A western trapper is like a sailor; past hazards only stimulate him to further risks.

The vast prairie is to the one what the ocean is to the other, a boundless field of enterprise and exploit.
However he may have suffered in his last cruise, he is always ready to join a new expedition; and the more adventurous its nature, the more attractive is it to his vagrant spirit.
Nothing seems to have kept Colter from continuing with the party to the shores of the Pacific but the circumstances of his having recently married.

All the morning he kept with them, balancing in his mind the charms of his bride against those of the Rocky Mountains; the former, however, prevailed, and after a march of several miles, he took a reluctant leave of the travellers, and turned his face homeward.
Continuing their progress up the Missouri, the party encamped on the evening of the 21st of March, in the neighborhood of a little frontier village of French creoles.

Here Pierre Dorion met with some of his old comrades, with whom he had a long gossip, and returned to the camp with rumors of bloody feuds between the Osages and the loways, or Ayaways, Potowatomies, Sioux, and Sawkees.

Blood had already been shed, and scalps been taken.