o his village, or met him at the rendezvous to barter for his
furs. I know that the price of every article he desired was fixed by the
trader, and never by the Indian, consequently he rarely got the best of
the bargain.

Uncle John Smith, Kit Carson, L. B. Maxwell, Uncle Dick Wooton, and a
host of other well-known Indian traders, long since dead, have often
told me that the first thing they did on entering a village with a
pack-load of trinkets to barter, in the earlier days before the whites
had encroached to any great extent, was to arrange a schedule of prices.
They would gather a large number of sticks, each one representing an
article they had brought. With these crude symbols the Indian
made himself familiar in a little while, and when this preliminary
arrangement had been completed, the trading began. The Indian, for
instance, would place a buffalo-robe on the ground; then the trader
commenced to lay down a number of the sticks, representing what he was
willing to give for the robe. The Indian revolved the transaction in his
mind until he thought he was getting a fair equivalent according to his
ideas, then the bargain was made. It was claimed by these old traders,
when they related this to me, that the savage generally was not
satisfied, always insisting upon having more sticks placed on the pile.
I suspect, however, that the trader was ever prepared for this, and
never gave more than he originally intended. The price of that initial
robe having been determined on, it governed the price of all the rest
for the whole trade, regardless of size or fineness, for that day. What
was traded for was then placed by the Indian on one side of the lodge,
and the trader put what he was to give on the other. After prices had
been agreed upon, business went on very rapidly, and many thousand
dollars' worth of valuable furs were soon collected by the successful
trader, which he shipped to St. Louis and converted into gold.

In a few years, relatively, the Indian began to appreciate the value of
our medium of exchange and the power it gave him to secure at the stores
in the widely scattered hamlets and at the military posts on the plains,
those things he coveted, at a fairer equivalent than in the uncertain
and complicated method of direct barter. It was not very long after the
advent of the overland coaches on the Santa Fe Trail, that our currency,
even the greenbacks, had assumed a value to the savage, which he at
least parti