io The Wilderness Hunter. 



in victorious campaigns against Apache and Navahoe ; 

 and in the Civil War he was made a colonel of the Fed- 

 eral army. 



After him came many other hunters. Most were 

 pure-blooded Americans, but many were Creole French- 

 men, Mexicans, or even members of the so-called civilized 

 Indian tribes, notably the Delawares. Wide were their 

 wanderings, many their strange adventures in the chase, 

 bitter their unending warfare with the red lords of the land. 

 Hither and thither they roamed, from the desolate, burn- 

 ing deserts of the Colorado to the grassy plains of the 

 Upper Missouri ; from the rolling Texas prairies, bright 

 beneath their sunny skies, to the high snow peaks of the 

 northern Rockies, or the giant pine forests, and soft 

 rainy weather, of the coasts of Puget Sound. Their main 

 business was trapping, furs being the only articles yielded 

 by the wilderness, as they knew it, which were both valu- 

 able and portable. These early hunters were all trappers 

 likewise, and, indeed, used their rifles only to procure 

 meat or repel attacks. The chief of the fur-bearing ani- 

 mals they followed was the beaver, which abounded in 

 the streams of the plains and mountains ; in the far north 

 they also trapped otter, mink, sable, and fisher. They 

 married squaws from among the Indian tribes with which 

 they happened for the moment to be at peace ; they 

 acted as scouts for the United States troops in their 

 campaigns against the tribes with which they happened 

 to be at war. 



Soon after the Civil War the life of these hunters, 

 taken as a class, entered on its final stage. The Pacific 



