buffalo
sinews and implements of the chase from the bones.

The gathering of the spoils was not the least dangerous part of the
buffalo-hunt. Many an apparently lifeless buffalo has lunged up in a
death-throe that has cost the hunter dear. The mounted police officer of
whom mention has been made was once camping with a patrol party along
the international line between Idaho and Canada. Among the hunting
stories told over the camp-fire was that of the Indian pursued by the
wounded buffalo. Scarcely had the colonel finished his anecdote when a
great hulking buffalo rose to the crest of a hillock not a gunshot away.

"Come on, men! Let us all have a shot," cried the colonel, grasping his
rifle.

The buffalo dropped at the first rifle-crack, and the men scrambled
pell-mell up the hill to see whose bullet had struck vital. Just as they
stooped over the fallen buffalo it lunged up with an angry snort.

The story of the pursued Indian was still fresh in all minds. The
colonel is the only man of the party honest enough to tell what happened
next. He declares if breath had not given out every man would have run
till he dropped over the horizon, like the Indian and the buffalo.

And when they plucked up courage to go back, the buffalo was dead as a
stone.

CHAPTER VIII

THE MOUNTAINEERS

It was in the Rocky Mountains that American trapping attained its climax
of heroism and dauntless daring and knavery that out-herods comparison.

The War of 1812 had demoralized the American fur trade. Indians from
both sides of the international boundary committed every depredation,
and evaded punishment by scampering across the line to the protection of
another flag. Alexander MacKenzie of the North-West Company had been the
first of the Canadian traders to cross the Rockies, reaching the Pacific
in 1793. The result was that in less than fifteen years the fur posts of
the North-West and Hudson's Bay Companies were dotted like beads on a
rosary down the course of the mountain rivers to the boundary. Of the
American traders, the first to follow up Lewis and Clark's lead from the
Missouri to the Columbia were Manuel Lisa the Spaniard and Major Andrew
Henry, the two leading spirits of the Missouri Company. John Jacob Astor
sent his Astorians of the Pacific Company across the continent in 1811,
and a host of St. Louis firms had prepared to send free trappers to the
mountains when the war broke out. The end of the war saw Astoria
c