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During the battle with Carson's trappers, the Blackfeet had sent their women and children on in advance; and, when the engagement had ended, and the discomfited warriors, so much reduced in number, returned without one scalp, the big skin lodge, which had been erected for the prospective war-dance, was occupied by the wounded savages, and the hatred for the whites among the tribe was intensified to the last degree of bitterness.
I had heard, too, that this method was much practised among the trappers and hunters when laying up a stock of buffalo flesh, or of any other animals they might chance to kill. It is called `jerking, and the meat when thus prepared goes by the name of `jerked meat. By the Spaniards it is called `tasajo.
The South Park is sixty miles long and thirty wide, with a surface like a rolling prairie, and contains hills, groves, lakes and streams in beautiful variety. It formerly abounded with buffalo and other game, and was a favorite winter hunting-ground of the Indians and the white trappers, but since the great influx of miners the buffaloes have mostly disappeared.
The canyon consisted of a deep cleft across a series of ranges of hills or low mountains. Through it ran a rough breakneck trail once used by the Indians and trappers but now abandoned since the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway through the Kicking Horse Pass and the opening of the Government trail through the Crow's Nest.
The next evening, looking over toward the west, I saw a truly frontier sight a line of trappers winding down the hillside with their pack animals. My mother had often told me of the trappers searching the distant mountains for fur-bearing animals and living a life of fascinating adventure. Here they were in reality.
Some of them he had travelled over in company with his father, and of others he had heard the accounts given by the voyageurs, traders, and trappers. Norman knew that Lake Winnipeg was muddy, he did not care to inquire the cause. He knew that there was a hilly country on its eastern and a low level land on its western shores, but it never occurred to him to speculate on this geological difference.
Spring was returning with its milder breezes and its warmer sun. The time for the spring hunt had commenced. There were no hostile Indians in the vicinity to disturb the trappers. Success, surpassing their most sanguine expectations, attended their efforts. Every morning the trappers came in from their various directions laden with furs. All were elated with their extraordinary prosperity.
This made it the easier for me to meet good people on equal terms not that I am silly enough to hold trade in disrespect, but because the merchants who came in direct contact with the Indians and trappers suffered in estimation from the cloud of evil repute which hung over their business.
Shuyak is uninhabited, but some natives have hunting barabaras there. Formerly this island contained great numbers of silver gray foxes. A few years ago some white trappers visited it and put out poison. The result was the extermination of all the foxes upon the island, for not only the foxes that ate the poison died, but the others which ate the poisoned carcasses.
It was beyond their power to return them to their owners, but the best were selected, several of the plumpest killed and cured, and the rest turned loose to go whither they chose. The trappers continued up the Gila until near the copper mines of New Mexico, where they found a party of white men trading with the Indians.
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