There had once been the trapper's paradise
where the annual "rendezvous" was held and the men of the mountains
gathered from creek and river and spent a year's earnings in a wild
week. But the streams were almost empty now and the great days over.
There was a market but no furs. Old Joe could tell what it had once
been like, old Joe who years ago had been one of General Ashley's men.
The old man took his pipe out of his mouth and shook his head.
"The times is dead," he said, with the regret of great days gone,
softened by age which softens all things. "There ain't anything in it
now. When Ashley and the Sublettes and Campbell ran the big companies
it was a fine trade. The rivers was swarmin' with beaver and if the
Indians 'ud let us alone every man of us 'ud come down to rendezvous
with each mule carrying two hundred pound of skins. Them was the
times."
The quick, laughing patter of the voyageur's French broke in on his
voice, but old Joe, casting a dim eye back over the splendid past, was
too preoccupied to mind.
"I've knowed the time when the Powder River country and the rivers that
ran into Jackson's Hole was as thick with beaver as the buffalo range
is now with buffalo.
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