shanty, Willie can help you to move to your quarters, and you can be
building your shanties, so we can get to work as soon as possible."

We gathered every thing together and moved it to the ground where we
were going to make our winter quarters, and Uncle Kit and Jim selected
the place to build our cabin, and the men all turned to and went to
chopping the logs and putting up the cabin. By night the body of the
cabin was almost up, but the reader must bear in mind that this was not
a very large house. It was ten feet one way, and twelve the other, with
a fire place built in one corner. They built the walls of the shack
seven foot high and then covered it with small poles, covered the poles
with fine bows and then there was from six to eight inches of dirt
packed on them and the cracks were stuffed with mud. The door was split
out of logs called puncheons and was fastened together with wooden pins,
driven into holes, bored with an auger. This way of building a house
to live in through the winter may seem strange to the readers who are
accustomed to all the luxuries of the modern home of civilization; but
we considered our cabin very good quarters, and we were very comfortable
that winter.

The first morning after we were settled in our new home we commenced
setting traps for Beaver. Jim Bridger was the lucky man of the whole
outfit in catching Beaver all that winter. Each man had twelve traps
which was called a string, and a number of times that winter Bridger had
a beaver in every one of his traps in the morning. I had watched him set
his traps many times and I tried to imitate him in every particular, but
I never had the luck he had.

Uncle Kit told me a number of times that winter that it was a good
trapper that made an average of catching five Beaver a day, during the