HISTORY OF THE NEWHOUSE TRAP. 207 



trace the steps with our eye, click ! a clash of steel, and the 

 heavy plunge of an animal in the water, struggling between 

 iron jaws at the end of an iron chain, tell at once the story of 

 the Rocky Mountain trapper and his game. 



If not tired with this jaunt, allow a year to pass, and then, 

 on the same handy roadster as before, fly with me a similar 

 journey in the opposite direction. We alight at one of the 

 great European capitals ; let it be London. It is night ; the 

 glitter of gas and glass around us, the whirl of fashion and the 

 roar of trade, with the miles of crowded pavement that 

 stretch away on every side, almost obliterate the conception 

 of such a thing as rural nature, to say nothing of primitive 

 forest solitude. Here in the aristocratic West End, a mansion 

 door opens ; a lady, robed and protected d la mode (for the 

 night is cool), and attended by powdered footmen, advances, 

 enters a coroneted carriage, and rolls off to opera or court. 



Do you see any connection between these two incidents of 

 antipodal real life ? None is obvious, certainly ; yet, on noting 

 the lady's costume, a tie of association is at once established ; 

 for that London dame this moment presses against her delicate 

 cheek the fur of the animal whose death-plunge we heard in 

 the mountain stream of the Northwest. Thus, between my 

 lady the Duchess and the Oregonian trapper, between the 

 Saskatchewan and the Strand, there is a chain of relations of 

 which the middle link, both locally and causatively, is the 

 Oneida Community Trap-Shop. If you had examined the 

 trap whose snap was fatal to the mink on our first flight, and 

 whose spoils you saw adorning European loveliness in our 

 second, you would probably have found stamped on its steel 

 spring the words, " S. Newhouse, Oneida Community, N. Y." 



The extraordinary growth of trapping as an occupation 

 within the last ten years, stimulated in part by the remuner- 

 ative price of furs, and in part by the ever- extending arc of 

 frontier settlements at the West, but still more perhaps by the 

 improvement in the manufacture of traps made by the Com- 

 munity under the supervision of its chief in that department, 

 Mr. Sewell Newhouse, will justify us in giving a sketch of 

 the history of the trap business and of its founder. 



