They were bold men, hard men, men who held life lightly and knew no
fear. In the van were the trappers and fur traders with their beaver
traps and their long-barreled rifles. They went far up into the
mountains where the rivers rose snow-chilled and the beavers built
their dams. There were mountain men in fringed and beaded buckskins,
long haired, gaunt and weather scarred; men whose pasts were unknown
and unasked, who trapped and hunted and lived in the lodges with their
squaws. There were black-eyed Canadian voyageurs in otter-skin caps
and coats made of blankets, hardy as Indian ponies, gay and light of
heart, who poled the keel boats up the rivers to the chanting of old
French songs. There were swarthy half-breeds, still of tongue, stolid
and eagle-featured, wearing their blankets as the Indians did,
noiseless in their moccasins as the lynx creeping on its prey.
And then came the emigrants, the first white-covered wagons, the first
white women, looking out from the shade of their sunbonnets. The squaw
wives wondered at their pale faces and bright hair. They came at
intervals, a few wagons crawling down the valley and then the long,
bare road with the buffaloes crossing it to the river and the
occasional red spark of a trapper's camp fire.
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