54 LIFEINTHEFARWEST. 



ate late into the night, and, smoking, wiled away the time in nar- 

 rating 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 leam the ups and 

 downs of his career ; and one night, when they assembled earlier 

 than usual at the fire, he prevailed upon the modest trapper to 

 "unpack" some passages in his wild, adventurous life. 



" Maybe," commenced the mountaineer, "you both. remember 

 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 civiliza- 

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

 of the Rocky Mountains. 



La Bonte was raised in the state of 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. W^hen a boy, our trapper was " some," he said, with 

 the rifle, and always had a hankering for the west ; particularly 

 when, on accompanying his father to Saint Louis every spring, he 

 saw the dififerent bands of traders and hunters start upon their an- 

 nual expeditions to the mountains. Greatly did he envy the inde- 

 pendent, insouciant trappers, as, in all the glory of beads and 

 buckskin, they shouldered their rifles at Jake Hawkin's door (the 

 rifle maker of St. Louis), and bade adieu to the cares and tram- 

 mels of civilized life. 



