The trapper that started out into the mountains might take only two or three extra horses. He did not use more than half a dozen traps in those days, and counted always upon living upon wild game. The new population of the mining camps, which spread all through the mountains with incredible rapidity, was made up of an entirely different class of men, and was surrounded by an environment less bountiful. They did not come to hunt, but to dig or to riot; and they must be fed. At this time the necessity brought forth the man. It was the American packer that now saved the day. The pack-horse idea is as old as America, but in its perfection it is the product of the Spanish Southwest. We read in history of the progresses of royal personages in ancient times in the Old World, where frequent mention is made of the number of sumpter-mules that attended the caravans in those roadless days. The sumpter-mule was the forerunner of the pack-mule, though it is to be doubted if any servant of an old-time king ever learned to do such impossible things with the sumpter-mule as the American packer did as a matter of course with his beasts of burden. Gradual changes were taking place, about midway of the last century, in the characteristics of Western commerce. The trapper and the hunter had trafficked as individuals. The Santa Fé trade was in control of men who remained at home and sent their goods into another country, just as did the early Phenician merchants. In the trade of the mining towns, the merchant had come to be a resident and not a non-resident, and the transportation of his supplies was in the hands of companies or individuals who had not any ownership in the goods they handled. The greatest drama of the common carrier had its scene in the Rocky Mountains. The price of staples in any mountain town was something that not even the merchant himself could predict in advance, dependent as it was upon the thousand contingencies of freighting in rude regions and among hostile tribes. Prices that would stagger the consumer of to-day were frequently paid for the simplest necessaries. As in the days of the trappers’ rendezvous everything was sold by the pint, so now the standard of measure became the pound. A common price for sugar in a mining camp was thirty-five to fifty cents a pound. In the San Juan mining camps, as late as 1875, potatoes sold for twenty-five cents a pound. A mule or burro would earn its own cost in a single trip, for there were occasions under certain conditions, such as the packing from Florence into the more remote placer districts, when the pack-master charged as much as eighty cents a pound from the supply point to the camps.