SKINNING A BUFFALO
Some little time was spent at Fort Leavenworth, where Ruxton found the change from the free life of prairie and mountain very unpleasant. He suffered still more when he reached St. Louis, and was obliged to assume the confining garb of civilization, and above all, to put his feet into shoes.
Ruxton’s journey from St. Louis to New York was uneventful, and in July he left for England, which he reached in the middle of August, 1847.
It was after this that he wrote a series of sketches, entitled “Life in the Far West,” which were afterward published in Blackwood’s Magazine, and finally in book form in England and America. These sketches purport to give the adventures of a trapper, La Bonté, during fifteen years’ wandering in the mountains, and set forth trapper and mountain life of the day. They show throughout the greatest familiarity with the old-time life. The author’s effort to imitate the dialect spoken by the trappers makes the conversation not always easy to read; but they are most interesting as faithful pictures of life in the mountains between 1830 and 1840—at the end of the days of the beaver.
A BOY IN INDIAN CAMPS
I
AMONG THE CHEYENNES
One of the most charming books written about the early plains is Lewis H. Garrard’s Wah-To-Yah and the Taos Trail. It is the narrative of a boy, only seventeen years old, who, in 1846, travelled westward from St. Louis with a train led by Mr. St. Vrain, of the firm of Bent, St. Vrain & Co., and after some time spent on the plains and in Cheyenne camps, proceeded westward to New Mexico and there saw and heard of many of the events just antecedent to the Mexican War.
It is an interesting fact that the book, which, in its interest and its fidelity to nature and to early times, equals the far more celebrated California and Oregon Trail of Parkman, tells of the events of the same year as Parkman’s volume, but deals with a country to the south of that traversed by him who was to become one of the greatest historians of America. The charm of each volume lies in its freshness. Neither could have been written except by one who saw things with the enthusiastic eyes of youth, who entered upon each adventure with youth’s enthusiasm, and who told his story with the frankness and simplicity of one who was very young. After all, the greatest charm of any literature lies in the simplicity with which the story is told, and in both these delightful volumes is found this attractive quality.