In the Old West. George Frederick Augustus Ruxton

INTRODUCTION

       Table of Contents

      When we bought the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon, in 1803, it was not from any pressing need of land, for we still had millions of fertile acres east of the Mississippi. The purchase was made to forestall complications with foreign powers, either with the arch-conqueror himself, whose ambition was supposed to be the mastery of the whole world, or with Great Britain, to which the western country was sure to fall in case France should be defeated. Possession of Louisiana was essential to our free navigation of the Mississippi.

      The vast domain thus added to our boundaries was terra incognita. Aside from, its strategic importance no one knew what it was good for. So Lewis and Clark were sent out from the frontier post of St. Louis to find a route to the Pacific and to report on what the new country was like.

      The only commercial asset that these explorers found which was immediately available was an abundance of fur-bearing animals. Fur may be called the gold of that period, and the news that there was plenty of it in the Rocky Mountains lured many an intrepid spirit of the border. Companies of traders proceeded at once up the Missouri to barter for peltries with the Indians.

      They established posts and arranged rendezvous in remote fastnesses of the mountains where they carried on a perilous but very profitable traffic. At the same time there went into the Far West many independent adventurers to hunt and trap on their own account.

      In the motley ranks of these soldiers of fortune the boldest and most romantic characters were the free trappers—those who went, as they expressed it; "on their own hook." The employees of the fur companies were under strict discipline that checked personal initiative. They were of the class who work for hire and see no compensation for an arduous life save the wages earned from their taskmasters. But the free trappers were accountable to nobody. Each of them fought his own fight and won the full fruit of his endeavors. Going alone, or in small bands who acknowledged no captain and would split up whenever the humor moved them, everyone a law unto himself and relying upon his own strong arm, they were men picked by nature for great enterprises and great deeds.

      It was not love of gain for its own sake that drew the free trappers into the wilderness. To them a pack of beaver skins was a mere gambler's stake, to be squandered riotously after the fashion of Jack ashore. What did compel them to a life of endless wandering and extreme hazard was the sheer lust of adventure, and a passion for that absolute, irresponsible freedom that can be enjoyed only in a state of nature. Never in our history have there been pioneers who took greater risks than they, or endured harsher vicissitudes, or severed themselves so completely from the civilization in which they were born. Nowhere, and at no time, have men of our race been thrown more upon their individual resources in unknown regions, and through periods of great peril, nor have there ever been characters more fitly developed to stand such strain.

      Cut off from the repressing and refining influences of civilization, forever warring with this Indian tribe and cohabiting with that, it was inevitable that most of these men should revert toward the status of white barbarians. And yet it would be a grave error, an injustice, to rate them with mere renegades and desperadoes. The trapper, whatever his faults, was still every inch a man. Bravest of the brave, yet cool and sagacious in the strategy of border war, capable in any emergency, faithful to his own code of honor, generous without limit to everyone but his foes, loyal to the death, frankly contemptuous of luxury and caste and affectation, imperial in his self-respect but granting equal rights to others, there was something heroic in this fierce and uncouth figure who dominated for a time the vast plains and mountains of the wild West. And it should not be forgotten that the early traders and trappers performed an indispensable service to their country that no other men of their time were able, or at least willing, to do: they were the explorers, the trail-makers, for western civilization.

      General Chittenden, our first authority on the history of the fur trade, says of the mountain men: "It was the roving trader and the solitary trapper who first sought out these inhospitable wilds, traced the streams to their sources, scaled the mountain passes, and explored a boundless expanse of territory where the foot of the white man had never trodden before. The Far West became a field of romantic adventure, and developed a class of men who loved the wandering career of the native inhabitant rather than the toilsome lot of the industrious colonist. The type of life thus developed, though essentially evanescent, and not representing any profound national movement, was a distinct and necessary phase in the growth of this new country. Abounding in incidents picturesque and heroic, its annals inspire an interest akin to that which belongs to the age of knight-errantry. For the free hunter of the Far West was, in his rough way, a good deal of a knight-errant. Caparisoned in the wild attire of the Indian, and armed cap-a-pie for instant combat, he roamed far and wide over deserts and mountains, gathering the scattered wealth of those regions, slaying ferocious beasts and savage men, and leading a life in which every footstep was beset with enemies and every moment pregnant of peril. The great proportion of these intrepid spirits who laid down their lives in that far country is impressive proof of the jeopardy of their existence. All in all, the period of this adventurous business may justly be considered the romantic era of the history of the West. …

      "It was the trader and trapper

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