They had, on a trapping excursion, encountered but a constant scene of disasters and were now returning to St.Louis, utterly impoverished.
They brought the welcome intelligence that buffaloes were in abundance two days' journey in advance.

After a social hour, in which the two parties feasted together, the surveyors mounted their horses, and the trappers shouldered their packs, and the two parties separated in different directions.

Lieutenant Fremont mentions an incident illustrative of the homeless life which many of these wanderers of the wilderness live: "Among them," he writes, "I had found an old companion on a northern prairie, a hardened and hardly-served veteran of the mountains, who had been as much hacked and scarred as an old _moustache_ of Napoleon's Old Guard.

He flourished in the soubriquet of La Tulipe.

His real name I never knew.