of upwards of one thousand miles from the sea, and three thousand from the capital of the United States.
Besides her merchants and upper class, who form a little aristocracy even here, a large portion of her population, still connected with the Indian and fur trade, preserve all their original characteristics, unacted upon by the influence of advancing civilisation. There is, moreover, a large floating population of foreigners of all nations, who must possess no little amount of enterprise to be tempted to this spot, whence they spread over the remote western tracts, still infested by the savage; so that, if any of their blood is infused into the native population, the characteristic energy and enterprise is increased, and not tempered down by the foreign cross.
But perhaps the most singular of the casual population are the mountaineers, who, after several seasons spent in trapping, and with good store of dollars, arrive from the scene of their adventures, wild as savages, determined to enjoy themselves, for a time, in all the gaiety and dissipation of the western city. In one of the back streets of the town is a tavern well known as the “Rocky-Mountain House,” and hither the trappers resort, drinking and fighting as long as their money lasts, which, as they are generous and lavish as Jack Tars, is for a few days only. Such scenes, both tragic and comic, as are enacted in the Rocky-Mountain House, are beyond the powers of pen to describe; and when a fandango is in progress, to which congregate the coquettish belles from “Vide Poche,” as the French portion of the suburb is nicknamed—the grotesque endeavours of the bear-like mountaineers to sport a figure on the light fantastic toe, and their insertions into the dance of the mystic jumps of Terpsichorean Indians when engaged in the “medicine” dances in honour of bear, of buffalo, or ravished scalp—are such startling innovations on the choreographic art as would make the shade of Gallini quake and gibber in his pumps.
Passing the open doors and windows of the Mountain House, the stranger stops short as the sounds of violin and banjo twang upon his ears, accompanied by extraordinary noises—sounding unearthly to the greenhorn listener, but recognised by the initiated as an Indian song roared out of the stentorian lungs of a mountaineer, who patting his stomach with open hands, to improve the necessary shake, choruses the well-known Indian chant:—
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