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WALKER.
I confess to knowledge of a large book bearing the above title,—a title which is no less appropriate for this brief, disrupted biographical memorandum. That I have a right to act as I have done, in adopting it, will presently appear,—as well as that the honored name thus appropriated by me refers neither io the dictionary nor the filibustero, both of which articles appear to have been superseded by newer and better things.
At the first flush, Fur would seem to be rather a sultry subject to open either a store or a story with, in these glowing days of a justly incensed thermometer.
And yet there is a fine bracing mountain-air to be drawn from the material, as with a spigot, if you will only favor your mind with a digression from the tangible article to the wild-rose associations in which it is enveloped.
Think of the high, wind-swept ridges, among the clefts of which are the only homesteads of the hardy pioneers by whose agency alone one kind of luxury is kept up to the standard demand for it in the great cities. It might not be so likely a place to get fancy drinks in as Broome Street, certainly, we must admit, as we picture to ourselves some brushy ravine in which the trapper has his irons cunningly set out for the betrayal of the stone-marten and the glossy-backed "fisher-cat,"—but the breeze in it is quite as wholesome as a brandy-smash. The whirr of the sage-hen's wing, as she rises from the fragrant thicket, brings a flavor with it fresher far than that of the mint-julep. It is cheaper than the latter compound, too, and much more conducive to health. Continuing to indulge our fancy in cool images connected with fur and its finders, we shall see what contrasts will arise. The blue shadow of a cottonwood-tree stretching over a mountain-spring. By the edge of the sparkling water sits, embroidering buckskin, a red-legged squaw, keeper of the wigwam to the ragged mountain-man who set the traps that caught the martens which furnished the tails that mark so gracefully the number of skins of which the rich banker's wife's fichu-russe is composed. Here is a striking contrast, in which extremes meet,—not the martens' tails, but the two men's wives, the banker's and the trapper's, brought into antithetical relation by the simple circumstance of a fichu-russe, the material of which was worn in some ravine of the wilderness, mayhap not a twelvemonth since, by a creature faster even than a banker's wife. Great is the hereafter of the marten-cat, whose skin may be looked upon as the soul by which the animal is destined to attain a sort of modified immortality in the Elysian abodes of Wealth and Fashion,—the place where good martens go!
The men through whose intervention eventual felicity is thus secured to the fur-creature are as much a race in themselves as the Gypsies. No genuine type of them ever approaches nearer to the confines of civilization than a frontier settlement beckons him. Old Adams, the bear-tutor, might have been of this type once, but he is adulterated with sawdust and gas-light now, with city cookery and spurious groceries. Many men of French Canadian origin are to be found trading and trapping in the Far West; although, taken in the aggregate, there are no people less given to stirring enterprise than these colonial descendants of the Gaul. The only direction, almost, in which they exhibit any expansive tendency is in the border trade and general adventure business, in which figure the names of many of them conspicuously and with honor. The Chouteaus are of that stock; and of that stock came the late Major Aubry, renowned among the guides and trappers of the southwestern wilderness; and if J.C. Fremont is not a French Canadian by birth, the strong efforts made about the time of the last Presidential election to establish him as one had at least the effect of determining his Canadian descent.
Pierre La Marche was a Franco-Canadian of the spread-eagle kind referred to. Departing widely from the conservative prejudices of his race, his wandering propensities took him away, at an early age, from the primitive colonial village in which he first saw the light of day. He was but fourteen years old when he left his peaceful and thoroughly whitewashed home on the banks of the St. François, in company with a knot of Canadian voyageurs, whose principles tended towards the Red River of the North. Leaving this convoy at Fond-du-Lac, he pushed his way on to the Mississippi, alone and friendless, and, falling in with a party of trappers at St. Louis, accompanied them when they returned to the mountain "gulches" in which their business lay.
After six years of trapper and trader life, but little trace of the simple young Canadian habitant was left in Pierre La Marche. He spoke mountain English and French patois with equal fluency. There was a decision of character about him that commanded the respect of his comrades. When the other trappers went to St. Louis, they used to drink and gamble away their hard-won dollars, few of these men caring for anything beyond the indulgence of immediate fancies. But Pierre was ambitious, and thought that money might be made subservient to his aspirations in a better way than speculating with it upon "bluff" or squandering it upon deteriorating drinks.
About this time of his life, Pierre began to think that the fact of his being "only a French Canadian" was likely to be a bar to his advancement. He despised himself greatly for one thing, indeed,—that his name was La Marche, and not Walker,—which patronymic he made out to be the nearest Anglo-Saxon equivalent for his French one. He adopted it,—calling himself Peter Walker,—and had an adventure out of it, to begin with.