Three classes, the Company divided each of the hunting brigades into--gentlemen, white men, hunters. The gentlemen usually went out in twos--a commander and his lieutenant, dressed in cocked hat and buttons and ruffles and satin waistcoats, with a pistol somewhere and very often a sword stuck in the high boot-leg. These were given the best places in the canoes, or mounted the finest horses of the mountain brigades. The second class were either servants to beat the furs and cook meals, or young clerks sent out to be put in training for some future chieftaincy. But by far the most picturesque part of the brigades were the motley hunters--Indians, Half-breeds, white men--in buckskin suits with hawks’ bills down the leggings, scarlet or blue handkerchief binding back the lank hair, bright sash about the waist and moccasins beaded like works of art. Then somewhere in each brigade was a musician, a singer to lead in the voyageurs’ songs, perhaps a piper from the Highlands of Scotland to set the bagpipes droning “The Campbells Are Coming,” between the rock walls of the Columbia. And, most amazing thing of all, in these transmontane brigades the men were accompanied by wives and families. A last hand shake with Doctor McLoughlin; tears mingled with fears over partings that were many of them destined to be forever, and out they swept--the Oregon brigades, with laughter and French voyageurs’ song and Highland bagpipes. A dip of the steersman’s lifted paddle, and the Northern brigades of sixty men each were off for Athabasca and the Saskatchewan and the St. Lawrence. A bugle call, or the beat of an Indian tom-tom, and the long lines of pack horses, two and three hundred in each brigade, decked with ribbons as for a country fair, wound into the mountain defiles like desert caravans of wandering Arabs. Oregon meant more in those days than a wedge stuck in between Washington and California. It was everything west of the Rockies that Spain did not claim. Then Chief factor McLoughlin, whom popular imagination regarded as not having a soul above a beaver skin, used to retire to his fort and offer up prayer for those in peril by land and sea. The man chosen to lead the southern brigades to the mountains and whose wanderings led to the exploration of Oregon, northern California, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Nevada and Utah--was a short rotund, fun-loving, young barrister of Montreal, Peter Skene Ogden. His ancestors had founded Ogdensburg of New York State and at an earlier day in the history of Scotland had won the surname “Skene,” through saving the life of King Malcolm by stabbing a wolf with a dagger--“a skene.” During the American Revolution, his father left New York for Montreal, and had risen to be chief justice of the courts there, so that the young barrister could claim as relatives the foremost families of New York State and the Province of Quebec: but an evil star presided at the birth of Peter Skene. [Illustration: OGDEN AND ROSS EXPLORATIONS]