f the
term. Wyeth was an enthusiast who caught the fever of the wilds; and
Captain Bonneville, a gay adventurer, whose men shot down more Indians
in one trip than all the free trappers of America shot in a century. As
for the desperado Harvey, whom Larpenteur reports shooting Indians like
dogs, his crimes were committed under the walls of the American Fur
Company's fort. MacLellan and Crooks and John Day--before they joined
the Astorians--and Boone and Carson and Colter, are names that stand for
the true type of free trapper.

The free trapper went among the Indians with no defence but good
behaviour and the keenness of his wit. Whatever crimes the free trapper
might be guilty of towards white men, he was guilty of few towards the
Indians. Consequently, free trappers were all through Minnesota and the
region westward of the Mississippi forty years before the fur companies
dared to venture among the Sioux. Fisher and Fraser and Woods knew the
Upper Missouri before 1806; and Brugiere had been on the Columbia many
years before the Astorians came in 1811.

One crime the free trappers may be charged with--a reckless waste of
precious furs. The great companies always encouraged the Indians not to
hunt more game than they needed for the season's support. And no Indian
hunter, uncorrupted by white men, would molest game while the mothers
were with their young. Famine had taught them the punishment that
follows reckless hunting. But the free trappers were here to-day and
away to-morrow, like a Chinaman, to take all they could get regardless
of results; and the results were the rapid extinction of fur-bearing
game.

Always there were more free trappers in the United States than in
Canada. Before the union of Hudson's Bay and Nor' Wester in Canada, all
classes of trappers were absorbed by one of the two great companies.
After the union, when the monopoly enjoyed by the Hudson's Bay did not
permit it literally to drive a free trapper out, it could always
"freeze" him out by withholding supplies in its great white northern
wildernesses, or by refusing to give him transport. When the monopoly
passed away in 1871, free trappers pressed north from the Missouri,
where their methods had exterminated game, and carried on the same
ruthless warfare on the Saskatchewan. North of the Saskatchewan, where
very remoteness barred strangers out, the Hudson's Bay Company still
held undisputed sway; and Lord Strathcona, the governor of the compan