THE MOUNTAINEERS 91 



afloat, and overlaying with moss to save the horses 

 feet. 



But the greatest cause of delay was the windfall, 

 pines and spruce of enormous girth pitched down by 

 landslide and storm into an impassable cheval-de-frise. 

 Turn to the right ! A matted tangle of underbrush 

 higher than the horses head bars the way ! Turn to 

 the left ! A muskeg where horses sink through quaking 

 moss to saddle-girths ! If the horses could not be 

 driven around the barrier, the mountaineers would try 

 to force a high jump. The high jump failing except 

 at risk of broken legs, there was nothing to do but 

 chop a passage through. 



And were the men carving a way through the wil 

 derness only the bushwhackers who have pioneered 

 other forest lands? Of the prominent men leading 

 mountaineers in 1831, Vanderburgh of the American 

 Fur Company was a son of a Fifth New York Regi 

 ment officer in the Revolutionary War, and himself a 

 graduate of West Point. One of the Rocky Mountain 

 leaders was a graduate from a blacksmith-shop. An 

 other leader was a descendant of the royal blood of 

 France. All grades of life supplied material for the, 

 mountaineer; but it was the mountains that bred the 

 heroism, that created a new type of trapper the most 

 purely American type, because produced by purely 

 American conditions. 



Green River was the rendezvous for the mountain 

 eers in 1831 ; and to Green River came trappers of the 

 Columbia, of the Three Forks, of the Missouri, of the 

 Bighorn and Yellowstone and Platte. From St. Louis 

 came the traders to exchange supplies for pelts ; and 

 from every habitable valley of the mountains native 



