All this time our Westerner, our trapper, is fitting himself for his work in the West as guide for “explorers.” We find him with fifty men, pushing up quite to the headwaters of the Missouri River, and later he and some companions turn up along the historic Yellowstone River, a country then well known in the organized fur trade of St. Louis. We do not discover that he ever went into the regular employ of any of the fur traders. No engagé or ordinary “pork eater” he, but a companion nearly always of these independent fur traders, the individual gentry of the wilderness. We find him now becoming acquainted with the Big Horn. He knows also the three forks of the Missouri; and he visits the “Big Snake” River and the Humboldt River, then called Mary’s River, since scientists still were scarce in the Rockies. He wanders continually back and forth across the upper Rockies. Brown’s Hole, Jackson’s Hole, Henry Lake, the Black Hills, all the upper waters of the great rivers, the Columbia, the Snake, the Green, the Colorado, the Platte, the Missouri, the Yellowstone, the Arkansas,—you shall hardly name any well-known Western region, any remote mountain park, any accurately mapped Western stream which you shall not, providing you have faithfully followed the wanderings of Kit Carson, discover to have been familiar to this man even before geographies were dreamed of west of the Missouri River. It would be but wearying to go on with the monotonous chronicle of repeated journeys back and forth, of hardships, of toils and dangers, of the round of the trapper’s employment, of the wild life at those wild, strange annual markets of the mountains, the trappers’ rendezvous. It will suffice us and serve us to remember that Carson practically closed his life as a trapper in 1834,[28] this date marking the end of eight years steadily employed by him in trapping and trading and in learning the West. In 1834 he and such companions as Bill Williams, William New, Mitchell, Frederick, and scores of others of his old-time friends, found themselves practically without a calling. When, after one long expedition west of the range, they readied Fort Roubidoux, it was only to discover that furs had gone very low in price. The advent of the silk hat had caused terror in St. Louis, and gloom throughout the Rockies. The day of the beaver trade was at an end. That animal, of so monstrous an importance in the history of the American continent, was now to assume a place far lower in estimation. Our bold, befringed mountaineers learned that it would no longer pay to pursue it into the remote fastnesses of the Rocky Mountains. Yet the beaver had served its purpose. Following its tooth-marks on the trees, there had pressed on to the head of every Western river a man qualifying for office as guide of the west-bound civilization beyond the Missouri. Kit Carson, type of the graduated trapper and adventurer, had had his schooling.