eated carriages. The motley crowd on
foot picked its way as best it could. Indians in savage garb passed
Indians in civilization's clothes, or mixtures of both; gamblers rubbed
elbows with emigrants and made overtures to buckskin-covered trappers
and hunters just in from the prairies and mountains, many of whom were
going up to Westport, their main rendezvous. Traders came into and went
from Aull and Company's big store, wherein was everything the frontier
needed. Behind it were corrals filled with draft animals and sheds full
of carts and wagons.

Boisterous traders and trappers, in all stages of drunkenness, who
thought nothing of spending their season's profits in a single week if
the mood struck them, were still coming in from the western foothills,
valleys, and mountains, their loud conversations replete with rough
phrases and such names as the South Park, Bent's Fort, The Pueblo, Fort
Laramie, Bayou Salade, Brown's Hole, and others. Many of them so much
resembled Indians as to leave a careless observer in doubt. Some were
driving mules almost buried under their two packs, each pack weighing
about one hundred pounds and containing eighty-odd beaver skins,
sixty-odd otter pelts or the equivalent number in other skins. Usually
they arrived in small parties, but here and there was a solitary
trapper. The skins would be sold to the outfitting merchants and would
establish a credit on which the trapper could draw until time to outfit
and go off on the fall hunt. Had he sold them to some far, outlying post
he would have received considerably less for them and have paid from two
hundred to six hundred per cent more for the articles he bought. As long
as there was nothing for him to do in his line until fall set in, he
might just as well spend some of the time on the long march to the
frontier, risking the loss of his goods, animals, and perhaps his life
in order to get better prices and enjoy a change of scene.

The county seat looked good to him after his long stay in the solitudes.
Pack and wagon trains were coming and going, some of the wagons drawn by
as many as a dozen or fifteen yokes of oxen. All was noise, confusion,
life at high pressure, and made a fit surrounding for his coming
carousal; and here was all the liquor he could hope to drink, of better
quality and at better prices, guarantees of which, in the persons of
numerous passers-by, he saw on many sides.

Rumors of all kinds were afloat, most of them conc