Larpenteur, who was there, has given even a more
circumstantial account of this terrible tragedy.]

CHAPTER VI

THE FRENCH TRAPPER

To live hard and die hard, king in the wilderness and pauper in the
town, lavish to-day and penniless to-morrow--such was the life of the
most picturesque figure in America's history.

Take a map of America. Put your finger on any point between the Gulf of
Mexico and Hudson Bay, or the Great Lakes and the Rockies. Ask who was
the first man to blaze a trail into this wilderness; and wherever you
may point, the answer is the same--the French trapper.

Impoverished English noblemen of the seventeenth century took to
freebooting, Spanish dons to piracy and search for gold; but for the
young French _noblesse_ the way to fortune was by the fur trade. Freedom
from restraint, quick wealth, lavish spending, and adventurous living
all appealed to a class that hated the menial and slow industry of the
farm. The only capital required for the fur trade was dauntless courage.
Merchants were keen to supply money enough to stock canoes with
provisions for trade in the wilderness. What would be equivalent to
$5,000 of modern money was sufficient to stock four trappers with trade
enough for two years.

At the end of that time the sponsors looked for returns in furs to the
value of eight hundred per cent on their capital. The original
investment would be deducted, and the enormous profit divided among the
trappers and their outfitters. In the heyday of the fur trade, when
twenty beaver-skins were got for an axe, it was no unusual thing to see
a trapper receive what would be equivalent to $3,000 of our money as his
share of two years' trapping. But in the days when the French were only
beginning to advance up the Missouri from Louisiana and across from
Michilimackinac to the Mississippi vastly larger fortunes were made.

Two partners[30] have brought out as much as $200,000 worth of furs from
the great game preserve between Lake Superior and the head waters of the
Missouri after eighteen months' absence from St. Louis or from Montreal.
The fur country was to the young French nobility what a treasure-ship
was to a pirate. In vain France tried to keep her colonists on the land
by forbidding trade without a license. Fines, the galleys for life, even
death for repeated offence, were the punishments held over the head of
the illicit trader. The French trapper evaded all these by staying in
the wild