Page:Hugh Pendexter--Kings of the Missouri.djvu/16

 Montreal as a jumping-off place for adventures of all sorts.

The explorations of Major Zebulon Pike, Captains Lewis and Clark, and Major Stephen H. Long, were from one to two decades old on this particular April day, and yet the people thus far had profited but scantily from the printed reports. There was soon coming a time when a mighty host, impelled by a national impulse to expand, would eagerly consult these sleeping authorities. But St. Louis in 1831 thought and talked of furs, not of peopling a continent. In the streets could be seen the lounging mountain men employed by the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, formed by General William H. Ashley in 1822. The season before these same men, clad in greasy and worn garments of buckskin and buffalo hide, had brought back from the mountains a hundred thousand dollars' worth of beaver. Men of the American Fur Company, the strongest fur organization on the continent with the exception of the Hudson's Bay, were kept at their permanent posts throughout the valley of the Missouri and did not enjoy the license of leave exhibited by Ashley's old men.

Traders also were returning from Santa Fé