LIFE IX THE FAB WEST. 39 



picked and chucked over their shoulders to the wolves, and 

 one fore leg and ifie "bit" of all, the head, were still cooked 

 before them the three had come to the resolution to join 

 company, and hunt in their present locality for a few 

 days at least the owner of the " two-shoot " gun volun- 

 teering to fill their horns with powder, and find tobacco for 

 their pipes. 



Here, on plenty of meat, of venison, bear, and antelope, 

 they merrily luxuriated ; returning after their daily hunts 

 to the brightly-burning camp-fire, where one always remained 

 to guard the animals, and unloading their packs of meat 

 (all choicest portions), ate late into the night, and, smok- 

 ing, wiled away the time in narrating scenes in their hard- 

 spent lives, and fighting their battles o'er again. 



The younger of the trappers, he who has figured under 

 the name of La Bonte, had excited, by scraps and patches 

 from his history, no little curiosity in the stranger's mind 

 to learn the ups and downs of his career ; and one night, 

 when they assembled earlier than usual at the fire, he pre- 

 vailed upon the modest trapper to " unpack " some passages 

 in his wild adventurous life. 



" Maybe," commenced the mountaineer, " you both re- 

 member when old Ashley went out with the biggest kind 

 of band to trap the Columbia and head- waters of Missoura 

 and Yellow Stone. Well, that was the time this niggur 

 first felt like taking to the mountains." 



This brings us back to the year of our Lord 1825 ; and 

 perhaps it will be as well, in order to render La Bonte's 

 mountain language intelligible, to translate it at once into 

 tolerable English, and to tell in the third person, but from 

 his own lips, the scrapes which befell him in a sojourn of 

 more than twenty years in the Far "West, and the causes 

 that impelled him to quit the comfort and civilisation of 

 his home, to seek the perilous but engaging life of a trapper 

 of the Rocky Mountains. 



La Bonte was raised in the state ol Mississippi, not far 

 from Memphis, on the left bank of that huge and snag- 

 filled river. His father was a Saint Louis Frenchman, his 

 mother a native of Tennessee. When a boy, our trapper 



