son in a canoe, and drifting
down-stream with a canoe-load of pelts to the fur post. But the
mountains were so distant and inaccessible, great quantities of supplies
had to be taken. That meant long cavalcades of pack-horses, which
Blackfeet were ever on the alert to stampede. Armed guards had to
accompany the pack-train. Out of a party of a hundred trappers sent to
the mountains by the Rock Mountain Company, thirty were always crack
rifle-shots for the protection of the company's property. One such
party, properly officered and kept from crossing the animal's tracks,
might not drive game from a valley. Two such bands of rival traders keen
to pilfer each other's traps would result in ruin to both.

That is the way the clash came in the early thirties of the last
century.

* * * * *

All winter bands of Rocky Mountain trappers under Fitzpatrick and
Bridger and Sublette had been sweeping, two hundred strong, like
foraging bandits, from the head waters of the Missouri, where was one
mountain pass to the head waters of the Platte, where was a second pass
much used by the mountaineers. Summer came with the heat that wakens all
the mountain silences to a roar of rampant life. Summer came with the
fresh-loosened rocks clattering down the mountain slopes in a landslide,
and the avalanches booming over the precipices in a Niagara of snow, and
the swollen torrents shouting to each other in a thousand voices till
the valleys vibrated to that grandest of all music--the voice of many
waters. Summer came with the heat that drives the game up to the cool
heights of the wind-swept peaks; and the hunters of the game began
retracing their way from valley to valley, gathering the furs cached
during the winter hunt.

Then the cavalcade set out for the _rendezvous_: grizzled men in
tattered buckskins, with long hair and unkempt beards and bronzed skin,
men who rode as if they were part of the saddle, easy and careless but
always with eyes alert and one hand near the thing in their holsters;
long lines of pack-horses laden with furs climbing the mountains in a
zigzag trail like a spiral stair, crawling along the face of cliffs
barely wide enough to give a horse footing, skirting the sky-line
between lofty peaks in order to avoid the detour round the broadened
bases, frequently swimming raging torrents whose force carried them half
a mile off their trail; always following the long slopes, for the long
slope