ith the Indians, and at once plied the argument of
whisky so actively that the furs destined for Red River went over the
mountains to St. Louis.

The trapper probably never heard of a Nemesis; but a curious retribution
seemed to follow on the heels of outrage.

Lisa had tried to balk the Astorians, and the Missouri Company went down
before Indian hostility. The Nor' Westers jockeyed the Astorians out of
their possessions and were in league with murderers at the massacre of
Seven Oaks; but the Nor' Westers were jockeyed out of existence by the
Hudson's Bay under Lord Selkirk. The Hudson's Bay had been guilty of
rank outrage--particularly on the Saskatchewan, where North-West
partners were seized, manacled, and sent to a wilderness--and now the
Hudson's Bay were cheated, cajoled, overreached by the Rocky Mountain
trappers. And the Rocky Mountain trappers, in their turn, met a rival
that could outcheat their cheatery.

In 1831 the mountains were overrun with trappers from all parts of
America. Men from every State in the Union, those restless spirits who
have pioneered every great movement of the race, turned their faces to
the wilderness for furs as a later generation was to scramble for gold.

In the summer of 1832, when the hunters came down to Pierre's Hole for
their supplies, there were trappers who had never before summered away
from Detroit and Mackinaw and Hudson Bay.[27] There were half-wild
Frenchmen from Quebec who had married Indian wives and cast off
civilization as an ill-fitting garment. There were Indian hunters with
the mellow, rhythmic tones that always betray native blood. There were
lank New Englanders under Wyeth of Boston, erect as a mast pole, strong
of jaw, angular of motion, taking clumsily to buckskins. There were the
Rocky Mountain men in tattered clothes, with unkempt hair and long
beards, and a trick of peering from their bushy brows like an enemy from
ambush. There were probably odd detachments from Captain Bonneville's
adventurers on the Platte, where a gay army adventurer was trying his
luck as fur trader and explorer. And there was a new set of men, not yet
weather-worn by the wilderness, alert, watchful, ubiquitous, scattering
themselves among all groups where they could hear everything, see all,
tell nothing, always shadowing the Rocky Mountain men who knew every
trail of the wilds and should be good pilots to the best
hunting-grounds. By the middle of July all business had been comple