* A pithy substance found in dead trees.
The tidbits of the deer the stranger had brought in were soon roasting over the fire; whilst, as soon as the burning logs had deposited a sufficiency of ashes, a hole was raked in them, and the head of the deer, skin, hair, and all, placed in this primitive oven, and carefully covered with the hot ashes.
A "heap" of fat meat in perspective, our mountaineers enjoyed their anteprandial pipes, recounting the news of the respective regions whence they came; and so well did they like each other's company, so sweet was the honeydew tobacco of which the strange hunter had good store, so plentiful the game about the creek, and so abundant the pasture for their winter-starved animals, that before the carcass of the two-year buck had been more than four-fifths consumed—and although rib after rib had been picked and chucked over their shoulders to the wolves, and one fore leg and the "bit" of all, the head, were still cooked before them—the three had come to the resolution to join company, and hunt in their present locality for a few days at least—the owner of the "two-shoot" gun volunteering to fill their horns with powder, and find tobacco for their pipes.
Here, on plenty of meat, of venison, bear, and antelope, they merrily luxuriated; returning after their daily hunts to the brightly-burning campfire, where one always remained to guard the animals, and unloading their packs of meat (all choicest portions), ate late into the night, and, smoking, wiled away the time in narrating scenes in their hard-spent lives, and fighting their battles o'er again.
The younger of the trappers, he who has figured under the name of La Bonté, had excited, by scraps and patches from his history, no little curiosity in the stranger's mind to learn the ups and downs of his career; and one night, when they assembled earlier than usual at the fire, he prevailed upon the modest trapper to "unpack" some passages in his wild adventurous life.
"Maybe," commenced the mountaineer, "you both remember when old Ashley went out with the biggest kind of band to trap the Columbia and head-waters of Missoura and Yellow Stone. Well, that was the time this nigger first felt like taking to the mountains."
This brings us back to the year of our Lord 1825; and perhaps it will be as well, in order to render La Bonté's mountain language intelligible, to translate it at once into tolerable English, and to tell in the third person, but from his own lips, the scrapes which befell him in a sojourn of more than twenty years in the Far West, and the causes that impelled him to quit the comfort and civilization of his home, to seek the perilous but engaging life of a trapper of the Rocky Mountains.
La Bonté * was raised in the state of Mississippi, not far from Memphis, on the left bank of that huge and snag-filled river. His father was a Saint Louis Frenchman, his mother a native of Tennessee. When a boy, our trapper was "some," he said, with the rifle, and always had a hankering for the West; particularly when, on accompanying his father to Saint Louis every spring, he saw the different bands of traders and hunters start upon their annual expeditions to the mountains. Greatly did he envy the independent insouciant trappers, as, in all the glory of beads and buckskin, they shouldered their rifles at Jake Hawk-en's door (the rifle-maker of Saint Louis), and bade adieu to the cares and trammels of civilized life.
However, like a thoughtless beaver-kitten, he put his foot into a trap one fine day, set by Mary Brand, ** a neighbor's daughter, and esteemed "some punkins"—or, in other words, toasted as the beauty of the county—by the susceptible Mississippians. From that moment he was "gone beaver;" "he felt queer," he said, "all over, like a buffalo shot in the lights; he had no relish for mush and molasses; hominy and johnny cakes failed to excite his appetite. Deer and turkeys ran by him unscathed; he didn't know, he said, whether his rifle had hind-sights or not. He felt bad, that was a fact; but what ailed him he didn't know."
* The name of this trapper is perpetuated in La Bonté Creek,
which enters the Platte River 66 miles above the mouth of
the Laramie, on the old Oregon trail. (Ed.)
** Mary Chase. See introduction to this volume. (Ed.)