an sachems,
Crows or Pend d'Oreilles or Flat Heads, clad in little else than
moccasins, a buffalo-skin blanket, and a pompous dignity.

Among the underlings was a time of wild revel, drinking daylight out and
daylight in, decking themselves in tawdry finery for the one dress
occasion of the year, and gambling sober or drunk till all the season's
earnings, pelts and clothing and horses and traps, were gone.

The partners--as the Rocky Mountain men called themselves in distinction
to the _bourgeois_ of the French, the factors of the Hudson's Bay, the
partisans of the American Fur Company--held confabs over crumpled maps,
planning the next season's hunt, drawing in roughly the fresh
information brought down each year of new regions, and plotting out all
sections of the mountains for the different brigades.

This year a new set of faces appeared at the _rendezvous_, from thirty
to fifty men with full quota of saddle-horses, pack-mules, and traps. On
the traps were letters that afterward became magical in all the
Up-Country--A. F. C.--American Fur Company. Leading these men were
Vanderburgh, who had already become a successful trader among the
Aricaras and had to his credit one victory over the Blackfeet; and
Drips, who had been a member of the old Missouri Fur Company and knew
the Upper Platte well. But the Rocky Mountain men, who knew the cost of
life and time and money it had taken to learn the hunting-grounds of the
Rockies, doubtless smiled at these tenderfeet who thought to trap as
successfully in the hills as they had on the plains.

Two things counselled caution. Vanderburgh would stop at nothing. Drips
had married a native woman of the Platte, whose tribe might know the
hunting-grounds as well as the mountaineers. Hunters fraternize in
friendship at holidaying; but they no more tell each other secrets than
rival editors at a banquet. Mountaineers knowing the field like Bridger
who had been to the Columbia with Henry as early as 1822 and had swept
over the ranges as far south as the Platte, or Fitzpatrick[33] who had
made the Salt Lake region his stamping-ground, might smile at the
newcomers; but they took good care to give their rivals the slip when
hunters left the _rendezvous_ for the hills.

When the mountaineers scattered, Fitzpatrick led his brigade to the
region between the Black Hills on the east and the Bighorn Mountains on
the west. The first snowfall was powdering the hills. Beaver were
beginning to h