Page images
PDF
EPUB

tan assumption, that it is just what Christianity was in the beginning, and that all variations from it in antiquity are to be set to the account of a devilish apostacy, of which Popery was at last the consummation and end. Come what may of the Reformation, there are certain general maxims of faith here which we can never safely renounce. We must hold fast to the divine origin of the church, and to its divine continuity from the beginning down to the present time. We must see and admit, that Protestantism is no return simply to Primitive Christianity. Its connection with this is through the Roman Catholic church only, as the real continuation of the older system. In no other view can it be acknowledged, as the historical and legitimate succession of this ancient faith. This implies, however, that the life of Protestantisin must be one with the life of the church as it stood previously. It is to be taken as different from this indeed in the rejection of many accidental corruptions, but not in distinctive substance and spirit. Its doctrines and habits must be felt to grow forth, with true inward vitality, from the faith that has been accredited as divine from the beginning, by the promise and miraculous providence of Christ. Puritanism then, by abjuring this historical and organic relationship to the ancient church, does what it can in truth to ruin the cause of genuine Protestantism. It brings in another Gospel. It throws us on the terrible dilemma: "Either Ancient Christianity was intrinsically false, or Protestantism is a bold imposture"; for it makes this last to be the pure negation and contradiction of the first. But when it comes to this, what sound mind can pause in its choice? To create such a dilemma, we say then, is to fight against the Reformation. Puritanism, carrying upon its hard front these formidable horns, is no better than treason and death to Protestism.

J. W. N.

TRAPPER'S LIFE.

THE Anglo Saxon era in North America resembles a magnificent rehearsal. It presents in the form of an abridgement the prominent features of the progress of society, from the beginning until the present time; it gives social phases of every cast, from a simple to a highly civilized state. The majestic romance of time has been dramatized, and America affords to the worldaudience the boards upon which the scenes of the great human play, embracing centuries at one lifting of the curtain, are represented. We greet in our western hemisphere the rejuvenes. cence of the old world, and we trace with living eyes the enactment of the human story from its beginning. Like the days of the Creation, or the weeks of the prophet Daniel, time, in our plot, is the symbolization of its greater self, and the condensed statement of the present is a glowing miniature-show of ages. In this cosmoramic exhibition, we may see at once upon the platform all the several degrees of civilization clearly displayed by the Anglo Saxon, from that of the semi-civilized trapper at the one limit to that of the polished citizen at the other. Geographi cal gradations here correspond to the gradations of time in the old European world. The meditative eye, as it passes from the Rocky Mountains to the cities of the Atlantic, may survey a line of social progression, coincident in the main with the course of progress that marked those vast transition periods of society, respectively represented in the history of man by Hercules, Ulysses, Themistocles and Pericles: those periods, whose marvellous and mystic phases the kindred genius of ancient Greece has so charmingly embroidered upon the tapestry of history.

Human nature, as it were glad of the chance, blithely accepts the offer of providence here, and returns to its primitive normal usages. The yearnings expressed by Ponce-de-Leon are gratified in a more general sense, and man is permitted to sojourn again in the childhood experiences of his nature. He assumes again, not in frolic, each mould and aspect he has ever worn, and thus confirms in some sort the doctrine of the Platonic year. The American trapper has dropped upon the earth after his time. His splendid physical heroism is fitted for an epical era -an era of myth. Had Kit Carson and Bill Williams flourished in the heroic ages, they would have matched Theseus and Idas in magnificence of exploit :-they would have been ranked by following generations with the demi-gods for their shining

deeds, and have had their apotheosis registered with that of Castor and Pollux in the bright enduring heavens.

We propose to make some observations on the character and life of the Trapper. He will soon become the property of history, a phenomenan of the past. The living fact he presents will hardly survive the living generation. The economy of the times, in its unblushing researches, has not respected even the pitiful interests and dearly-bought earnings of this recluse of the great West. The substitution of the fur-seal and nutria, and the preparation of the skins of other less valuable fur-bearing animals, together with the unlimited use of silk in the manufacture of hats, are making every year the trapping of beaver an object of less consideration. Already many of this class have cast away their traps, and are constructing adobe hovels along the outskirts of the Mexican settlements, or beginning to upturn the virgin soil in distant view of the Mormons. "The depreciation in the value of beaver skins has thrown the great body of trappers out of employment, and there is a general tendency among the mountain men to settle in the fruitful valleys of the Rocky Mountains. Already the plow has turned up the scil within sight of Pike's Peak, and a hardy pioneer, an Englishman, has led the way to the Great Salt Lake, where a settlement of mountaineers has even now been formed, three thousand miles from the frontier of the United States."" Again: "The demand for the trapper's services now is not as it once was. The price of furs has depreciated so much as to drive him to other engagements. Even since 1838, all who could have been abandoning this mode of life, and Oregon and California have opened rare opportunities for the adventurous spirits of the Plains.” a

The domains of the trapper are but ill-defined in their spacious outlines. In general they embrace all that immense area of mountain and plain lying between the States and the Pacific. The southern term of this vast tract gradually loses itself amid the wide-sown settlements of Northern Mexico. The ancient missions of the Jesuits and Franciscans, together with the recent ly formed gold colonies in California, and the settlements on the Columbia, limit its approaches to the western ocean. Its northern frontier vacillates far within the confines of that shadowy unexplored realm of impenetrable forests and frozen lakes, clos

I Mexico and the Rocky Mountains, by S. F. Ruxton, 1849.

2 Letter of a Missouri Gentleman, August 21st, 1851.

ed to all civilization, which is known only on the maps as being a part of the great British empire. In this magnificent field of nature, extending through twenty degrees of latitude, the Blackfeet, Crows, Sioux, Pawnees, Camanches and other ferocious tribes, on the one side of the Sierra Madre and Rocky Mountains, and the Apaches, Utahs and Shoshones, on the other, wander at will. This territory, in all its length and breadth, is the trapper's hunting ground and home. Its mountains and forests are traversed by him in every direction. Its rivers, and smaller confluent streams, are searched downward their whole length from their sources, and trapped for beaver. Many hundreds of these men, employed by the different fur companies are dispersed singly and in pairs over this whole region. This free imperial range, illimitable as it seems, has been greatly disturbed, the last few years, by the torrent of emigration drawn through its centre, in consequence of the national acquisitions from Mexico, the western localization of Mormonism, and the gold discoveries.

The habits of the American trapper display an entire harmony with his condition and circumstances. By a strange transmutation, the civilized rudiments of his character have become the nutrient soil of barbarous developments, like those ancient ruins of Yucatan over which a wild tropical vegetation exhibits its most sturdy growth. His life is wholly removed from the restraints of society, and those unwritten conventional laws which regalate the thousand proprieties of conduct, which adjust the outward moral tone and aspect of human intercourse, and give to the deportment of man its social charm and polish, are as unknown to him as the institutes of Calvin. His character has taken its hues from the complexion of surrounding scenes, and modeled in the image of savage nature betrays a striking combination of simplicity and ferocity. The animal food taken almost raw, upon which he wholly subsists, tends to blunt his finer sensibilities, and to promote the truculence of his nature. His wants are few. His buckskin costume is everlasting in its wear. With his rifle in hand, upon the prairie or mountain height, he is like the reaper in his own harvest field. Constant exposure has rendered him indifferent to the approach of danger. Crafty and patient, he consults the instincts of primitive man, and rivals the Indian in detecting the haunts of an enemy. The laws of God

In these boundless wastes the greatest and most noted trapping ground is on Green (Colorado) river, beyond Fort Laramie, as well as on the streams beyond Budger's and Vasque's fort.

he does not know, those of men he does not care to remember. It was perhaps the fancied abridgement of his liberties by the latter, that led him first to cast his life upon the domains of nature, and the exile will not brook that the system which has ostracized him should, even by the feeblest prestige of its remembrance, haunt him in his solitude. His unfettered wishes forma the code by which his actions are governed.

In the fierce contests of the passions, none perhaps displays itself with more signal energy than that of revenge. It is, we believe, the peculiar honor of the Gospel among all religions, and the shining token of its superhuman origin, that with its sublime doctrine of forgiveness it has shorn of its strength this Agonistes of man's depraved nature. But the highly seasoned banquet to which the trapper is accustomed to treat his innate propensities, gives this characteristic the full means of maintaining in his case its terrible ascendancy. It glares fiercely through all his achievements. These achievements, it is true, are remarkable. They rank as high in their gross sense among heroic deeds, as the Rocky mountains upon which they are transacted among the mountains of the globe. But as the Wind River chain owes its brilliancy to the perpetual snows which in a temperate latitude crown its summit-to a cause which forbids the spread of all genial verdure, so none but a frigid mind, and frozen state of the kindly affections, could exhibit the wild prowess, and display the inhuman feats of revenge, that signalize the trapper's history. We will mention here two instances for all. We choose them, not that they are marked by special atrocity in mountain adventure, for this is by no means the case, but because in addition to their retaliatory aspect, they serve to exhibit, to some extent, the reckless daring of the trapper. Col. Fremont, in his Report of the Exploring Expedition which traversed California under his command, relates an adventure under this head on the part of two trappers; one of whom was Kit Carson, the Chevalier Bayard of mountain chivalry, the other, Godey, a St. Louis Frenchman. To avenge the massacre of two New Mexicans, and recover some stolen horses, these men rode at a hard gallop from sixty to a hundred miles, charged at daybreak into an Indian village filled with braves, (save the mark!), dispersed the savages like a herd of deer before them, and returned to camp with the lost animals and two propitiatory scalps.

An exploit of a similar character was performed, whilst a party, consisting of twelve or fifteen trappers, was sweeping a few years ago like a whirlwind through the mountains, under the

« PreviousContinue »