LIFE IN THE FAR WEST. 61 



and Upper Missouri. Where now intelligent and wealthy mer- 

 chants walk erect, in conscious substantiality of purse and credit, 

 and direct the conunerce 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 evidences 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 plow the vast and fertile regions of the West. 

 Rough and savage though they were, they were the true pioneers 

 of that extraordinary tide of civilization which has poured its re- 

 sistless 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 plow of civilized 

 man. To the wild and half-savage trapper, who may be said to 

 exemplify the energy, enterprise, and hardihood characteristic of 

 the American people, divested of all the false and vicious glare 

 with which a high state of civihzation, 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 em- 

 pire of the West, destined in a few short years to become the most 

 important of those confederate states composing the mighty union 

 of North America. 



Sprung, then, out of the wild and adventurous fur trade, St. 

 Louis, still the emporium of that species of commerce, preserves 

 even now, in the character of its population, many of the marked 

 peculiarities distinguishing its early founders, who were identified 



