try.
They live the whole year through in the steppes, savannahs, prairies,
and forests of the Arkansas, Missouri, and Oregon territories--districts
which comprise enormous deserts of sand and rock, and, at the same time,
the most luxuriant and beautiful plains, teeming with verdure and
vegetation. Snow and frost, heat and cold, rain and storm, and hardships
of all kinds, render the limbs of the trapper as hard, and his skin as
thick, as those of the buffalo that he hunts; the constant necessity in
which he finds himself of trusting entirely to his bodily strength and
energy, creates a self-confidence that no peril can shake--a quickness
of sight, thought, and action, of which man in a civilized state can
form no conceptions. His hardships are often terrible; and I have seen
trappers who had endured sufferings, compared to which the fabled
adventures of Robinson Crusoe are mere child's play, and whose skin had
converted itself into a sort of leather, impervious to every thing
except lead and steel. In a moral point of view, these men may be
considered a psychological curiosity: in the wild state of nature in
which they live, their mental faculties frequently develop themselves in
a most extraordinary manner; and in the conversation of some of them may
be found proofs of a sagacity and largeness of views, of which the
greatest philosophers of ancient or modern times would have no cause to
be ashamed.

The daily and hourly dangers incurred by these trappers must, one would
think, occasionally cause them to turn their thoughts to a Supreme
Being; but such is not the case. Their rifle is their god--their knife
their patron saint--their strong right hand their only trust. The
trapper shuns his fellow-men; and the glance with which he measures the
stranger whom he encounters on his path, is oftener that of a murderer
than a friend: the love of gain is as strong with him as it is found to
be in a civilized state of society, and the meeting of two trappers is
generally the signal for the death of one of them. He hates his white
competitor for the much-prized beaver skins far more than he does his
Indian one: the latter he shoots down as coolly as if he were a wolf or
a bear; but when he drives his knife into the breast of the former, it
is with as much devilish joy as if he felt he were ridding mankind of as
great an evil-doer as himself. The nourishment of the trapper,
consisting for years together of buffalo's flesh--the stron