of May last, he thus referred to the probable origin of the evil:—
"'I have been confined to my room for many days, from the effects of an accident I met with in the Rocky Mountains, having been spilt from the bare back of a mule, and falling on the sharp picket of an Indian lodge on the small of my back. I fear I injured my spine, for I have never felt altogether the thing since, and, shortly after I saw you, the symptoms became rather ugly. However, I am now getting round again.'
"His medical advisers shared his opinion that he had sustained internal injury from this ugly fall; and it is not improbable that it was the remote, but real cause of his dissolution. From whatsoever this ensued, it will be a source of deep and lasting regret to all who ever enjoyed opportunities of appreciating the high and sterling qualities of George Frederick Ruxton. Few men, so prepossessing on first acquaintance, gained so much by being better known. With great natural abilities and the most dauntless bravery, he united a modesty and gentleness peculiarly pleasing.
"Had he lived, and resisted his friends' repeated solicitations to abandon a roving life and settle down in England, there can be little doubt that he would have made his name eminent on the lists of those daring and persevering men, whose travels in distant and dangerous lands have accumulated for England, and for the world, so rich a store of scientific and general information. And although the few words it has been thought right and becoming here to devote to his memory, will doubtless be more particularly welcome to his personal friends, we are persuaded that none will peruse without interest this brief tribute to the merits of a gallant soldier and accomplished English gentleman."
In the present edition no liberties have been taken with the text except by correcting a few obvious errors, and making the spelling conform to American usage. Footnotes by the present editor are marked (Ed); those unsigned are by Ruxton himself.
One useful purpose that this book may serve is to give professional hunters and trappers their due as hard working men. From time immemorial it has been the fashion to look down upon their ilk as lazy vagabonds "too trifling to work for a living." Such is the almost universal opinion of people who never have taken a big game hunt themselves, never even have seen hunters at work in the wilderness, but know them only as they take their well-earned ease after an exhausting chase.
"The lazy hunter" is the most misjudged of men; for really there is no harder labor than the pursuit of wild animals for a livelihood. The libelous epithet perhaps came in vogue from the fact that hunting and trapping are apt to unfit a man for settled habits of industry. Or it may have come from observing the whole-souled enjoyment with which the hunter pursues his occupation. We have not yet got rid of the Puritan notion that no effort is worthy unless it is painful to the spirit. The freeman of the woods calls his labor sport, and he laughs, in retrospect, at all the cruel toil, the starving and freezing and broken bones. Being utterly independent he seldom does things that "go against the grain," save as he is driven by necessity. But how sharp was the lash of that necessity, how often it stung body and soul, how many a hunter "went under," even in the old days when game was in the greatest abundance, is shown with perfect fidelity to truth in this picture of "Life in the Far West."
Horace Kephart.
IN THE OLD WEST
CHAPTER I
AWAY to the head-waters of the Platte, where several small streams run into the south fork of that river, and head in the broken ridges of the "Divide" which separates the valleys of the Platte and the Arkansa, were camped a band of trappers on a creek called Bijou. It was the month of October, when the early frosts of the coming winter had crisped and dyed with sober brown the leaves of the cherry and quaking ash belting the brooks; and the ridges and peaks of the Rocky Mountains were already covered with a glittering mantle of snow, sparkling in the still powerful rays of the autumn sun.
The camp had all the appearance of permanency; for not only did it comprise one or two unusually comfortable shanties, but the numerous stages on which huge strips of buffalo-meat were hanging in process of cure, showed that the party had settled themselves here in order to lay in a store of provisions, or, as it is termed in the language of the mountains, "to make meat." Round the camp fed twelve or fifteen mules and horses, their fore-legs confined by hobbles of rawhide; and, guarding these animals, two men paced backwards and forwards, driving in the stragglers, ascending ever and anon the bluffs which overhung the river, and leaning on their long rifles, whilst they swept with their eyes the surrounding prairie. Three or four fires burned in the encampment, at some of which Indian women carefully tended sundry steaming pots; whilst round one, which was in the center of it, four or five stalwart hunters, clad in buckskin, sat cross-legged, pipe in mouth.
They were a trapping party from the north fork of Platte, on their way to wintering-ground in the more southern valley of the Arkansa; some, indeed, meditating a more extended trip, even to the distant settlements of New Mexico, the paradise of mountaineers. The elder of the company was a tall gaunt man, with a face browned by twenty years' exposure to the extreme climate of the mountains; his long black hair, as yet scarcely tinged with gray, hanging almost to his shoulders, but his cheeks and chin clean shaven, after the fashion of the mountain-men. His dress was the usual hunting-frock of buckskin, with long fringes down the seams, with pantaloons similarly ornamented, and moccasins of Indian make. Whilst his companions puffed their pipes in silence, he narrated a few of his former experiences of western life; and whilst the buffalo hump-ribs and tenderloin are singing away in the pot, preparing for the hunters' supper, we will note down the yarn as it spins from his lips, giving it in the language spoken in the "Far West":—
"'Twas about calf-time, maybe a little later, and not a hundred year ago by a long chalk, that the biggest kind of rendezvous was held 'to' to Independence, a mighty handsome little location away up on old Missoura. A pretty smart lot of boys was camped thar, about a quarter from the town, and the way the whisky flowed that time was some now, I can tell you. Thar was old Sam Owins—him as got rubbed out * by the Spaniards at Sacramenty, or Chihuahuy, this hoss doesn't know which, but he went under ** anyhow. Well, Sam had his train along, ready to hitch up for the Mexican country—twenty thunderin' big Pittsburgh wagons; and the way his Santa Fé boys took in the liquor beat all—eh, Bill?"
* Killed, adapted from the Indian figurative language
** Died.
"Well, it did."
"Bill Bent—his boys camped the other side the trail, and they was all mountain-men, wagh!—and Bill Williams, and Bill Tharpe (the Pawnees took his hair on Pawnee Fork last spring): three Bills, and them three's all gone under. Surely Hatcher went out that time; and, adapted from the Indian figurative language, wasn't Bill Garey along, too? Didn't him and Chabonard sit in camp for twenty hours at a deck of euker? Them was Bent's Indian traders up on Arkansa. Poor Bill Bent! them Spaniards made meat of him. He lost his topknot to Taos. A clever man was Bill Bent as I ever know'd trade a robe or throw a bufler in his tracks. Old St. Vrain could knock the hind-sight off him though, when it came to shootin', and old Silverheels spoke true, she did: 'plumcenter' she was, eh?"
"Well, she wasn't nothin' else."
"The Greasers * paid for Bent's scalp, they tell me. Old St. Vrain went out of Santa Fé with a company of mountain-men, and the way they made'em sing out was slick as shootin'. He
