LIFE IN THE FAR WEST. 191 



Over clouds of tobacco and kinnik-kinnk, these grave affairs are 

 settled and terms arranged. 



In the corral, groups of leather-clad mountaineers, with " decks" 

 of " euker" and " seven up," gamble away their hard-earned 

 peltries. The employes — mostly St. Louis Frenchmen and Cana- 

 dian voyageurs — are pressing packs of buffalo skins, beating robes, 

 or engaged in other duties of a trading fort. Indian squaws, the 

 wives of mountaineers, strut about in all the pride of beads and 

 fofarrow, jingling with bells and bugles, and happy as paint can 

 make them. Hunters drop in with animals packed with deer or 

 buffalo meat to supply the fort ; Indian dogs look anxiously in at 

 the gate- way, fearing to enter and encounter their natural enemies, 

 the whites : and outside the fort, at any hour of the day or night, 

 one may safely wager to see a dozen cayeutes or prairie wolves 

 loping round, or seated on their haunches, and looking gravely on, 

 waiting patiently for some chance offal to be cast outside. Against 

 the walls, groups of Indians, too proud to enter without an invita- 

 tion, lean, wrapped in their buffalo robes, sulky and evidently ill 

 at ease to be so near the whites without a chance of fingering their 

 scalp-locks ; their white lodges shining in the sun, at a httle 

 distance from the river-banks ; their horses feeding in the plain 

 beyond. 



The appearance of the fort is very striking, standing as it does 

 hundreds of miles from any settlement, on the vast and lifeless 

 prairie, surrounded by hordes of hostile Indians, and far out of 

 reach of intercourse with civilized man ; its mud-built walls in- 

 closing a little garrison of a dozen hardy men, sufl^cient to hold in 

 check the numerous tribes of savages ever thirsting for their blood. 

 Yet the solitary stranger passing this lone fort, feels proudly secure 

 when he comes within sight of the " stars and stripes" which float 

 above the walls. 



