Here is a striking
contrast, in which extremes meet,--not the martens' tails, but the two
men's wives, the banker's and the trapper's, brought into antithetical
relation by the simple circumstance of a _fichu-russe_, the material
of which was worn in some ravine of the wilderness, mayhap not a
twelvemonth since, by a creature faster even than a banker's wife.
Great is the hereafter of the marten-cat, whose skin may be looked
upon as the soul by which the animal is destined to attain a sort of
modified immortality in the Elysian abodes of Wealth and Fashion,--the
place where good martens go!
The men through whose intervention eventual felicity is thus secured
to the fur-creature are as much a race in themselves as the Gypsies.
No genuine type of them ever approaches nearer to the confines of
civilization than a frontier settlement beckons him. Old Adams, the
bear-tutor, might have been of this type once, but he is adulterated
with sawdust and gas-light now, with city cookery and spurious
groceries. Many men of French Canadian origin are to be found trading
and trapping in the Far West; although, taken in the aggregate, there
are no people less given to stirring enterprise than these colonial
descendants of the Gaul. The only direction, almost, in which they
exhibit any expansive tendency is in the border trade and general
adventure business, in which figure the names of many of them
conspicuously and with honor. The Chouteaus are of that stock; and of
that stock came the late Major Aubry, renowned among the guides and
trappers of the southwestern wilderness; and if J.
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