VI 



FRONTIER TYPES 



A MEXICAN VAQUERO. 



HE old race of Rocky Mountain hunters and trap- 

 pers, of reckless, dauntless Indian fighters, is now fast 

 dying out. Yet here and there these restless wander- 

 ers of the untrodden wilderness still linger, in wooded 

 fastnesses so inaccessible that the miners have not yet 

 explored them, in mountain valleys so far off that no 

 ranchman has yet driven his herds thither. To this day many 

 of them wear the fringed tunic or hunting-shirt, made of buck- 

 skin or homespun, and belted in at the waist, the most pic- 

 turesque and distinctively national dress ever worn in America. 

 It was the dress in which Daniel Boone was clad when he 

 first passed through the trackless forests of the Alleghanies and 

 penetrated into the heart of Kentucky, to enjoy such hunting 

 as no man of his race had ever had before ; it was the dress 

 worn by grim old Davy Crockett when he fell at the Alamo. 

 The wild soldiery of the backwoods wore it when they marched 

 f to victory over Ferguson and Pakenham, at King's Moun- 

 tain and New Orleans ; when they conquered the French 

 towns of the Illinois; and when they won at the cost of Red 



Eagle's warriors the bloody triumph of the Horseshoe Bend. 



These old-time hunters have been the forerunners of the white advance 

 throughout all our Western land. Soon after the beginning of the pres- 

 ent century they boldly struck out beyond the Mississippi, steered their 

 way across the flat and endless seas of grass, or pushed up the valleys 

 of the great lonely rivers, crossed the passes that wound among the tow- 

 ering peaks of the Rockies, toiled over the melancholy wastes of sage 

 brush and alkali, and at last, breaking through the gloomy woodland that 



