Many of the trappers have squandered in one drunken frolic the
hard-earned wages of a year; some have run in debt, and must toil on to
pay for past pleasure. All are sated with this deep draught of pleasure,
and eager to commence another trapping campaign; for hardship and hard
work, spiced with the stimulants of wild adventures, and topped off with
an annual frantic carousal, is the lot of the restless trapper.
The captain now made his arrangements for the current year. Cerre and
Walker, with a number of men who had been to California, were to proceed
to St. Louis with the packages of furs collected during the past year.
Another party, headed by a leader named Montero, was to proceed to the
Crow country, trap upon its various streams, and among the Black Hills,
and thence to proceed to the Arkansas, where he was to go into winter
quarters.
The captain marked out for himself a widely different course. He
intended to make another expedition, with twenty-three men to the
lower part of the Columbia River, and to proceed to the valley of the
Multnomah; after wintering in those parts, and establishing a trade with
those tribes, among whom he had sojourned on his first visit, he would
return in the spring, cross the Rocky Mountains, and join Montero and
his party in the month of July, at the rendezvous of the Arkansas; where
he expected to receive his annual supplies from the States.
If the reader will cast his eye upon a map, he may form an idea of the
contempt for distance which a man acquires in this vast wilderness, by
noticing the extent of country comprised in these projected wanderings.
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