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Updated: September 15, 2025
When every respectable man in Europe and America wore a beaver skin upon his head, or a part of one, and when a good beaver skin could be bought in Western New York for a dollar's worth of trash, and could be sold in London for twenty-five English shillings, and when those twenty-five English shillings could be invested in English cloth and cutlery, and sold in New York for forty shillings, it may be imagined that fur-trading was a very good business.
He was a light-headed Irishman; he ran off with a Cheyenne squaw, and not long afterwards was killed by the Comanches. This property, however, he gave over to a friend of his, a Frenchman named Le Claire, connected in a business way with the big Choteau Fur-trading Company in St. Louis. This Frenchman brought his wife and child here to live. I knew them, for they traded at the 'Last Chance' store.
Although the profits to be realized from the enterprise were not certain, it seemed probable that fur-trading, and developing the resources of the country, might become advantageous. The expenses of the undertaking were also small: a few barrels of biscuits, of pease and cider would be found sufficient to sustain the fifteen or twenty men who formed the nucleus of the colony.
Pinega was a fine city of three thousand inhabitants with six or seven thousand in the nearby villages that thickly dot the banks of this broad expansion of the old fur-trading and lumber river port. Its people were progressive and fairly well educated. The city had been endowed by its millionaire old trader with a fine technical high school. It had a large cathedral, of course.
In 1835, when only sixteen, he joined a fur-trading expedition under Charles Bent, destined for the fort on the Arkansas River built by him and his brothers. They arrived at the crossing of the Santa Fe Trail over Pawnee Fork without special adventure, but there they had the usual tussle with the savages, and Hobbs killed his first Indian.
Now appears in history Fort Benton, on the Missouri, the great northern supply post just as at an earlier date there had appeared Fort Hall, one of the old fur-trading posts beyond the Rockies, Bent's Fort on the Arkansas, and many other outposts of the new Saxon civilization in the West. Later came the pony express and the stage coach which made history and romance for a generation.
It was surrounded by a palisade of stout timbers, fixed deeply in the ground, and united by cross-bars, further strengthened by buttresses, and loop-holed for musketry, with a few light guns to sweep the fort should the enemy break in. The interior consisted of log-huts and storehouses. Such is the style of most of the fur-trading forts.
We had expected to push on to Fort Laramie without stopping elsewhere, but when we reached Fort Bernard, a small fur-trading post ten miles east of Fort Laramie, we learned that the Sioux Indians were gathering on Laramie Plain, preparing for war with the Crows, and their allies, the Snakes; also that the emigrants already encamped there found pasturage very short.
In time De Catinat built a house on Staten Island, where many of his fellow-refugees had settled, and much of what he won from his fur-trading was spent in the endeavour to help his struggling Huguenot brothers.
A few years later certain Scottish pioneers brought a rival exploration and trading corporation into existence and called it the "X.Y. Company". In 1804 these rival Montreal fur-trading associations were fused into a new North-west Trading Company.
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