days,
at the risk of his own life, until there wasn't any nursing to be done;
and when he had gone on Hugh Glass was the same as dead and he ought to
have _stayed_ dead. Wasn't that reasonable?

Hugh scratched his scarred head and half agreed. The commanding
officer ordered that he be given a brand new outfit; whatever he
needed. This squared matters, and Trapper Hugh proceeded to entertain
the garrison with his tall stories of how he had been "et by a b'ar,"
and had been chasin' his plunder for ten months, between the lower
Missouri and the Yellowstone.

This bear adventure made "Old Glass" a celebrated figure among the
traders and trappers of beaver days on the Upper Missouri. As seemed
to him, he had earned the right to live forever, in defiance of Injuns
and "varmints." But in the winter of 1832-1833 the Arikaras killed
him, on the ice of the Yellowstone River, hard by the mouth of the same
Big Horn where he had so astonished the Andrew Henry fort nine years
before.

CHAPTER XV

A FRACAS ON THE SANTA FE TRAIL (1829)

AND THE BUILDING OF BENT'S FORT

The United States east of the Upper Mississippi River was opened to the
white race by the settlers, who fought to locate their homes in the
country of the Shawnees, the Mingos, the Delawares, the Potawatomis,
and all.

The newer United States of the vast Louisiana Territory, west of the
Upper Mississippi River, was for a long time thought to be of little
value as a home land. Its value seemed to lie in furs and in trade
with the natives.

After the exploration by Captain Meriwether Lewis and his friend
Lieutenant Clark, the fur-hunters were the Americans who opened the
trails into the country of the Sioux, the Arikaras, the Blackfeet, the
Crows and all. They did not make permanent homes; they built only rude
forts, as store-houses, and when outside lived in camps like Indian
camps. They did not till the ground. When they left, the country was
about the same as before, given up to the wild men and the wild animals.

This, during fifty years, was the principal use made of the Missouri
River portion of the Louisiana Territory, in the northwest. And in the
southwest portion little more was done, but the American merchants were
the ones who opened that.

Young Lieutenant Zebulon Montgomery Pike first explored it, sent out by
the commander-in-chief of the army, in 1806, while Lewis and Clark were
still homeward bound from the other direction. He