64 The Winning of the West 



of music and dancing 32 ; marriages and christen- 

 ings were seasons of merriment, when the fiddles 

 were scraped all night long, while the moccasined 

 feet danced deftly in time to the music. 



Three generations of isolated life in the wilder- 

 ness had greatly changed the characters of these 

 groups of traders, trappers, bateau-men, and adven- 

 turous warriors. It was inevitable that they should 

 borrow many traits from their savage friends and 

 neighbors. Hospitable, but bigoted to their old 

 customs, ignorant, indolent, and given to drunken- 

 ness, they spoke a corrupt jargon of the French 

 tongue; the common people were even beginning 

 to give up reckoning time by months and years, and 

 dated events, as the Indians did, with reference to 

 the phenomena of nature, such as the time of the 

 floods, the maturing of the green corn, or the ripen- 

 ing of the strawberries. 33 All their attributes 

 seemed alien to the polished army officers of old 

 France 34 ; they had but little more in common with 

 the latter than with the American backwoodsmen. 

 But they had kept many valuable qualities, and, in 

 especial, they were brave and hardy, and, after their 



32 "Journal of Jean Baptiste Perrault," 1783. 



33 "Voyage en Amerique" (1796), Gen6ral Victor Collot, 

 Paris, 1804, p. 318. 



34 Do. Collot calls them "un compose de traiteurs, d'aven- 

 turiers, de coureurs de bois, rameurs, et de guerriers ; igno- 

 rans, superstitieux et entetes, qu'aucunes fatigues, aucunes 

 privations, aucunes dangers ne peuvent arreter dans leurs 

 enterprises, qu'ils mettent toujours fin; ils n'ont conserve 

 des vertus francaises que le courage." 



