with moss to save the horses' feet.

But the greatest cause of delay was the windfall, pines and spruce of
enormous girth pitched down by landslide and storm into an impassable
_cheval-de-frise_. Turn to the right! A matted tangle of underbrush
higher than the horses' head bars the way! Turn to the left! A muskeg
where horses sink through quaking moss to saddle-girths! If the horses
could not be driven around the barrier, the mountaineers would try to
force a high jump. The high jump failing except at risk of broken legs,
there was nothing to do but chop a passage through.

And were the men carving a way through the wilderness only the
bushwhackers who have pioneered other forest lands? Of the prominent men
leading mountaineers in 1831, Vanderburgh of the American Fur Company
was a son of a Fifth New York Regiment officer in the Revolutionary War,
and himself a graduate of West Point. One of the Rocky Mountain leaders
was a graduate from a blacksmith-shop. Another leader was a descendant
of the royal blood of France. All grades of life supplied material for
the mountaineer; but it was the mountains that bred the heroism, that
created a new type of trapper--the most purely American type, because
produced by purely American conditions.

Green River was the _rendezvous_ for the mountaineers in 1831; and to
Green River came trappers of the Columbia, of the Three Forks, of the
Missouri, of the Bighorn and Yellowstone and Platte. From St. Louis came
the traders to exchange supplies for pelts; and from every habitable
valley of the mountains native tribes to barter furs, sell horses for
transport, carouse at the merry meeting and spy on what the white
hunters were doing. For a month all was the confusion of a gipsy camp or
Oriental fair.

French-Canadian _voyageurs_ who had come up to raft the season's cargo
down-stream to St. Louis jostled shoulders with mountaineers from the
Spanish settlements to the south and American trappers from the Columbia
to the north and free trappers who had ranged every forest of America
from Labrador to Mexico.[32] Merchants from St. Louis, like General
Ashley, the foremost leader of Rocky Mountain trappers, descendants from
Scottish nobility like Kenneth MacKenzie of Fort Union, miscellaneous
gentlemen of adventure like Captain Bonneville, or Wyeth of Boston, or
Baron Stuart--all with retinues of followers like mediaeval lords--found
themselves hobnobbing at the _rendezvous_ with mighty Indi