While trading furs at St. Louis, on one occasion, he offered a remnant of his stock to a dealer with whom he was not acquainted. They had an argument as to prices. The dealer, a man of hasty temper, asked him his name.
"Walker," was the reply.
When La Marche arose from the distant corner into which he was projected in company with the bundle of furs levelled at his head, revenge was his natural sentiment. Drawing his heavy knife from its sheath, he flung it away: the temptation to use it might have been too much for him. Small in stature, but remarkable for muscular strength, and for inventive resource in the "rough-and-tumble" fight, La Marche clenched with the burly store-keeper, who was getting the worst of it, when some of his employés interfered. This led to a general engagement. Several of La Marche's companions now rushed in, and in five minutes their opponents gave out, succumbent to superior wind and sinew.
Next morning, when the trappers took their way out of St. Louis, La Marche was a leader among them for life. But the reason of the store-keeper's rage was for many years a mystery to him. He knew not the enormity of "Walker," as an exponent of disparagement; he simply thought it a nicer name than La Marche, while it fully embodied the sentiment of that name. He adopted it, then, as I said before, and went on towards posterity as Peter Walker.
I heard many strange anecdotes of Peter Walker at the residence of a retired voyageur, who used to sing him Homerically to his chosen friends. These voyageurs are professional canoe-men; adventurers extending, sparsely, from the waters of French Canada to those of Oregon,—and sometimes back. Honest old Quatreaux! I mentioned his "residence" just now, and the term is truly grandiloquent in its application. The residence of old Quatreaux was a log cabane, about twenty feet square. Planks, laid loosely upon the cross-ties of the rafters, formed the up-stairs of the building: up-ladder would be a term more in accordance with facts; for it was by an appliance of that kind that the younger and more active of the sixteen members composing the old voyageur's family removed themselves from view when they retired for the night. A partition, extending half-way across the ground-floor, screened off the state or principal bed from outside gaze; at least, it was exposed to view only from points rendered rather inaccessible by tubs, with which these Canadian families are generally provided to excess. This apartment was strictly assigned to me, as a visitor; and although I firmly declined the honor,—chiefly with reference to certain large and very hard fleas I knew of in its dormitory arrangements,—it was kept religiously vacant, in case my heart should relent towards it, and the family in general slept huddled together on the outer floor, without manifest classification: the two old people; son and wife; daughter and husband; children; the extraordinary little hunch-backed and one-eyed girl, whom nobody would marry, but everybody liked; dogs. I used to stretch myself on a buffalo-robe before the wood-fire, in company with a faithful spaniel, who was as wakeful on these occasions as if he suspected that the low-bred curs of the establishment might pick his pockets.
Quatreaux's cabane was situated on the edge of an extensive tract of marsh,—lagoon would be a more descriptive word for it, perhaps,—a splashy, ditch-divided district, extending along the borders of a lake for miles. Snipe-shooting was my motive there; and dull work it was in those dark, Novembry, October days, with "the low rain falling" half the time, and the yellow leaves all the time, and no snipe. But whether we poled our log canoe up to some stunted old willow-tree that sat low in the horizontal marsh, and took shelter under it to smoke our pipes, or whether we mollified the privation of snipe in the cabane at night with mellow rum and tobacco brought by me, still was Walker the old voyageur's favorite theme.
Old Quatreaux spoke English perfectly well, although his conservatism as a Canadian induced him to prefer his mother tongue as a vehicle for general conversation. But I remarked that his anecdotes of Walker were always related in English, and on these occasions, therefore, for my benefit alone: for but little of the Anglo-Saxon tongue appeared to be known to, or at least used by, any member of his numerous family. Indeed, I can recall but two words of that language which I could positively aver to have heard in colloquial use among them,—poodare and schotte. And why should the old voyageur have thus reserved his experiences from those who were near and dear to him? Simply because most of his adventures with Walker were not of the strictly mild character becoming a family-man. But it was all the same to these good people; and when I laughed, they all took up the idea and laughed their best,—the little hunch-backed girl generally going off into a kind of epilepsy by herself, over in the darkest corner of the room, among the tubs.
When divested of the strange Western expletives and imprecations with which the old man used to spice his reminiscences, some of them are enough. I remember one, telling how Peter Walker "raised the wind" on a particular occasion, when he got short of money on his way to some distant trading-post, in a district strange to him. It is before me, in short-hand, on the pages of an old, old pocket-book, and I will tell it with some slight improvements on the narrator's style, such as suppressing his unnecessary combinations of the curse.
Mounted on a two-hundred-dollar buffalo-horse, for which he would not have taken double that amount, Peter Walker found himself, one afternoon, near the end of a long day's ride. He had but little baggage with him, that little consisting entirely of a bowie-knife and holster-pistols,—for the revolver was a scarce piece of furniture then and there. Of money he was entirely destitute, having expended his last dollar upon the purchase of his noble steed, and of the festive suit of clothes with which he calculated upon astonishing people who resided outside the limits of civilization. The pantaloon division of that suit was particularly superb, consisting principally of a stripe by which the outer seam of each leg was made conducive to harmony of outline. He was about three days' journey from the trading-post to which he was bound. The country was a frontier one, sparsely provided with inns.
The sun was framed in a low notch of the horizon, as he approached a border-hostelry, on the gable of which "Cat's Bluff Hotel" was painted in letters quite disproportioned in size to the city of Cat's Bluff, which consisted of the house in question, neither more nor less. In that house Peter Walker decided upon sojourning luxuriously for that night, at least, if he had to draw a check upon his holsters for it.