Epilogue to an Era

By 1840 the beaver trade was done.  A conversation with a trapper in 1846 shows that some held out hope years later..."Beaver's bound to rise.  Human nature can't go on selling beaver a dollar a pound.  That ain't a going to shine much longer.  There was times six dollars a skin." 

Most trappers had moved on to other things by 1846.  Some took to writing such as James Beckwourth   Much of what was written by the former trappers were tales spun to excite readers with a bit of fact woven in, but it did add new weight to the growing legend of the American West as the home of heroes.

Other former trappers became hunters for trading posts - decimating the buffalo herds for carriage robes, coats, rugs and shoe lining.  A good number of trappers left the mountains all together, moving on to the West Coast where they tried their hand at ranching.

Jim Bridger, Tom Fitzpatrick, Joseph Walker and Kit Carson went on to play major dramatic roles in taming the West.  Bridger built a trading post on the Oregon Trail in SW Wyoming.  Settlers stopped at Bridger's Fort for decades to learn route information and gather supplies.  Fitzpatrick and Walker became wilderness guides of legend.  Carson is remembered simply as the "pathfinder's pathfinder."

To sum up the life of the trapper best, Washington Irving wrote:

"No toil, no danger, no privation can turn him from his pursuit.  His passionate excitement at times resembles a mania.  In vain may cruel savages bisect his path, in vain the rocks may oppose his progress but let a single track of beaver meet his eye and he forgets all dangers.  At times he may be found scaling the most frightful precipices, searching for springs and lakes unknown to his comrades, where he may meet with his favorite game.  Such is the mountaineer, the hardy trapper of the West, and such is the wild, Robin Hood kind of life now existing among the Rocky Mountains." 

Next time - Inside Bent's Fort




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Today in Pioneer History: "On May 16, 1881, Dick Fellows, an inept horseman but persistent outlaw, becomes a free man after spending five years in the San Quentin prison.