to the shore and got away
under cover of the floating tree. Hunters crossing the Cimarron desert
set out with pack-horses, and, like Captain Becknell's party, were often
compelled to kill horses and dogs to keep from dying of thirst.
Frequently their fate was that of Rocky Mountain Smith, killed by the
Indians as he stooped to scoop out a drinking-hole in the sand. Men who
brought down their pelts to the mountain _rendezvous_ of Pierre's Hole,
or went over the divide like Fraser and Thompson of the North-West Fur
Company, had to abandon both horses and canoes, scaling canon walls
where the current was too turbulent for a canoe and the precipice too
sheer for a horse, with the aid of their hunting-knives stuck in to the
haft.[2] Where the difficulties were too great for a few men, the fur
traders clubbed together under a master-mind like John Jacob Astor of
the Pacific Company, or Sir Alexander MacKenzie of the Nor' Westers.
Banded together, they thought no more of coasting round the sheeted
antarctics, or slipping down the ice-jammed current of the MacKenzie
River under the midnight sun of the arctic circle, than people to-day
think of running from New York to Newport. When the conflict of 1812 cut
off communication between western fur posts and New York by the overland
route, Farnham, the Green Mountain boy, didn't think himself a hero at
all for sailing to Kamtchatka and crossing the whole width of Asia,
Europe, and the Atlantic, to reach Mr. Astor.

The American fur trader knew only one rule of existence--to go ahead
without any heroics, whether the going cost his own or some other man's
life. That is the way the wilderness was won; and the winning is one of
the most thrilling pages in history.

* * * * *

About the middle of the seventeenth century Pierre Radisson and Chouart
Groseillers, two French adventurers from Three Rivers, Quebec, followed
the chain of waterways from the Ottawa and Lake Superior northwestward
to the region of Hudson Bay.[3] Returning with tales of fabulous wealth
to be had in the fur trade of the north, they were taken in hand by
members of the British Commission then in Boston, whose influence
secured the Hudson's Bay Company charter in 1670; and that ancient and
honourable body--as the company was called--reaped enormous profits from
the bartering of pelts. But the bartering went on in a prosy,
half-alive way, the traders sitting snugly in their forts on Ru