“Long before that, and for twenty years after that, the fur traders kept on building, until the mouth of every good-sized river running into the Missouri had not only one, but sometimes three or four posts, all competing all or part of the time! Risky business it was. Some made fortunes; most of them died broke. Well, I reckon they had a good run for their money, eh?”
“And when did it end?” asked the Mandan friend, who had sat an absorbed listener to a story, the most of which was new to him.
“It has not ended yet,” answered Uncle Dick. “St. Louis is to-day the greatest fur market in the world, though now skunk and coon and rat have taken the place of beaver and buffalo and wolf. But within the past four years a muskrat pelt has sold for five dollars. In 1832 the average price for the previous fifteen years had been twenty cents for a rat-hide—many a boy in my time thought he was rich if he got ten cents. A buffalo robe averaged three dollars; a beaver pelt, four dollars; an otter, three dollars. Think of what they bring now! Well, the demand combs the country, that’s all.
“But in 1836 beaver slumped—because that was the year the silk hat was invented. Did you know that? And in 1883 the buffalo robes ended. I’d say that 1850 really was about the end of the big days of the early fur trade—what we call the upper-river trade.”
Rob put his hand down over the map. “And here it was,” said he, “in this country west of here, up the Yellowstone, up the Missouri, all over and in between!”
“Quite right, yes,” his companion nodded. “Of all the days of romance and adventure in the Far West, those were the times and this was the place—from here west, up the great waterway and its branches.
“No one can estimate the value of the Missouri River to the United States. It made more history for us than the Mississippi itself. It made our first maps—the fur trade did that. It led us across and got us Oregon. It led us to the placers which settled Montana. It took the first horses and wagons and plows into the upper country in its day, as well as the first rifles and steel traps. It brought us into war with the Indians, and helped us win the war. It carried our hunters up to the buffalo, and carried all the buffalo down, off from the face of the earth. And it rolls and boils and tumbles on its way now as it did when the great bateaux swept down its flood, over a hundred miles a day, loaded with robes and furs.”
“I wish we could see it all!” grumbled Jesse, again.
“You can see it all now, Jess,” said his uncle, “better than you could if you plugged up its stream without looking at a map or book. And even if you did look at both, you’ve got to see the many different periods the old Missouri has had in its history, and balance one against the other.