Though they encountered in the loneliest and most desolate distant regions, they generally met and separated as friends.

Among the perils of the trapper's life in British America was not reckoned that from the hostile natives.
It was far different within our own territory.

Those who left our frontier States and pushed westward, and those who penetrated northward and eastward from the Mexican country, knew they were invading the hunting grounds of the fiercest Indians on the American continent.

We have already told enough to show the intense hostility of the red men; between them and the hunters and trappers raged a war that never ceased or slackened, except when policy held it for a time in check.
The little group of horsemen, who rode out from Independence or Westport, or who took steamer at St.Louis up the Missouri, often came back with several of their number missing.

Up among the mountains, they had gone out to visit their traps and had never come back to camp.