

LIFE IN THE FAR WEST. 45 



alongside the wharves, its well-stored warehouses, and all 

 the bustling concomitants of a great commercial depot, they 

 can scarcely realise the memory of a few short years, when 

 on the same spot nothing was to be seen but the miserable 

 hovels of a French village the only sign of commerce 

 being the unwieldy bateaux of the Indian traders, laden 

 with peltries from the distant regions of the Platte and 

 Upper Missouri. Where now intelligent and wealthy 

 merchants walk erect, in conscious substantiality of purse 

 and credit, and direct the commerce of a vast and well- 

 peopled region, there stalked but the other day, in dress of 

 buckskin, the Indian trader of the West ; and all the evi- 

 dences of life, mayhap, consisted of the eccentric vagaries 

 of the different bands of trappers and hardy mountaineers 

 who accompanied, some for pleasure and some as escort, 

 the periodically arriving bateaux, laden with the beaver- 

 skins and buffalo-robes collected during the season at the 

 different trading-posts in the Far West. 



These, nevertheless, were the men whose hardy enterprise 

 opened to commerce and the plough the vast and fertile 

 regions of the West. Rough and savage though they were, 

 they were the true pioneers of that extraordinary tide of 

 civilisation which has poured its resistless current through 

 tracts large enough for kings to govern, over a country now 

 teeming with cultivation, where, a few short years ago, 

 countless herds of buffalo roamed unmolested, where the 

 bear and deer abounded, and the savage Indian skulked 

 through the woods and prairies, lord of the unappreciated 

 soil that now yields its prolific treasures to the spade and 

 plough of civilised man. To the wild and half -savage 

 trapper, who may be said to exemplify the energy, enter- 

 prise, and hardihood characteristic of the American people, 

 divested of all the false and vicious glare with which a high 

 state of civilisation, too rapidly attained, has obscured their 

 real and genuine character, in which the above traits are 

 eminently prominent to these men alone is due the 

 empire of the West, destined in a few short years to be- 

 come the most important of those confederate States com- 

 posing the mighty union of North America. 



