In spite of his faults when in conflict with rivals, it has been the trader living alone, unprotected and unfearing, one voice among a thousand, who has restrained the Indian tribes from massacres that would have rolled back the progress of the West a quarter of a century. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 27: For example, the Deschamps of Red River.] [Footnote 28: Chittenden.] [Footnote 29: Larpenteur, who was there, has given even a more circumstantial account of this terrible tragedy.] CHAPTER VI THE FRENCH TRAPPER To live hard and die hard, king in the wilderness and pauper in the town, lavish to-day and penniless to-morrow--such was the life of the most picturesque figure in America's history. Take a map of America. Put your finger on any point between the Gulf of Mexico and Hudson Bay, or the Great Lakes and the Rockies. Ask who was the first man to blaze a trail into this wilderness; and wherever you may point, the answer is the same--the French trapper. Impoverished English noblemen of the seventeenth century took to freebooting, Spanish dons to piracy and search for gold; but for the young French _noblesse_ the way to fortune was by the fur trade. Freedom from restraint, quick wealth, lavish spending, and adventurous living all appealed to a class that hated the menial and slow industry of the farm. The only capital required for the fur trade was dauntless courage. Merchants were keen to supply money enough to stock canoes with provisions for trade in the wilderness. What would be equivalent to $5,000 of modern money was sufficient to stock four trappers with trade enough for two years. At the end of that time the sponsors looked for returns in furs to the value of eight hundred per cent on their capital. The original investment would be deducted, and the enormous profit divided among the trappers and their outfitters. In the heyday of the fur trade, when twenty beaver-skins were got for an axe, it was no unusual thing to see a trapper receive what would be equivalent to $3,000 of our money as his share of two years' trapping. But in the days when the French were only beginning to advance up the Missouri from Louisiana and across from Michilimackinac to the Mississippi vastly larger fortunes were made.