The Appeal. [volume] (Saint Paul, Minn. ;) 1889-19??, 1899-10-14

Far West-Unexpected Marriages
Made by Order-The Great buffalo
Trap-A Fight Between Blackfeet
and Crows-A White Mans Life
With Blackfcet-VeriIy an Excit-
ing Time.
There are trappers and trappers. The
lad starting out from the old farmhouse
at break Of day to visit his snares set
along the bank Of some nearby stream is
q trapper; he has the true spirit. Then
there is the man, perhaps once farm
er's boy, who lives in the deep woods and
has his blazed line extending across val
ley and lliis and from stream to stream.
for miles and miles: he Is trapper in
every sense of the word. But the trap
. per who was the king Of them all has
passed away; his domain has been taken
from him and the land knows him no
more. He was the one who, In the course
Of his vocation, explored the great West
and mapped the way for that tide OF
civilization which in our own time, in the
days Succeeding the Civil war, has torn
up the plains and conquered the noun
tains of halht a continent.
One often hears the expression: "A
lazy, shiftless Wrapper 1t is wide of
the truth, DECLARES a Kipp (Mont.) writer
In the New York Sun. The trcpper is
not lazy; he tolls harder, undergoes more
privation, exposes himself to more hard
ship than men Of almost any other class.
The truth Is, he was born with a dislike
of the trammels of civilization. In him
the spirit of some remote ancestor, per-
hans that of a dweller. has
been reincarnated, and in obedience to its
demands he has returned to nature, fol-
lowing her ways as nearly as he can.
He will not, cannot, bear the yoke which
modern life imposes. He has no ambi-
ton to own lands and dwellings, to &C
cumulate wealth. All he cares for is to
live with nature, to lead life untram-
melled by the observances and duties or
civilization. And people who cannot I'M
derstand such a man deem him lazy and
shiftless, but when one comes to knew
these men intimately their character is a
revelation. They have great will power;
they are fertile in expedient, and al
though deficient in education, they are
more than the average man thinkers and
philosophers. They have their own opi2-,
ions, and strong ones, too, upon those
large questions which interest humanity.
AS the farmers boy experiences pleas
ure in tramping through piece OF dis
tciuC WOOuidlu 1OI IuS tllllC oAAo S-A0
ploring it's unknown eXpanse, so did the
- rappers Of the early, half of this century,
and even later delight to~fit, out at one
of the frontier tOWns-St. Louis or st.
Paul-and start for a years sojourn in
the Far West. At first they confined their
operations to the nearby country, Mime
sofa, Iowa, Missouri and Kansas, but
as the years passed they went further
and further toward the sunset in search
of new fields, until they finally established
their winter camps along the slopes OF
the Rockies, and beyond, even to the
Pacific. They knew Of but cared naught
for the dangers they would encounter.
There were countless baEds of Indians to
fight or circumvent; there were many
wide and treacherous streams to cross;
wild beasts to encounter; they were Ia
BILE to accident or disease far from sur
geons care. And all for what? for the
taking Of a few beaver and marten pelts?:
No, it was that inherited spirit Of unrest
and love of adventure that led them on.
1t was the satisfaction of camping upon
some far-aWay stream; in some wild can
yon: of climbing some rugged mountain
height and saying:,"I am the first white
man to view this spot" The bones of
many Of these brave men now lie bleach
ing on the great plains Of the West or
are buried deep in the sands of the
mountain streams. Sometimes they re-
turned to the frontier towns with their
gering and with a look in their eyes which
told of the hardships they had endured.
which told of the harships they endured.
They had escaped from some thievlng
band of Indians with their lives, but had
lost their horses, arms and furs. The
Indians often took that means of deal
ing with the poor trapper. They thought
he would suffer a more horrible death
if set a-foot in the desert without food
or the means to procure it than if they
should kill him on the spot.
How picturesque these old-time trap
pers were! Catlin has left us one or two
paintings of them; several life-like cuts
of them are to be found in old works
about the West, and even to-day one oc-
casionally sees just such men In the
Rocky mountain region. Their clothes
were generally of buckskin, frinsed or
unfringed; plant rnoccasins covered the
feet. Did they wear a coat, 1t was or
coarse black wool, unlined, cut with long
tails and had seWed to the back OF the
neck three-cornered capote, of like ma
,terial. Brass buttons decorated the front
and back. Instead of hats they wore
huge turbans of coon or other fur. and
beneath their long hair streamed down
over their shoulders and was of equal
length with the beard which covered
their faces Neither hair nor beard ever
felt the shears. When either grew so
long as to be in the way they whipped
off. Around their waist was a leathern
belt, which contained their knife and
sheath, and sometimes pistol. But as
"a rule the trapper had no use for that
weapon, preferring to depend upon his
lang barreled, sharp-sighted rife for all
purposes.
Starting on one of those long expetli-
items from the banks of the Missts~s ~,
the old-time trappers took scarcely IaOre
with them than IL they were going tor q
days Journey. They may have had t";o
or three pack horses each, but these
carried scarcely any weight. Each man
had a good supply of ammunition, which
was to procure his food; there were plenty
tof traps, an ak or two, few cooking
utensils, and shelter of some kind, gem
Ierally an Indian lodge They may nave
had few pounds of flour. pork. sugar
land tea; no more. however, than would
carry them beyond the settlements into
the game country. The trapper, like the
Indian. subsisted almost entirely upon
meat with occasionally some berries,
fresh or dried, and it seems to have been
IAN all-suf1cient and healthful diet. The
;meat-eating habit, once acquired, seems
never to desert one. The few surviving
,traupers OF the old time, as we'll as the
indians, subsist upon it even in these
DAYS Of a cheap and varied food supply.
tRread they will eat in moderate. quaint
Ties. but IL they have meat, and plenty OF
AZ. they care for nothing else, unless 1t
hs the service berry and the cherry, which
they dry in quantities for winter use.
About twenty miles east of the foothills
,of the Rockies, In the northern part of
Montana, there lives one Of the old-time
;trappers named Rivet, now ninety-two
hot he S rnoa v1yy