YII 



America has been full of picturesque characters. Even 

 the Orient to-day, which is much what it has always been, 

 has no more of the odd and interesting than we have had. 

 Civilization {L e. newspapers, railroads, and telegraphs) 

 brings us down to one pattern. Ready-made clothing is 

 the archenemy of the graceful and appropriate — the de- 

 mon in art. No greater advance in mechanics was ever 

 made than that of building arms, machines, and tools to 

 scale, and that of duplicate parts. But people nowadays 

 are all duplicate parts, and while it Avorks well in mechan- 

 ics, it destroys originality and beauty in the human race. 

 When you consider what our early frontier population 

 was ; what energy, intelligence, and pluck resided in the 

 men who went out beyond "the settlements" into the 

 habitat of the red man to hunt or trap, we can surely 

 boast a more wonderful, and actually more picturesque 

 set of actors on tlie stage of American history than can 

 be found in any other land. 



Among these was the trapper. Some of the largest 

 cities on the American continent — St. Louis, as an in- 

 stance — may be said to have been built from the profits 

 of the fur trade. There had been stray trappers and small 

 dealers from the earliest days ; but the first man who dis- 

 covered the immense extent to which the peltry traffic 

 could be carried was a rover of broad views, who most 

 likely hailed from Kentucky or Missouri, was of French 

 or Scotch- Irish descent, and perchance came from the 



