aptured by the Nor' Westers, the Astorians scattered to all parts of
the world, Lisa driven down the Missouri to Council Bluffs, Andrew
Henry a fugitive from the Blackfeet of the Yellowstone, and all the free
trappers like an idle army waiting for a captain.

Their captain came.

Mr. Astor's influence secured the passage of a law barring out British
fur traders from the United States. That threw all the old Hudson's Bay
and North-West posts south of the boundary into the hands of Mr. Astor's
American Fur Company. He had already bought out the American part of the
Mackinaw Company's posts, stretching west from Michilimackinac beyond
the Mississippi towards the head waters of the Missouri. And now to his
force came a tremendous accession--all those dissatisfied Nor' Westers
thrown out of employment when their company amalgamated with the
Hudson's Bay.

If Mr. Astor alone had held the American fur trade, there would have
been none of that rivalry which ended in so much bloodshed. But St.
Louis, lying like a gateway to the mountain trade, had always been
jealous of those fur traders with headquarters in New York. Lisa had
refused to join Mr. Astor's Pacific Company, and doubtless the Spaniard
chuckled over his own wisdom when that venture failed with a loss of
nearly half a million to its founder. When Lisa died the St. Louis
traders still held back from the American Fur Company. Henry and Ashley
and the Sublettes and Campbell and Fitzpatrick and Bridger--subsequently
known as the Rocky Mountain traders--swept up the Missouri with brigades
of one hundred, two hundred, and three hundred men, and were overrunning
the mountains five years before the American Company's slowly extending
line of forts had reached as far west as the Yellowstone. A clash was
bound to ensue when these two sets of rivals met on a hunting-field
which the Rocky Mountain men regarded as pre-empted by themselves.

The clash came from the peculiarities of the hunting-ground.

It was two thousand miles by trappers' trail from the reach of law. It
was too remote from the fur posts for trappers to go down annually for
supplies. Supplies were sent up by the fur companies to a mountain
_rendezvous_, to Pierre's Hole under the Tetons, or Jackson's Hole
farther east, or Ogden's Hole at Salt Lake, sheltered valleys with
plenty of water for men and horses when hunters and traders and Indians
met at the annual camp.

Elsewhere the hunter had only to follow th