ree Or re 
TRAPPING IN OWA 1865-6. 
joa beginning of any enterprize or event of mo- 
ment usually lingers long in after-memory and 
forms an epoch in the review of one’s past life. Thus 
stands out an array of incidents in the writer’s memory 
in connection with his first attempt at a professional 
trapper’s life on the headwater streams of Little Sioux 
River in Northwestern Iowa in the autumn of I865. 
In this retrospective review aided by my original notes, 
I take up the record of initiation to a trapper’s calling, 
making notation of the first trip from our headquarters 
at Correctionville on the main Sioux to Mill creek, and 
other headwater streams coming in from thetreeless plains 
west of the valley proper. 
Lyman Comstock, formerly a fellow soldier in Col. 
Sawyer’s Border Batalllon of an earlier day,.was the 
projector of the expedition, he having many year’s ex- 
perience asa trapper, hunter and wolfer and familiar 
with the streams in which we were expected to make our 
fortunes in securing choice raw furs for the New York 
and London fur houses. 
Our camp equipage and team were of the ordinary 
rigs used in those days by the trappers of Northwestern 
Iowa. The narrator had just came down the Platte River 
from the Rocky Mountains, where he had gained some 
knowledge of antelope, elk and deer hunting, but had to 
rely wholly on Comstock’s experience in setting out a line 
of traps. 
