There is a something in those endless and gigantic wildernesses which seems to elevate the soul, and to give to it, as well as to the body, an increase of strength and energy. There reign, in countless multitudes, the wild horse and the bison; the wolf, the bear, and the snake; and, above all, the trapper, surpassing the very beasts of the desert in wildness—not the old trapper described by Cooper, who never saw a trapper in his life, but the real trapper, whose adventures and mode of existence would furnish the richest materials for scores of romances.
Our American civilization has engendered certain corrupt off-shoots, of which the civilization of other countries knows nothing, and which could only spring up in a land where liberty is found in its greatest development. These trappers are for the most part outcasts, criminals who have fled from the chastisement of the law, or else unruly spirits to whom even the rational degree of freedom enjoyed in the United States has appeared cramping and insufficient. It is perhaps fortunate for the States, that they possess the sort of fag-end to their territory comprised between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains; for much mischief might be caused by these violent and restless men, were they compelled to remain in the bosom of social life. If, for example, la belle France had had such a fag-end or outlet during the various crises that she has passed through in the course of the last fifty years, how many of her great warriors and equally great tyrants might have lived and died trappers! And truly, neither Europe nor mankind in general would have been much the worse off, if those instruments of the greatest despotism that ever disguised itself under the mask of freedom—the Massenas, and Murats, and Davousts, and scores more of suchlike laced and decorated gentry—had never been heard of.
One finds these trappers or hunters in all the districts extending from the sources of the Columbia and Missouri, to those of the Arkansas and Red Rivers, and on the tributary streams of the Mississippi which run eastward from the Rocky Mountains. Their whole time is passed in the pursuit and destruction of the innumerable wild animals, which for hundreds and thousands of years have bred and multiplied in those remote steppes and plains. They slay the buffalo for the sake of his hump, and of the hide, out of which they make their clothing; the bear to have his skin for a bed; the wolf for their amusement; and the beaver for his fur. In exchange for the spoils of these animals they get lead and powder, flannel shirts and jackets, string for their nets, and whisky to keep out the cold. They traverse those endless wastes in bodies several hundreds strong, and have often desperate and bloody fights with the Indians. For the most part, however, they form themselves into parties of eight or ten men, a sort of wild guerillas. These must rather be called hunters than trappers; the genuine trapper limiting himself to the society of one sworn friend, with whom he remains out for at least a year, frequently longer; for it takes a considerable time to become acquainted with the haunts of the beaver. If one of the two comrades dies, the other remains in possession of the whole of their booty. The mode of life that is at first adopted from necessity, or through fear of the laws, is after a time adhered to from choice; and few of these men would exchange their wild, lawless, unlimited freedom, for the most advantageous position that could be offered them in a civilized country. They live the whole year through in the steppes, savannahs, prairies, and forests of the Arkansas, Missouri, and Oregon territories—districts which comprise enormous deserts of sand and rock, and, at the same time, the most luxuriant and beautiful plains, teeming with verdure and vegetation. Snow and frost, heat and cold, rain and storm, and hardships of all kinds, render the limbs of the trapper as hard, and his skin as thick, as those of the buffalo that he hunts; the constant necessity in which he finds himself of trusting entirely to his bodily strength and energy, creates a self-confidence that no peril can shake—a quickness of sight, thought, and action, of which man in a civilized state can form no conceptions. His hardships are often terrible; and I have seen trappers who had endured sufferings, compared to which the fabled adventures of Robinson Crusoe are mere child's play, and whose skin had converted itself into a sort of leather, impervious to every thing except lead and steel. In a moral point of view, these men may be considered a psychological curiosity: in the wild state of nature in which they live, their mental faculties frequently develop themselves in a most extraordinary manner; and in the conversation of some of them may be found proofs of a sagacity and largeness of views, of which the greatest philosophers of ancient or modern times would have no cause to be ashamed.
The daily and hourly dangers incurred by these trappers must, one would think, occasionally cause them to turn their thoughts to a Supreme Being; but such is not the case. Their rifle is their god—their knife their patron saint—their strong right hand their only trust. The trapper shuns his fellow-men; and the glance with which he measures the stranger whom he encounters on his path, is oftener that of a murderer than a friend: the love of gain is as strong with him as it is found to be in a civilized state of society, and the meeting of two trappers is generally the signal for the death of one of them. He hates his white competitor for the much-prized beaver skins far more than he does his Indian one: the latter he shoots down as coolly as if he were a wolf or a bear; but when he drives his knife into the breast of the former, it is with as much devilish joy as if he felt he were ridding mankind of as great an evil-doer as himself. The nourishment of the trapper, consisting for years together of buffalo's flesh—the strongest food that a man can eat—and taken without bread or any other accompaniment, doubtless contributes to render him wild and inhuman, and to assimilate him in a certain degree to the savage animals by which he is surrounded.
During an excursion that I made with some companions towards the upper part of the Red River, we met with several of these trappers; amongst others, with one weather-beaten old fellow, whose face and bare neck were tanned by sun and exposure to the colour of tortoise-shell. We hunted two days in his company, without noticing any thing remarkable about the man; he cooked our meals, which consisted usually of a haunch of venison or a buffalo's hump, instructed us where to find game, and was aware of the approach of the latter even sooner than his huge wolf-dog, which never left his side. It was only on the morning of the third day, that we discovered something calculated to diminish our confidence in our new comrade. This was a number of lines and crosses upon the butt of his rifle, which gave us a new and not very favourable insight into the man's character. These lines and crosses came after certain words rudely scratched with a knife-point, and formed a sort of list, of which the following is a copy:—
Buffaloes—no number given, they being probably too numerous.
Bears, nineteen—the number being indicated by nineteen strait strokes.
Wolves, thirteen—marked by oblique strokes.
Red underloppers, four—marked by four crosses.
White underloppers, two—noted by two stars.