ecome
serious; but that is always the fault of the white man when he plays the
dangerous game of war with Indians. The spying party was ambushed, the
leader slain, his flesh torn from his body and his skeleton thrown into
the river. A few months later the Rocky Mountain traders paid for this
escapade. Fitzpatrick, the same trapper who had "lifted" Ogden's furs
and led this game against the spies, was robbed among Indians instigated
by white men of the American Fur Company. This marked the beginning of
the end with the Rocky Mountain trappers.

The American Fur Company, which Mr. Astor had organized and stuck to
through good repute and evil repute, was now officered by Ramsay Crooks
and Farnham and Robert Stuart, who had remained loyal to Mr. Astor in
Astoria and been schooled in a discipline that offered no quarter to
enemies. The purchase of the Mackinaw Company gave the American Company
all those posts between the Great Lakes and the height of land dividing
the Mississippi and Missouri. When Congress excluded foreign traders in
1816, all the Nor' Westers' posts south of the boundary fell to the
American Fur Company; and sturdy old Nor' Westers, who had been thrown
out by the amalgamation with the Hudson's Bay, also added to the
Americans' strength. Kenneth MacKenzie, with Laidlaw, Lament, and Kipp,
had a line of posts from Green Bay to the Missouri held by an American
to evade the law, but known as the Columbia Company.

This organization[28] the American Fur Company bought out, placing
MacKenzie at the mouth of the Yellowstone, where he built Fort Union and
became the Pooh-Bah of the whole region, living in regal style like his
ancestral Scottish chiefs. "King of the Missouri" white men called him,
"big Indian me" the Blackfeet said; and "big Indian me" he was to them,
for he was the first trader to win both their friendship and the Crows'.

Here MacKenzie entertained Prince Maximilian of Wied and Catlin the
artist and Audubon the naturalist, and had as his constant companion
Hamilton, an English nobleman living in disguise and working for the fur
company. Many an unmeant melodrama was enacted under the walls of Union
in MacKenzie's reign.

Once a free trapper came floating down the Missouri with his canoe full
of beaver-pelts, which he quickly exchanged for the gay attire to be
obtained at Fort Union. Oddly enough, though the fellow was a
French-Canadian, he had long, flaxen hair, of which he was inordinately
va