wants. Had not Colter crossed the
Rockies with Lewis and Clark and spent two years in the mountain
fastnesses? Yet when he reached the Mandans on the way home, the
revulsion against all the trammels of civilization moved him so strongly
that he asked permission to return to the wilderness, where he spent two
more years. Had he not set out for St. Louis a second time, met Lisa
coming up the Missouri with a brigade of hunters, and for the third
time turned his face to the wilderness? Had he not wandered with the
Crows, fought the Blackfeet, gone down to St. Louis, and been impelled
by that strange impulse of adventure which was to the hunter what the
instinct of migration is to bird and fish and buffalo and all wild
things--to go yet again to the wilderness? Such was the passion for the
wilds that ruled the life of all free trappers.

* * * * *

The free trappers formed a class by themselves.

Other trappers either hunted on a salary of $200, $300, $400 a year, or
on shares, like fishermen of the Grand Banks outfitted by "planters," or
like western prospectors outfitted by companies that supply provisions,
boats, and horses, expecting in return the major share of profits. The
free trappers fitted themselves out, owed allegiance to no man, hunted
where and how they chose, and refused to carry their furs to any fort
but the one that paid the highest prices. For the _mangeurs de lard_, as
they called the fur company raftsmen, they had a supreme contempt. For
the methods of the fur companies, putting rivals to sleep with laudanum
or bullet and ever stirring the savages up to warfare, the free trappers
had a rough and emphatically expressed loathing.

The crime of corrupting natives can never be laid to the free trapper.
He carried neither poison, nor what was worse than poison to the
Indian--whisky--among the native tribes. The free trapper lived on good
terms with the Indian, because his safety depended on the Indian.
Renegades like Bird, the deserter from the Hudson's Bay Company, or
Rose, who abandoned the Astorians, or Beckwourth of apocryphal fame,
might cast off civilization and become Indian chiefs; but, after all,
these men were not guilty of half so hideous crimes as the great fur
companies of boasted respectability. Wyeth of Boston, and Captain
Bonneville of the army, whose underlings caused such murderous slaughter
among the Root Diggers, were not free trappers in the true sense o