e of
their camps was indeed a lucky thing for the lost traveller. Everything
the host had was at his guest's disposal, and though coffee and sugar
were the dearest of his luxuries, often purchased with a whole season's
trapping, the black fluid was offered with genuine free-heartedness,
and the last plug of tobacco placed at the disposition of his chance
visitor, as though it could be picked up on the ground anywhere.

Goods brought by the traders to the rendezvous for sale to the trappers
and hunters, although of the most inferior quality, were sold at
enormously high prices.

Coffee, by the pint-cup, which was the usual measure for everything,
cost from a dollar and twenty cents to three dollars; tobacco a dollar
and a half a plug; alcohol from two dollars to five dollars a pint;
gunpowder one dollar and sixty cents a pint-cup, and all other articles
at proportionably exorbitant rates.

The annual gatherings of the trappers at the rendezvous were often the
scene of bloody duels; for over their cups and cards no men were more
quarrelsome than the old-time mountaineers. Rifles at twenty paces
settled all difficulties, and, as may be imagined, the fall of one or
the other of the combatants was certain, or, as sometimes happened, both
fell at the word "Fire!"

The trapper's visits to the Mexican settlements, or to the lodges of
a tribe of Indians, for the purpose of trading, often resulted in his
returning to his quiet camp with a woman to grace his solitary home,
the loving and lonely couple as devoted to each other in the midst of
blood-thirsty enemies, howling wolves, and panthers, as if they were in
some quiet country village.

The easy manners of the harum-scarum, reckless trappers at the
rendezvous, and the simple, unsuspecting hearts of those nymphs of the
mountains, the squaws, caused their husbands to be very jealous of the
attentions bestowed upon them by strangers. Often serious difficulties
arose, in the course of which the poor wife received a severe whipping
with the knot of a lariat, or no very light lodge-poling at the hands of
her imperious sovereign. Sometimes the affair ended in a more tragical
way than a mere beating, not infrequently the gallant paying the penalty
of his interference with his life.

Garrard, a traveller on the great plains and in the Rocky Mountains
half a century ago, from whose excellent diary I have frequently quoted,
passed many days and nights at Bent's Fort fifty years ag