r, and more honesty in paying just debts, than where legal
restraints operated in all their force. The turpitude of vice and the
majesty of virtue, were as apparent as in older settlements. Industry,
in laboring or hunting, bravery in war, candor, honesty, and hospitality
were rewarded with the confidence and honor of the people. Regulating
parties would exist, and thieves, rogues and counterfeiters were sure to
receive a striped Jacket "worked nineteen to the dozen," and by this
mode of operation, induced to "clear out;" but truth, uprightness,
honesty and sincerity are always respected. Many of the frontier class
are _illiterate_, but they are by no means _ignorant_. They are a
shrewd, observing, thinking people. They may not have learned the black
marks in books, but they have studied _men and things_, and have a quick
insight into human nature. They are not inattentive to religion, though
their opportunities of religious instruction are few, compared with old
countries. They have prejudices and fears about many of the organized
benevolent societies of the present age, yet there are no people more
readily disposed to attend religious meetings, and whose hearts are more
readily affected with the gospel than the backwoods people; and as large
a proportion are orderly professors of religion as in any part of the
Union. Ministers of the gospel and Missionaries, who can suit themselves
to the circumstances and habits of frontier people,--who like Paul, can
"become all things to all men,"--find pleasant and interesting fields of
labor on all our frontiers. But let such persons show fastidiousness,
affect superior intelligence and virtue, catechise the people for their
plainness and simplicity of manners, and draw invidious comparisons, and
they are sure to be "used up," or left without hearers, to deplore the
"dark clouds" of ignorance and prejudice in the west.

_Hunters and Trappers._ Entirely beyond the boundaries of civilization
are many hundreds of a unique class, distinguished by the terms Hunters
and Trappers. They are engaged in hunting buffalo and other wild game,
and trapping for beaver. They are found upon the vast prairies of the
West and Northwest,--in all the defiles and along the streams of the
Rocky mountains, and in various parts of the Oregon Territory, to the
peninsula of California. They are an enterprising and erratic race from
almost every state, and are usually in the employ of persons of capital
and