22 THE WILDERNESS HUNTER. 



Joining in bands, the stalwart, skin-clad rifle- 

 men waged ferocious war on the Indians, 

 scarcely more savage than themselves, or 

 made long raids for plunder and horses against 

 the outlying Mexican settlements. The best, 

 the bravest, the most modest of them all was 

 the renowned Kit Carson. He was not only 

 a mighty hunter, a daring fighter, a finder of 

 trails, and maker of roads through the un- 

 known, untrodden wilderness, but also a real 

 leader of men. Again and again he crossed 

 and re-crossed the continent, from the Mis- 

 sissippi to the Pacific ; he guided many of the 

 earliest military and exploring expeditions of 

 the United States Government; he himself 

 led the troops in victorious campaigns against 

 Apache and Navahoe ; and in the Civil War 

 he was made a colonel of the Federal army. 



After him came many other hunters. Most 

 were pure-blooded Americans, but many were 

 Creole Frenchmen, Mexicans, or even mem- 

 bers of the so-called civilized Indian tribes, 

 notably the Delawares. Wide were their 

 wanderings, many their strange adventures in 

 the chase, bitter their unending warfare with 

 the red lords of the land. Hither and thither 

 they roamed, from the desolate, burning 

 deserts of the Colorado to the grassy plains 

 of the Upper Missouri \ from the rolling Texas 

 prairies, bright beneath their sunny skies, to 

 the high snow peaks of the northern Rockies, 

 or the giant pine forests, and soft rainy 

 -weather, of the coasts of Puget Sound. Their 

 main business was trapping, furs being the 

 only articles yielded by the wilderness, as 

 they knew it, which were both valuable and 



