The French trapper was and is to-day as different from the English as
the gamester is from the merchant. Of all the fortunes brought from the
Missouri to St. Louis, or from the _Pays d'en Haut_ to Montreal, few
escaped the gaming-table and dram-shop. Where the English trader saves
his returns, Pierre lives high and plays high, and lords it about the
fur post till he must pawn the gay clothing he has bought for means to
exist to the opening of the next hunting season.

It is now that he goes back to some birch tree marked by him during the
preceding winter's hunt, peels the bark off in a great seamless rind,
whittles out ribs for a canoe from cedar, ash, or pine, and shapes the
green bark to the curve of a canoe by means of stakes and stones down
each side. Lying on his back in the sun spinning yarns of the great
things he has done and will do, he lets the birch harden and dry to the
proper form, when he fits the gunwales to the ragged edge, lines the
inside of the keel with thin pine boards, and tars the seams where the
bark has crinkled and split at the junction with the gunwale.

It is in the idle summer season that he and his squaw--for the Pierre
adapts, or rather adopts, himself to the native tribes by taking an
Indian wife--design the wonderfully bizarre costumes in which the
French trapper appears: the beaded toque for festive occasions, the gay
moccasins, the buckskin suit fringed with horse-hair and leather in lieu
of the Indian scalp-locks, the white caribou capote with horned
head-gear to deceive game on the hunter's approach, the powder-case made
of a buffalo-horn, the bullet bag of a young otter-skin, the musk-rat or
musquash cap, and great gantlets coming to the elbow.

None of these things does the English trader do. If he falls a victim to
the temptations awaiting the man from the wilderness in the dram-shop of
the trading-post, he takes good care not to spend his all on the spree.
He does not affect the hunter's decoy dress, for the simple reason that
he prefers to let the Indians do the hunting of the difficult game,
while he attends to the trapping that is _gain_ rather than _game_. For
clothes, he is satisfied with cheap material from the shops. And if,
like Pierre, the Englishman marries an Indian wife, he either promptly
deserts her when he leaves the fur country for the trading-post or sends
her to a convent to be educated up to his own level. With Pierre the
marriage means that he has cast off