92 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 



tribes to barter furs, sell horses for transport, carouse 

 at the merry meeting and spy on what the white hunt 

 ers were doing. For a month all was the confusion 

 of a gipsy camp or Oriental fair. 



French-Canadian voyageurs who had come up to 

 raft the season s cargo down-stream to St. Louis jostled 

 shoulders with mountaineers from the Spanish settle 

 ments to the south and American trappers from the 

 Columbia to the north and free trappers who had 

 ranged every forest of America from Labrador to Mex 

 ico.* Merchants from St. Louis, like General Ashley, 

 the foremost leader of Rocky Mountain trappers, de 

 scendants from Scottish nobility like Kenneth Mac- 

 Kenzie of Fort Union, miscellaneous gentlemen of ad 

 venture like Captain Bonneville, or Wyeth of Boston, 

 or Baron Stuart all with retinues of followers like 

 medieval lords found themselves hobnobbing at the 

 rendezvous with mighty Indian sachems, Crows or 

 Pend d Oreilles or Flat Heads, clad in little else than 

 moccasins, a buffalo-skin blanket, and a pompous 

 dignity. 



Among the underlings was a time of wild revel, 

 drinking daylight out and daylight in, decking them 

 selves in tawdry finery for the one dress occasion of the 

 year, and gambling sober or drunk till all the season s 

 earnings, pelts and clothing and horses and traps, were 

 gone. 



The partners as the Rocky Mountain men called 

 themselves in distinction to the bourgeois of the French, 

 the factors of the Hudson s Bay, the partisans of the 



* This is no exaggeration. Smith s trappers, who were scat 

 tered from Fort Vancouver to Monterey, the Astorians, Major 

 Andrew Henry s party had all been such wide-ranging foresters. 



