Dec. 24, 1904.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
629 
Trails of the Pathfinders.— XXIU. 
The Rambler in North America. 
In the years 1832 and '33, Charles J. Latrobe, an 
Englishman, made extensive travels in the United 
States, of which he has left an account in two volumes 
entitled "The Rambler in North America." Latrobe 
was a natural traveler; observant, eager for informa- 
tion, appreciative of the beautiful, and sufficiently ex- 
perienced to take the rough with the smooth with 
great good nature. He was also a thorough English- 
man, critical of the people with whom he was brought 
in contact, inquisitive as a Yankee, yet quite uncon- 
scious of the curiosity which he himself possessed and 
constantly displayed, and entirely disposed to make 
fun of the Yankees for theirs. 
He reached New York in the latter part of May, 
1832, and is enthusiastic about the beauties of the bay 
of New York, which he describes in language that 
will seem curious to those who, in these days, have 
looked at the city from the water, and considered what 
is now termed New York's sky-line. He says: "You 
see a long line of level wharves and slips crowded by 
endless tiers of shipping, and tall brick warehouses 
peering over them; a few uninteresting church-steeples 
rearing themselves from the central parts of the city, 
which rises so gradual from the water's edge, that, at 
a distance, it seems to be built on a dead flat. There 
is neither beauty nor sublimity in such an object. Then 
the adjacent shores of Long Island and New Jersey 
opposite, though well wooded, are not particularly bold; 
the small low islands scattered over the nearer portions 
of the bay, are far from being either well clothed, or 
dignified by handsome structures; the swelling back 
of Staten Island, is too distant to form a prominent 
object in the landscape; still, come from what quarter 
you may, you are struck with the air of beauty. 
"Much is doubtless to be attributed to the extreme 
mellowness and transparency of the atmosphere, which 
gives color to every object on land or water. In this, 
the climate of New York is truly Italian. There is a 
freshness in the verdure that covers the sloping and 
gentle shores, a harmony in the outlines — and above 
all, there is a life in the aquatic scenery, which I never 
witnessed elsewhere in an equal degree. An air of 
gaiety and festal enjoyment which contrasts singularly 
with the unholiday appearance of men and things in the 
interior of the country, reigns on the waters of the 
bays and rivers, in the vicinity of the cities to a sur- 
prising degree." 
Latrobe's reference to the Yankees has been men- 
tioned; let us give his own words about them, the 
picture which he paints of the New Englander: "The 
manners and habits of this great eastern division of the 
American people are strikingly distinct from those of 
their fellow citizens to the southward. * * * They 
are speculative, at the same time that their caution, 
clearsightedness, and indomitable perseverance, gener- 
ally insure success. In politics, their practical con- 
duct is strikingly opposed to the theoretical vagaries of 
the south. They have often, and not without reason, 
been compared to the northern inhabitants of our own 
island: but, I think, the New Englanders have all the 
steadiness and prudence of the Scotch, with a yet 
greater degree of ingenuity. Like the Scotch, they 
foster education; like the Scotch, they are inclined to 
the more severe forms of religious discipline and wor- 
ship; like the Scotch, they are fearfully long-winded; 
like them they are gadders abroad, loving to turn their 
faces southward and westward, pushing their fortunes 
wherever fortunes are to be pushed, and often in 
places and by shifts where no one ever dreamed that 
fortunes were to be gained. They may be found sup- 
planting the less energetic possessor of land and prop- 
erty in every State of the Union. They have a finger 
upon the rim of every man's dish, and a toe at every 
man's heel. They are the peddlers and schoolmasters 
of the whole country; and, though careless of good 
living abroad, when at home and at ease, they are 
fond of 'creature comforts.' " From this description 
it may be seen that Latrobe was keen to see, and 
wielded a trenchant pen to describe the characteristics 
of our ancestors. Yet he does this universally with 
good nature, and one sees no phase of carping, spite 
or snappishness in all his volumes. 
Continuing through New England, the author passed 
up into Concord, saw the great falls, and at Buffalo 
the little party, made up of the author, Washington 
Irving, and M. de Pourtales, was threatened with dis- 
persal. Just as they were about to leave for Detroit — 
Mr. Irving having planned to leave them on the way 
to return to New York — word came to them that the 
Government was about to send a commission to nego- 
tiate with the Indians on the western frontier. This 
commission was to be stationed at Fort Gibson, on the 
Arkansas River, and it was one of the three commis- 
sioners who gave the author and his party this infor- 
mation. He invited Mr. Irving to attach himself to the 
commission, and promised a hearty welcome to the 
other members of the party. All accepted promptly, 
and in a short time they were on their way to what 
was then the far west. They went to Ashtabula, and 
thence, by way of Cleveland, Newark, Columbus and 
Cincinnati, to Louisville, Ky., and from there by steam- 
boat down the Ohio to St. Louis. 
By this time steamboat traffic was well established 
on the Ohio and lower Mississippi. It was in 1811, 
more than twenty years before, that the first steamboat 
was launched on the Ohio, at Pittsburg. The building 
of this boat followed a survey of the river by a certain 
Mr. Roosevelt, of New York, who did the work pur- 
suant to an agreement with Chancellor Livingston and 
Mr. Fulton, whose experiments with steam navigation 
made on the Hudson River, prior to the year 1809, had 
been so successful as to make them look for "other 
worlds to conquer." It will be remembered that the 
appearance of this vessel, and the great speed with 
which it passed along down the river, excited a feeling 
of mingled astonishment and terror among the settlers 
on its banks, most of whom had never heard of so 
monstrous a thing as a steamboat. It was during this 
voyage that the earthquake of 1811, '12 convulsed the 
valley of the Ohio. 
The sights seen by Latrobe and his party as they 
passed down the river were of things that have long 
since passed away. Among other things, he says: 
"Though greatly diminished in number, you still meet 
many an ark, for the transport of goods, built as a 
broad flat-boat, with a deck of two or three feet eleva- 
tion above the level of the water. They have generally 
a small window fore and aft, and a door in the middle, 
a peep into which will show you a goodly store of 
pots, pans, or flour barrels. A narrow ledge runs 
round them for the convenience of poling. A small 
chimney rises above; raccoon and deer-skins, the pro- 
duce of the hours spent on shore, are nailed on the 
sides to dry. The larger are generally propelled by 
four oars, and I have occasionally seen them sur- 
mounted by a crooked mast and topmast. Here you 
will meet one fitted up as a floating tin-shop, gleaning 
many a bright dollar from the settlers. Others again 
are of a still more simple construction, and have merely 
a temporary deck supported upon rails, through which 
the sheep and other live stock may be described. Hay 
for their consumption will be piled above, and cab- 
bages stowed away in the compartment behind. 
"Of the large barge, upon which the greater part of 
the valuable goods in request on the river were form- 
erly transported, few are now seen in the lower waters. 
They required twenty hands to warp them up against 
the current at the rate of six or seven miles a day, and 
were frequently of one hundred tons burden." 
At St. Louis the members of the commission who 
were bound for Fort Gibson determined to await the 
passage of the steamer up the Missouri, which should 
take them to the town of Independence, then the start- 
ing point for much of the western travel; but Mr. 
Irving, Mr. de Pourtales and Latrobe determined to 
go overland, camping on the way. For such a journey 
it was necessary to hire servants and purchase a camp 
outfit, and after this had been done, they started into 
the new land. Shortly before reaching Lexington they 
met a party of seventy trappers returning from the 
Rocky Mountains and Santa Fe. Latrobe speaks of 
them as "men worn with toil and travel, bearing in 
their garb and on their persons evident marks of the 
adventurous passage of those immense prairies which 
lie to the westward. Seven of their numbers had fallen 
in combat with the Indians on their return. 
Independence reached, it was found that the steamer 
had not yet been heard of, and the party settled them- 
selves down to wait for it, and in the meantime to 
learn what they could of the surrounding country. 
Latrobe paints an interesting picture of some phases 
of the life of the new settler in a country that was then 
being first cleared for the plow. Here the author was 
appointed by his two companions, quartermaster and 
commissary to the mess, and upon him fell the toil 
of purchasing provisions and other supplies, hiring 
servants and selecting horses. All this he did, and 
no doubt to the satisfaction of his friends, if not al- 
together to his own ; but he tells the story of his trials 
in a humorous light-hearted way which is very at- 
tractive. 
After the members of the commission and their com- 
panions left Independence for Fort Gibson, the author 
shows us the party just going into camp at the close 
of a long day's march. "The broken line of the caval- 
cade, the great intervals between the horsemen, the 
wagons toiling far in the rear, and the difficulty of keep- 
ing the spare horses on the track, as they seize upon 
every opportunity to diverge from it, to feed upon the 
rank grass, all betoken the propriety of making choice 
of our night-quarters. 
"The streams and creeks, meandering among these 
vast prairies, are generally deeply sunk, and bordered 
by a belt of rich forest, of greater or less breadth, and 
upon such our choice always fell, as we had here wood, 
water, shelter and fodder for our steeds. If possible, 
we halt before the sun is down, that we may get every- 
thing comfortably settled before night-fall, choosing 
an open space among the trees, within a stone's throw 
of the water. 
"The spot being fixed upon, we drive and ride in 
among the tall grass and dismount ; each unsaddles his 
steed, hobbles it, as the term is, by tying the two fore- 
feet close together, and sends it hopping into the forest 
like a kangaroo, crashing and scrambling through the 
gigantic and entangled brushwood which arises under 
the heavier timber. Here, at this season, they feed upon 
the pea-vine, a very nutritious plant which abounds in 
all the wooded alluvial grounds or, 'bottoms' of the 
Western Prairies. * * *" 
At length the Colonel's sonorous voice is heard an- 
nounced supper, "and each rousing himself to the 
willing toil, contrives a seat around a tent cloth, and 
partakes of the banquet. And banquet it was; for 
we lived at this time like princes, as coffee, biscuit, and 
bread were plentiful in the camp, in addition to our 
other luxuries, among which I would recount that 
despised dish, fried pumpkins. * * 
"The table withdrawn, we sit half an hour round the 
fire, listen to each other's tales, and, betweent whiles, 
to the distant howl of the prairie wolf, the shriek of 
the owl, the chirp of innumerable grasshoppers and 
crickets, the cry of the bustards going to sleep in the 
neighboring marsh, ox speculate upon some odd non- 
descript out-of-the-way noise in the deep forest; till in 
fine, growing gradually sleepy, we steal off to rest. 
"I cannot say that silence always held her sceptre 
over us, even when sound asleep, for little Prevot and 
the black snored so loud that the dogs would sit up and 
bark at the noise." 
Journeying westward from Independence, the trav- 
elers for several days skirted the limit of the treeless 
plains, of which Latrobe wrote, they "know no settled 
inhabitants, and over the other extremity of which, at 
five or six hundred miles distance, the gigantic summit 
of Mount Pike serves as a land-mark to the scouting 
Indian or trapper." 
At Harmony, a missionary establishment on the banks 
of the Osage River, they saw their first Indians, Pianka- 
shaws,, and a few days later met some Osages, people 
with shayed heads, tall, straight and upright, and, in a 
certain degree, martial in gait and bearing; and of all 
the tribes which Latrobe saw during his stay in America, 
the Osage came nearest to his ideal of the North 
American Indian. And this is but natural, since in the 
Osage he saw more nearly the primitive type than 
among any others to the east. 
It had been the purpose of Latrobe and his friend 
Pourtales to attach themselves for a time to one of the 
two great bands of the Osage tribe, but this proved 
impracticable. However, they were invited to accom- 
pany an armed expedition to the westward, which had 
just been sent out, and a runner had been sent for- 
ward after the rangers, with orders to the officers to 
await the commissioner and his friends. They were 
believed to be in camp fifty or sixty miles to the west- 
ward, and, in fact, a few days later, Latrobe and his 
party overtook them. They were commanded by a 
captain, who was an experienced backwoodsman, and 
he had as assistant two or three lieutenants of like quali- 
fications and credit. The men themselves numbered 
eighty," in the pay of the Government, enlisted for the 
service of the frontier, among the young backwoods- 
men of Missouri and Arkansas, for a given time; each 
providing, however, his own horse, rifle and clothing. 
Food and ammunition were furnished to them; the 
nature of the service being of the roughest, uniforms 
were dispensed with, and each appeared as his fancy 
or finances dictated. * * * The men carried rations 
for a certain number of days, after which it was ex- 
pected that we should come within the buffalo range, 
and amply provide ourselves there with the necessary 
food." 
Marching westward, the way was full of novel ex- 
periences for our Englishman, yet he seems to have 
fallen in well with the ways of the country. Game was 
plenty enough; elk, deer and bear, with abundance of 
turkeys furnished the company with abundance of fresh 
provisions. 
_ Except when marching, the men of the rangers had 
little to do, and much of their time was occupied in 
"swopping," or trading with one another, horses, sad- 
dles, rifles and clothes of every kind. Of course the 
materials for this trading were limited to what they 
had with them, and articles made the rounds, sometimes 
coming back into the possession of the original owner. 
The author tells of a certain man who was continually 
swopping his horses, and who, on the return to Fort 
Gibson, possessed the very animal that he had started 
with, and sixty dollars into the bargain. 
The travelers of our party had amusement and ex- 
citement enough without swopping. At the outset of 
the trip they had agreed that each man should care 
for his own saddle horse, "unsaddling and hobbling him 
in the first instance, and when brought into camp on 
the following morning, taking off the vile hobbles, and 
preparing him for the start. There was no hardship 
in this, if I except unhobbling, as the knot with which 
the feet were strongly secured, during the course of a 
long night spent in hopping through the damp grass, 
became often_ hard as iron, and as wet as a sponge; 
and many a time have I begun to lose my equanimity, 
and been on the point of using my knife, after five 
minutes were thrown away with alternate applications 
of teeth and fingers, vainly attempting to unloose the 
Gordian tie. For the rest, all seemed to inspire pleas- 
ure; and when we subsequently met in the gay saloons 
of the eastern cities, we often recalled those days of 
adventure and light-heartedness. * * * Here, alone, 
in the midst of the great wilderness, we moved day by 
day; lay down at night and rose in the morning in 
peace and quiet. We were like a vessel moored in a 
sheltered haven, within the breakers, and out of the 
reach of the tempest raging in the open sea. Those 
who have never moved out of the narrow sphere .in 
which all is artificial; where the possession of much 
makes the attainment of more an absolute necessity; 
where luxuries appear to be necessaries, can hardly 
conceive how little is in reality essential, not only for 
existence, but for^ contentment; or what a pliant and 
easily moulded mind any body we possess. Get only 
over your prejudice and try, and there are thousands 
of so-called comforts that you can do without — and of 
things which you can do for yourselves." Indeed, 
Latrobe speaks with much real feeling, and at some 
length of the beauties of the country through which he 
was passing and of the charm of this independent life. 
And now, the party were advancing further into the 
country beyond the Arkansas, and were beginning to 
look out for buffalo. They were also beginning to 
watch for signs of the Pawnees, those people of the 
southern central plains whose expertness in. horse 
taking, and whose daring in war made them, to the 
travelers in the south, as terrible as the Blackfeet of 
the Saskatchewan -and the Upper Missouri were to the 
trappers and traders of the north country. The Pawnee, 
according to our author, was the Arab of the West, 
whose hand was against every one; and they and the 
Comanches were alike dreaded. 
As yet the buffalo were still beyond them. These, 
like the Indian, had been obliged to forsake their 
original domains, and retired into the wilderness. Sixty 
years before this time, the rich forests and cane-brakes 
of Kentucky and Tennessee had swarmed with them, 
but Latrobe says: "There is not one to be found east 
of the Mississippi: and as man has penetrated, year by 
year, hundreds of miles to the westward, so the bison 
has fled his presence, and yearly interposes a good 
hundred miles betweent its pathway and the nearest 
settlements. * * * A few years back and the bison 
might be met with and killed in the center of the Ar- 
kansas territory; but we had now advanced a hundred 
miles beyond its remotest limit, and had not yet met 
with them." 
At last, however, they reached a country where buf- 
falo sign was plenty, and with it also the sign of hostile 
Indians. After these tracks were seen, the company 
traveled a little closer together, and at night the horses 
were tied up, instead of being allowed to wander as 
usual. Now, too, wild horses were seen, and here a 
half-breed guide caught one with his rope, brought it 
into camp, and the next day it was humbly carrying a 
pack with the rest of the animals. Shortly after cross- 
ing the Red Fork of the Arkansas, the rangers turned 
southward, and while traveling along near the cross 
timbers, saw their first buffalo. Here they had their 
first Indian scare. George Bird Grinneix, 
[to be continued.] J 
