hostile Blackfeet guarding the entrance 

 to the mountains at the head waters of the Missouri, 

 some at the hands of the Snakes on the Upper Columbia, 

 others between the Platte and Salt Lake. Time and 

 money and life it cost to learn the hunting-grounds of 

 the Rockies; and the mountaineers would not see 

 knowledge won at such a cost wrested away by a spy 

 ing rival. 



Then, too, the mountains had bred a new type of 

 trapper, a new style of trapping. 



Only the most daring hunters would sign contracts 

 for the &quot; Up-Country/ or Pays d en Haul as the 

 French called it. The French trappers, for the most 

 part, kept to the river valleys and plains; and if one 

 went to the mountains for a term of years, when he 

 came out he was no longer the smug, indolent, laughing, 

 chattering voyageur. The great silences of a life hard 

 as the iron age had worked a change. To begin with, 

 the man had become a horseman, a climber, a scout, a 

 fighter of Indians and elements, lank and thin and 

 lithe, silent and dogged and relentless. 



In other regions hunters could go out safely in 

 pairs or even alone, carrying supplies enough for the 

 season in a canoe, and drifting down-stream with a 



