or prairie, shoots his own game, lights his fire, and cooks his repast.
With his horse and his rifle, he is independent of the world, and spurns
at all its restraints. The very superintendents at the lower posts
will not put him to mess with the common men, the hirelings of the
establishment, but treat him as something superior.

There is, perhaps, no class of men on the face of the earth, says
Captain Bonneville, who lead a life of more continued exertion, peril,
and excitement, and who are more enamored of their occupations, than the
free trappers of the West. No toil, no danger, no privation can turn the
trapper from his pursuit. His passionate excitement at times resembles
a mania. In vain may the most vigilant and cruel savages beset his
path; in vain may rocks and precipices and wintry torrents oppose
his progress; let but a single track of a beaver meet his eye, and he
forgets all dangers and defies all difficulties. At times, he may be
seen with his traps on his shoulder, buffeting his way across rapid
streams, amidst floating blocks of ice: at other times, he is to be
found with his traps swung on his back clambering the most rugged
mountains, scaling or descending the most frightful precipices,
searching, by routes inaccessible to the horse, and never before trodden
by white man, for springs and lakes unknown to his comrades, and where
he may meet with his favorite game. Such is the mountaineer, the hardy
trapper of the West; and such, as we have slightly sketched it, is the
wild, Robin Hood kind of life, with all its strange and motley populace,
now existing in full vigor among the Rocky Mountains.

Having thus given the reader some idea of the actual state of the fur
trade in the interior of our vast continent, and made him acquainted
with the wild chivalry of the mountains, we will no longer delay the
introduction of Captain Bonneville and his band into this field of their