However, the supreme mountain scouts were of American vintage. The best in the west were cool, longheaded, deadly-shooting backwoodsmen from Kentucky and Virginia. They had what it took to deal with Indian treachery, wild beasts, and constant danger in a thousand forms. The fur business demanded men of great force and energy. Hence, the successful trappers were hard-working, hard-fighting men inured to hardship and exposure. Their vanity was in fast riding, straight shooting, prowess in trapping and trailing, and enduring privation without wincing. However, most of them were capable of complete relaxation in the fashion of drinking and gambling. In fact, they were “white Injuns” and proud of the same class of achievements. The tides of trapper fortune were capricious. One year they rolled with promise; the next were empty as a beach. The competition was always keen, and they were ever on the move. “Old Roustabout,” “Perpetual Motion,” “Never Quit,” and “Knock ’Em Stiff Hawkeye” were current nicknames in the Order. Some of them became veritable walking maps possessed of uncanny perception of distance, condition, and landmarks. All this knowledge was susceptible to sudden erasure by one deft blow of a tomahawk. Surely every trapper fully understood the meaning of the old Hudson Bay Company motto, “A skin for a skin.” The passing of time, together with kindly, indiscriminate sentimentality toward the lore of the Old West, has enveloped all of her buckskin-fringed denizens in an enchanting blanket of romance. Legend endows them with a uniform mantle of heroism and self-sacrifice. No great effort ought to be made to drag frontiersmen from these generous folds of fiction, because such a course might evoke the other extreme of shouting “Ichabod.” However, a correct comprehension of reality should be the intelligent observer’s constant aim. Tramping this western wilderness was hardy-man’s-pie, and one may search in vain for “cream puffs” in the trapper fraternity. Among this advance guard of the human flood were turbulent spirits. Surely persons of the wild and reckless type have their place in pioneering the way for the more conforming populace. Although they were generally of a kindred spirit, no company personnel ever conformed to a particular type. Indeed, a more heterogeneous assemblage could not be imagined. Some were cross-grained and lazy; some, young or superannuated; others, half-breed and faithless—a real challenge to the leadership of their employer. In time the ordinary men were weeded out, but those remaining were still as diverse as humans could be.