OLD-TIME HUNTERS AND TRAPPERS. 
By SAMUEL PARKER. 
Aside from the Indians tew characters have 
figured more conspicuously in the drama of 
the new world than the old-time class of hunt- 
ers and trappers, at the head of which stood 
Kit Carson and Daniel Boone. An interest 
thrilling and extraordinary attached to these 
hardy rovers of the wilderness, whose nightly 
couch was the bosom of Mother Earth, and 
about whose picturesque and smoke-tanned 
costumes there clung the permeating odor of - 
pine and cedar boughs. 
From the serene mountain solitudes of the 
far Northwest, where Nature has dipped her 
pencil in the rainbow and transferred its gor- 
geous dyes to the walls of the grand cafion of 
the Yellowstone, and along the banks of every 
river that traverses the vast rolling plains be- 
yond the Missouri to the rivers of the ancient 
Montezumas in Mexico, the smoke of their 
campfires has curled upward through the crisp 
desert air unseen of human eyes, save those 
of the painted Indians, by whom these fearless 
adventurers were regarded as invaders of the 
red men’s possessions, and who were ever 
eager to adorn their lodge poles with trappers’ 
scalps. 
The glamor of romance which imaginative 
literature has thrown about the eventful lives 
of the hunters and trappers of olden times, is 
perhaps no more extravagant than the actual 
experiences which they encountered amid the 
solitudes of the untamed wilderness. What 
boy has perused the thrilling adventures and 
hair-breadth escapes of the hunters and trap- 
‘pers in the palmy days of the’ Northwestern 
and Hudson’s Bay fur companies without a 
feeling of the most unbounded enthusiasm, 
along with a corresponding tinge of regret that 
he was born too late to cast his lot with those 
long-haired and buckskin-clad adventurers, to 
whom the perils incident to their wild vocation 
were more congenial than the tamer pursuits 
of civilization ? However this may be, it is cer- 
tain that the secret charm of the romantic de- 
lineations of hunting and trapping episodes 
consists largely in the picturesque and scenic 
grandeur of the localities wherein the same 
are laid, and it is likewise true that nothing 
could appeal so powerfully to the imagination 
of a susceptible boy and gradually inspire him 
with an ardent love of the beautiful in nature 
as the stories of the old-time fur hunters. It 
matters little whether the storied exploits ot 
Antelope Tom or Beaver Pete be depicted on 
the canvas of fact or fancy, the background of 
the picture is usually a rushing, pine-belted 
river, an imposing forest or a range of cedared 
mountains with their hoary summits sleeping 
among the clouds. Nor is the boy alone in 
his admiration of the allurements of a primitive 
life such as characterized the hunters and trap- 
pers of early days. Men of wealth and cul- 
ture, who have been reared amid the luxuries 
and comforts of a pampered civilization, and 
who, in response to the nomadic impulses of 
their natures, have betaken themselves for a 
brief season of camp life to the mountains and 
prairies of the far West, have returned regret- 
fully to dream of crags and eagles, tumbling 
waters and wind-stirred pines. 
Perhaps, however, the most remarkable in- 
stance in support of the singular fascination of 
the life of a mountain trapper, barring, of 
course, the nationality of the individual, is that 
of the educated Indian trapper of which men- 
tion is made in a history of ‘‘ The Great West” 
published some forty years ago. This Indian, 
according to the account of a traveler, by whom 
he was discovered in the region of the Rocky 
Mountains, was a graduate of Dartmouth Col- 
lege, New Hampshire, a profound and elegant 
scholar and a critic on English and Roman lit- 
erature, but who for seventeen years had been 
pursuing the avocation ofatrapper. His reply 
to the gentleman’s query as to why a man of 
his scholastic attainments had chosen to cast 
his lot in the wilderness, while strictly charac- 
teristic of an Indian, was likewise tinged with 
the enthusiasm engendered by his long famil- 
iarity with the wild sublimities of nature. 
“Red men,” he remarked, ‘often acquire 
and love the sciences, but with the nature the 
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