Francis Parkman's The Oregon trail

Contents

PAGE

Introduction "

Parkman's Life and Works vii

Author's Preface to the First Edition 2

CHAPTER

I. The Frontier 3

II. Breaking the Ice ii

III. Fort Leavenworth 22

IV. "Jumping Off" 26

V. The "Big Blue" 37

VL The Platte and the Desert 55

VII. The Buffalo 09

VIII. Taking French Leave <^5

IX. Scenes at Fort Laramie loi

X. The War-parties "7

XI. Scenes at the Camp I39

XII. Ill-luck 159

XIII. Hunting Indians loO

XIV. The Ogillallah Village 190

XV. The Hunting Camp 211

XVI. The Trappers 234

XVII. The Black Hills 244

XVIII. A Mountain Hunt 249

XIX. Passage of the Mountains 261

XX. The Lonely Journey 278

XXI. The Pueblo and Bent's Fort 299

XXII. Tete Rouge, the Volunteer 307

xxin. Indian Alarms 3'^^

XXIV. The Chase 324

XXV. The Buffalo-camp 334

XXVI. Down the Arkansas 35o

xxvii. The Settlements 3o8

Questions for Study and Review 395

Portrait of Francis Parkman Frontispiece

Map : The Land of Parkman's Oregon Trail 380

Introduction

PARKMAN'S LIFE AND WORKS

Francis Parkman was born in Boston, September i6, 1823. His Puritan ancestry included several ministers, with such Old Testament names as Elias and Ebenezer, and a prosperous Yankee merchant, from whom Parkman's father, the pastor of the New North Church in Boston, inherited a comfortable fortune. When Francis was eight years old, he was sent to his grandfather's home at Medford, a few miles from Boston, to gain strength and health. " Here," he tells us, " I learned very little, and spent the intervals of schooling more profitably in collecting eggs, insects and reptiles, trapping squirrels and woodchucks, and making persistent, though rarely fortunate, attempts to kill birds with arrows."

At twelve he returned to the city and entered the Chauncey Hall School, where he was trained to use clear, direct English and to memorize the best poetry. After school hours he and his boy friends converted the barn-loft into the " Star Theatre," where they rehearsed plays, devised costumes, and prepared handbills announcing their performances, which were often " concluded with some interesting experiments in chemistry by Mr. Parkman." More frequently, however, he might have been found reveling in the pages of Scott or following Cooper's favorite Leatherstocking into the haunts of the Indian. Indeed, he became " so identified with the novelist's red heroes," says one of his friends, " that he dreamed of them, talked of them more than anything else, and emulated them in woodcraft."

viii Introduction

We are not surprised, therefore, that soon after entering Harvard College, in 1840, Parkman determined to write a history of the wars that ended in the conquest of Canada, for here, he declared, " the forest drama was more stirring and the forest stage more thronged with appropriate figures than in any other passage of our history." To this task Parkman gradually gave all the powers of his restless, untiring nature, which found labor a passion and rest intolerable ; and though he finished his college course with credit and even entered the Harvard Law School, his reading and study, his play and travel were alike directed to prepare him for his task. Whatever Parkman undertook he did with all his might; consequently five o'clock of a winter morning often found him in a cold room poring by candle light over some musty record of the days of Montcalm and Wolf. He read a whole library of American and French history and crowded with memoranda his little green notebooks. He studied the style and methods of the master historians, filled reams of paper with character sketches, and strove to learn to write " so men would like to read him."

To this lore of books he added a knowledge of woodcraft. During the summer vacations he ranged the woods of Northern New York, New England, and Canada, paddled down the streams Champlain had explored, strode along the old war paths of the red men, and shared the rough life of the hunter and trapper, the boatman and the Indian. Thus he was ever busy preparing for his task; and even when an accident in the Harvard gymnasium forced him to go abroad in 1843, he spent some time in a convent, that he might be better fitted to write of the Canadian Jesuit missionaries.

In this same quest for materials Parkman planned the trip described in The Oregon Trail. The eastern Indians he knew well ; but they had been debased by their contact with the whites, and only along the western frontier could he study the nature and habits of the red men in their wild and primitive state. Accompanied by his

Parkman's Life and Works ix

" cousin and lifelong friend," Quincy Adams Shaw, he therefore set out for the western plains in the spring of 1846. Here he succeeded in joining a band of savage Dahcotahs, lived and hunted with them among the hills and valleys of the present state of Wyoming, and returned, as he says, " with a cartload of experiences."

Unfortunately, he also brought back a body so shattered by disease that he never knew another day entirely free from pain. " There was too much soul for the body to which it was yoked," says one of his friends; and Parkman attempted to spur and whip that jaded body to action. His sight was so impaired that for months he was confined to a darkened room; a strange rushing of blood to the head forbade him the continuous use of his mind; and to these afflictions was added lameness. His disease baffled the doctors, who tried everything from a diet of milk to drawing red-hot irons along his spine. But these afflictions, which would have killed an ordinary man, only made Parkman clinch his teeth and fight the harder. While his eyes were bandaged, he dictated to his cousin Shaw the narrative of The Oregon Trail, which appeared serially in The Knickerbocker Magazine in 1847; and in his darkness he devised the means of guiding his pencil along the pages that recorded The Conspiracy of Pontiac, the earliest volumes of his great history of the American forest.

In time " the enemy," as Parkman called his disease, eased its hold; and in 1850 he was married to Miss Catherine Biglow. In a few years, however, his sky again darkened: the death of his little son, in 1857, was soon followed by that of his wife; and his disease returned with a re-doubled fury that threatened his sight, his reason, and his life. Forbidden all literary work, Parkman turned to horticulture and filled his garden at Jamaica Plain, near Boston, with a thousand varieties of roses. He delighted in loading with flowers the arms of the chance passers-by, or in exhibiting his lilies, one of which, a new variety he had produced, brought him a thousand dollars.

X Introduction

Later the skill and knowledge he then gained brought him a professorship in the Bussey Institue of Harvard College.

Parkman never wasted a minute allowed him for work and seized the first favorable moment for resuming his history. At times he could write but six lines a day, and even at his best he could never work more than three hours out of the twenty-four. But when most men would have shown the white flag, Parkman toiled on — gathering thousands of pages of manuscripts and letters, consulting old newspapers and pamphlets, crossing the ocean time after time to examine French and English public records, and traveling from Quebec to Florida to visit the sites of the chief events recorded in his narratives. Gradually the story of the struggle of the French to explore and colonize America took shape in his pages: The Pioneers of France in the New World, 1865, and The Jesuits in North America, 1867, were succeeded by La Salle, 1869, and The Old Regime in Canada, 1874. Then followed Count Front enac and New France, 1877, and his acknowledged masterpiece, Montcalm and Wolf, 1884; finally the series was ended in 1892 with A Half-Century of Conflict. In these pages Parkman shows us Marquette as he first catches sight of the broad Mississippi, the lion-hearted La Salle toiling through the snow-clad Michigan forests, Tonty of the iron hand and gallant old Frontenac holding the savages at bay, the black-robed Jesuit Brebeuf tortured at the stake by the Iroquois, and the frail young General Wolf laboring up the rocky steep to meet his death on the Plains of Quebec. We listen to the war-whoop of the Hurons and the answering crack of the white man's rifle ; and we realize that here, indeed, is the vast epic of the American forest.

The completion of Parkman's task, which he had planned in his youth and finished after his own " half century of conflict," was soon followed by his death. He passed away at "nis home in Jamaica Plain, November 8, 1893, and was buried at Mt. Auburn Cemetery, where he

The Oregon Trail xi

rests near Agassiz and Holmes, Lowell and Longfellow. The memory of his brave and fruitful life will long endure.

II THE OREGON TRAIL

On the maps which Parkman consulted in planning his trip in 1846 that spacious tract lying west of the bend of the Missouri and east of the Rocky Mountains, and extending from Canada to Texas, was designated as " The Great American Desert." Such was the ignorance of this region even among those who should have been better informed. This great plain, in which have since been developed a half dozen productive and prosperous states, busy with mill and farm and ranch, was then one vast, unbroken Indian territory. To the south extended Texas, which had lately won its freedom from Mexico, but which had not as yet added its star to our flag. To the west and southwest lay California and New Mexico, ruled by their last Mexican governors; while to the north of California stretched that vast, undefined territory called the Oregon country.

Among the Indian tribes which then occupied the basin of the Missouri, some were native to the region, and others had been driven thither by the whites. Thus the Delawares, whose forefathers had granted a home to William Penn, were forced to accept a strip of territory along the north bank of the Kansas, near the Missouri. To their north were the Shawanoes, who had been pushed on through Ohio and Missouri and were gradually adopting the customs of the whites and growing prosperous. Still farther north had been colonized the Kickapoos, an Illinois tribe; and near them their kinsmen, the Pottawottomies, led a wretched, squalid life.

Of the tribes native to the region, the Pawnees, who dwelt chiefly in the present state of Nebraska, were thq xii Introduction

most formidable and treacherous. They bore a deadly hatred toward the great nation of the Dahcotahs, who held the buffalo ranges to the north and west of them, and who were commonly regarded as the most powerful of the Plain Indians. One of these Dahcotah tribes was the Ogillallahs, or wanderers, with whom Parkman lived and hunted. At that time they were planning to take the warpath against their fierce and crafty enemies, the Crows, who claimed what is now Northern Wyoming. Among the other neighbors of the Dahcotahs were the Cheyennes, rich in horses, who frequented the Black Hills; and their long-haired friends and cousins dwelling in Eastern Colorado, the Arapahoes, or dog-eaters, who were shrewd traders and, according to Parkman, arrant thieves. In these respects they resembled those Arabs of the plains along the Arkansas, the Camanches, who ranked an expert horse thief above a dashing warrior, and who were, perhaps, " the most daring riders in the w^orld." For years they and their allies, the Kioways, were the terror of travelers across the southern plains; and Parkman was indeed fortunate to pass along their borders and escape with his scalp.

The first white men to pierce this region were the explorers and missionaries, the trappers and hunters. Most of these trappers and hunters were light-hearted French Canadians, or dark Creoles from the old Louisiana settlements, or spare, gaunt, restless Yankees. In their quest for the buffalo and the beaver they traced every western stream to its source, discovered the easiest and best trails, and prepared the way for the government explorers and the immigrants. In their boats of buffalo hide they brought down their furs and skins to the forts and posts of the American Fur Company, which practically monopolized the early trade in the basin of the Missouri. At these posts these long-haired hermits of the plains and mountains drank and gambled away their year's earnings and then fitted out on credit for another season of toil, gathering buffalo robes among the Indians

The Oregon Trail xiii

of the plains, or threading the beaver streams in the heart of the Rockies.

Some of these mountain men marched with the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1804-1806 to the mouth of the Columbia, where, a few years later, the American Fur Company made that brave but fruitless effort to establish a trading post, which forms the theme of Irving's Astoria. After the War of 1812 Great Britain and the United States agreed that this Oregon country should be open for ten years to the citizens of either nation, and twice they renewed their treaty. Gradually, however, the rivalry between these two nations for this home of the beaver and the salmon, this land of promise for the immigrant, grew keener and fiercer. About 1832 a train of wagons first crossed the Continental Divide to the basin of the Columbia; and before 1840 the Oregon Trail was well established.

The immigrants following this great artery of national life usually started from Independence, near the site of the present Kansas City, or, less frequently, from Fort Leavenworth or St. Josesph. Striking off to the northwest till they reached the southernmost bend of the Platte river, in the present state of Nebraska, they followed that stream for more than six hundred miles to one of its sources in Wyoming, near that famous gateway to the Rockies called South Pass. Here they crossed to the Pacific slope, and, pursuing their hard journey across Idaho to the tributaries of the Columbia, finally made their way down its valley.

In 1840, when the question of the northwestern boundary became a grave international issue, the zeal to win this country for the Stars and Stripes burned brightly. In 1845 three thousand immigrants passed over the Oregon Trail; and in 1847 that number was nearly doubled. Many of those who braved this long and perilous journey were prompted by the appeal to patriotism or, less frequently, by missionary zeal ; others were lured by the call of the wilderness or by the prospect of free xiv Introduction

and fertile land. Whatever their motives, however, these immigrants were essentially home seekers and carried in their great white-covered wagons chairs and tables, ploughs and seeds, Bibl'^s and school books. Fastened at the backs of the wagons were well-filled chicken coops or the halter ropes of favorite milch cows. Little brownfaced, calico-clad girls and small boys in blue jeans rode astride some faithful old horse, while their mother sat on the wagon seat knitting stockings, and their father walked beside the slow, strong ox teams. Frequently these caravans halted for a few days while the men shod the foot-sore oxen, and the women baked bread and washed the soiled clothing; and the long weeks were marked by courtships and marriages, births and deaths, quarrels and occasional crimes.

This tide of immigration was near its height when Parkman journeyed to the west. In June, 1846, when he was at Fort Laramie, Great Britain and the United States signed a treaty fixing the boundary of the Oregon country at the forty-ninth parallel. Two years later the startling news of the discovery of gold in California thronged the Trail with thousands and thousands of eager prospectors; and again, in 1858, the Colorado gold craze crowded this wide-furrowed highway with wagons bearing the slogan, " Pike's Peak or Bust." Finally, in 1868, the railway placed its iron band across the continent.

Parkman journeyed along this Oregon Trail for some six or seven hundred miles — about one-third of its length; then, as he sought adventure and not immigration, he turned south, and traveling along the foothills of the Colorado Rockies till he reached that great highway of the southern plains, the Santa Fe Trail, followed it back to civilization. The Oregon Trail, as we have just seen, was the path of the immigrant; the Santa Fe was the track of the trader. The former extended practically two thousand miles and involved a journey of four or five months; while the latter, with its seven hundred miles, was usually traversed in six or seven weeks.

The Oregon Trail xv

Starting alike from Independence, the two routes coincided for the first two days' journey west of the Missouri ; then the Santa Fe Trail branched to the southwest. Near the present Fort Dodge, Kansas, it divided, one road following the Arkansas River up to Fort Bent, Colorado, and thence south to Las Vegas, and finally to Santa Fe ; while the other branch crossed the Arkansas and bore directly to Las Vegas. In 1822 the first large caravan brought its calicos and linens, its sugar, coffee, and hardware to the New Mexican capital and returned safely with furs and wool, horses and mules, sacks of gold and bars of silver. But even when the annual commerce had swelled to four or five hundred wagons, as in Parkman's time, the Indians were so dangerous that troops often escorted the caravan to the international borders on the Arkansas; and the traders regularly organized with a captain and subalterns, set guards at night, and formed, with their huge black wagons, a corral for their hundreds of horses, mules, and oxen. As a recompense for these dangers and hardships, however, the traders looked forward to heavy purses and to a season of dancing and gambling, bull baiting and cock fighting, within the white adobe walls of Santa Fe.

During the Mexican War this trail became a great military highway. Parkman was already on the plains when war was declared, May 13, 1846; and on his return met along the trail detachments of General Kearny's army, marching from Fort Leavenworth, on the Missouri, to Bent's Fort, on the upper Arkansas, whence they proceeded against Santa Fe, Northern Mexico, and California. After Santa Fe had come under the Stars and Stripes, this commerce of the prairies grew by leaps and bounds, reaching its height about i860. But the prairie schooner and stagecoach were doomed by the locomotive; in 1872 the railway was completed; and to-day only a few ruts remain to mark this famous trail of the trader.

/7

DESCRIPTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY

(i) C. H. Farnham, Life of Francis Parkman, Litt Brown, and Co., Boston, 1901. An excellent study of Par man's life and character by one who knew him well.

(2) H. D. Sedgwick, Francis Parkman, Houghton Miffl Company, Boston, 1904. Cleverly written and especial valuable for the study of Parkman's earlier years.

(3) Francis Parkman, Works, Frontenac Edition, vols., Little, Brown, and Co., Boston, 1910.

• (4) Washington Irving, Astoria, G. P. Putnam's Soi New York, n. d. The account of the establishment of t American trading post at the mouth of the Columbia.

! (5) Washington Irving, Adventures of Captain Bonn ville, G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, n. d. The journe of a pioneer of the Oregon Trail.

(6) R. G. Thwaites, editxjr, Early Western Travels, 17^ 1846, Vols. I-XXXII, Arthur H. Clark Co., Cleveland, 19c 1907. A collection of reprints of rare volumes of eai western life and travel. The most valuable for the stude of Parkman are the following: Vols. XIX-XX, J. Greg Commerce of the Prairies (1831-1839). A vivid picture the Santa Fe trail. Vols. XXVIII-XXIX, T. J. Farnha Travels in the Great Western Prairies (1839). Vol. XX Joel Palmer, Journal of Travels Over the Rocky Mountai (1845-1846). Interesting and valuable from cover to cov Vol. XXV, " Compnsing the series of original paintings Charles Bodmer to illustrate Maximilian, Prince of Wie( Travels in the Interior of North America, 1832-1834."

(7) George P. Harrison, Westward Extension, 1845-18, Harper and Brothers, New York, 1906.

Descriptive Bibliography xvii

(8) H. M. Chittenden, The American Fur Trade of the \ c- Far West, 3 vols., Francis P. Harper, New York, 1902. . A f . ''^^ storehouse of rehable information in nearly every phase of \ ^^ early western life in the land of the Oregon Trail. Vol. ''

III contains an excellent large-sized map.

(9) Frederick S. Dellenbaugh, Breaking the Wilderness, G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1905. Trustworthy, very readable, and well illustrated.

(10) F. L. Paxsoh, The Last American Frontier, The Macmillan Company, New York, 1910. No student or teacher of The Oregon Trail should neglect this book.

Author's Preface To The First Edition

The journey which the following narrative describes was undertaken on the writer's part with a view of studying the manners and character of Indians in their primitive state. Although in the chapters which relate to them, he has only attempted to sketch those features of their wild and picturesque life which fell, in the present instance, under his own eye, yet in doing so he has constantly aimed to leave an impression of their character correct as far as it goes. In justifying his claim to accuracy on this point, it is hardly necessary to advert to the representations given by poets and novelists, which, for the most part, are mere creations of fancy. The Indian is certainly entitled to a high rank among savages, but his good qualities are not those of an Uncas or an Outalissi.

Boston, February 15, 1849.

Chapter I The Frontier

"Away, away from men and towns To the silent wilderness." — Shelley.

Last spring, 1846, was a busy season in the city of St. Louis. Not only were emigrants from every part of the country preparing for the journey to Oregon and California, but an unusual number of traders were making ready their wagons and outfits for Santa Fe. Many 5 of the emigrants, especially of those bound for California, were persons of wealth and standing. The hotels were crowded, and the gunsmiths and saddlers were kept constantly at work in providing arms and equipments for the different parties of travellers. Almost every day 10 steamboats were leaving the levee and passing up the Missouri, crowded with passengers on their way to the frontier.

In one of these, the " Radnor," since snagged and lost, my friend and relative, Quincy A. Shaw, and myself, left 15 St. Louis on the twenty-eighth of April, on a tour of curiosity and amusement to the Rocky Mountains. The boat was loaded until the water broke alternately over her guards. Her upper deck was covered with large wagons of a peculiar form for the Santa Fe trade, and her hold 20 was crammed with goods for the same destination. There were also the equipments and provisions of a party of Oregon emigrants, a band of mules and horses, piles of saddles and harness, and a multitude of nondescript articles indispensable on the prairies. Almost hidden in this medley one might have seen a small French cart, of the sort very appropriately called a " mule-killer " beyond the 5 frontiers, and not far distant a tent, together with a miscellaneous assortment of boxes and barrels. The whole equipage was far from prepossessing in its appearance; yet, such as it was, it was destined to a long and arduous journey, on which the persevering reader will

10 accompany it.

The passengers on board the " Radnor " corresponded with her freight. In her cabin were Santa Fe traders, gamblers, speculators, and adventurers of various descriptions, and her steerage was crowded with Oregon

15 emigrants, " mountain men," negroes, and a party of Kansas Indians, who had been on a visit to St. Louis.

Thus laden, the boat struggled upward for seven or eight days against the rapid current of the Missouri, grating upon snags, and hanging for two or three hours at

20 a time upon sand-bars. We entered the mouth of the Missouri in a drizzling rain, but the weather soon became clear, and showed distinctly the broad and turbid river, with its eddies, its sand-bars, its ragged islands, and forest-covered shores. The Missouri is constantly changing

25 its course, — wearing away its bank on one side, while it forms new ones on the other. Its channel is shifting continually. Islands are formed and then washed away; and while the old forests on one side are undermined and swept off, a young growth springs up from the new soil upon the

30 other. With all these changes, the water is so charged with mud and sand that it is perfectly opaque, and in a few minutes deposits a sediment an inch thick in the bottom of a tumbler. The river was now high; but when we descended in the autumn it was fallen very low, and

35 all the secrets of its treacherous shallows were exposed to view. It was frightful to see the dead and broken trees, thick-set as a military abatis, firmly imbedded in the sand, and all pointing down stream, ready to impale any

The Frontier 5

unhappy steamboat that at high water should pass over that dangerous ground.

In five or six days v^^e began to see signs of the great western movement that was then taking place. Parties of emigrants, with their tents and wagons, would be en- 5 camped on open spots near the bank, on their way to the common rendezvous at Independence. On a rainy day, ne^r sunset, we reached the landing of this place, which is situated some miles from the river, on the extreme frontier of Missouri. The scene was characteristic, for 10 here were represented at one view the most remarkable features of this wild and enterprising region. On the muddy shore stood some thirty or forty dark, slavishlooking Spaniards, gazing stupidly out from beneath their broad hats. They were attached to one of the Santa Fe 15 companies, whose wagons were crowded together on the banks above. In the midst of these, crouching over a smouldering fire, was a group of Indians belonging to a remote Mexican tribe. One or two French hunters from the mountains, with their long hair and buckskin dresses, 20 were looking at the boat; and, seated on a log close at hand, were three men with rifles lying across their knees. The foremost of these, a tall, strong figure, with a clear blue eye and an open, intelligent face, might very well represent that race of restless and intrepid pioneers whose 25 axes and rifles have opened a path from the Alleghanies to the western prairies. He was on his way to Oregon, probably a more congenial field to him than any that now remained on this side the great plains.

Early on the next morning we reached Kansas, about 30 five hundred miles from the mouth of the Missouri. Here we landed, and leaving our equipments in charge of my good friend Colonel Chick, whose log-house was the substitute for a tavern, we set out in a wagon for Westport, where we hoped to procure mules and horses for 35 the journey.

It was a remarkably fresh and beautiful May morning. The rich and luxuriant woods through which the miserable road conducted us were lighted by the bright sunshine and enlivened by a multitude of birds. We overtook on the way our late fellow-travellers, the Kansas Indians, who, adorned with all their finery, were proceed- 5 ing homeward at a round pace ; and whatever they might have seemed on board the boat, they made a very striking and picturesque feature in the forest landscape.

[ Westport was full of Indians, whose little shaggy ponies

I were tied by dozens along the houses and fences. Sacs

10 and Foxes, with shaved heads and painted faces, Shawanoes and Delawares, fluttering in calico frocks and turbans, Wyandots dressed like white men, and a few wretched Kansas wrapped in old blankets, were strolling about the streets or lounging in and out of the shops and

15 houses.

As I stood at the door of the tavern, I saw a remarkable looking person coming up the street. He had a ruddy face, garnished with the stumps of a bristly red beard and moustache; on one side of his head was a round cap

20 with a knob at the top, such as Scottish laborers sometimes wear; his coat was of a nondescript form, and made of a gray Scotch plaid, with the fringes hanging all about it; he wore pantaloons of coarse homespun, and hobnailed shoes; and, to complete his equipment, a little black pipe

25 was stuck in one corner of his mouth. In this curious attire, I recognized Captain C. of the British army, who, with his brother and Mr. R., an English gentleman, was bound on a hunting expedition across the continent. I had seen the Captain and his companions at St. Louis.

30 They had now been for some time at Westport, making preparations for their departure, and waiting for a re-inforcement, since they were too few in number to attempt it alone. They might, it is true, have joined some of the parties of emigrants who were on the point of setting out

35 for Oregon and California; but they professed great disinclination to have any connection with the '' Kentucky fellows."

The Captain now urged it upon us that we should join

The Frontier 7

forces and proceed to the mountains in company. Feeling no greater partiality for the society of the emigrants than they did, we thought the arrangement an advantageous one, and consented to it. Our future fellow-travellers had installed themselves in a little log-house, where we 5 found them all surrounded by saddles, harness, guns, pistols, telescopes, knives, and, in short, their complete appointments for the prairie. R., who professed a taste for natural history, sat at a table stuffing a woodpecker; the brother of the Captain, who was an Irishman, was 10 splicing a trail-rope on the floor, as he had been an ama- \ teur sailor. The Captain pointed out, with much compla- \^ cency, the different articles of their outfit. " You see," i said he, " that we are all old travellers. I am convinced \ that no party ever went upon the prairie better pro- 15 vided." The hunter whom they had employed, a surly looking Canadian, named Sorel, and their muleteer, an American from St. Louis, were lounging about the building. In a little log-stable close at hand were their horses and mules, selected by the Captain, who was an excellent judge.