[90] Chittenden thinks Smith later changed the name Adams to Virgin after Thomas Virgin of his party. It may, however, be a corruption of Le Verkin, a name which survives in one of the branches. [Illustration] CHAPTER XIV A Brood of Wilderness Breakers—Kit Carson the Dauntless—Campbell, 1827, Santa Fé to San Diego—Becknell and the Santa Fé Trail—Wheel Tracks in the Wilderness—The Knight in Buckskin Dies—Pegleg Smith the Horse Trader—The Apache Turns Forever against the American—New Mexico the Dreamland—Wolfskill Breaks a Trail to the Pacific—Bonneville, Captain Courteous; and Wyeth, Leader Hopeful—Bonneville Forgets a Duty. The Mexicans were restless over the advent of the numerous Americans who now appeared in their settled valley, which, for more than a century and a half, had lain completely isolated from the outer world, a lone child of the Wilderness, a sort of dreamland where one day was like another day, and where years rolled into decades, even centuries, without any one knowing it. The Americans, quick, sharp, bluff, energetic, startled these slow people, yet the officials tried to impose on them. Trapping was permitted because the Mexicans did not know how to do it, but after the American had reaped a harvest it was not easy to get away with it, for by some flimsy subterfuge the furs might be confiscated and the trapper on a pretext thrown into prison, as in the case of the Patties in California. Nevertheless the American trapping operations quickly extended over all the New Mexican territory as well as over the region north of the forty-second parallel, still undetermined as to ownership. British mainly operated there. The ten years agreed upon in 1818 between Great Britain and the United States as to this tract expired without their being able to come to an understanding, and the agreement was renewed for a second ten years. Russia came to terms on her southern and eastern boundary, making treaties with the United States and Great Britain, the one with the latter establishing in 1825 the lines of Alaska that were inherited in 1867 by the United States, and only definitely settled in 1903. Matters relating to the Mexican country and to the Oregon region remained therefore for another decade without political change. [Illustration: Prairie Dogs. From _Wonderland _, 1901. Northern Pacific Railway.]