Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 24.djvu/15

 X740592 Ewing Young in Far Southwest 3 destine. None but Mexicans could legally obtain licenses to trap in Mexican waters. Mexicans, however, would not trap. The industry, therefore, fell, without competi- tion, into the hands of American trappers. But as their activities in the field were unlawful, there was more or less of a tendency to conceal the real facts of what they were doing. The fur traders of the Upper Missouri region usually had some sort of headquarters in Missouri, where their records and papers of various kinds accumulated and where many of them still remain, prized as historic col- lections. In the Southwest, on the other hand, trappers resorted to Taos and Santa Fe as outfitting depots where they disposed of their furs and made up their outfits for the next trapping expedition. They can seldom be said to have had any headquarters, and their papers and ac- counts, if they kept any, seem long since to have been lost. Furthermore, the newspapers of St. Louis and other frontier settlements of Missouri announced the arrival and departure of trapping parties in and from those set- tlements for the Upper Missouri river. These newspaper accounts now form an important part of our information concerning the fur trade in the Upper Missouri and Rocky Mountain regions. But in New Mexico there were no newspapers during the period when trapping was at its height in the Southwest. Some echo of the activity in that section, of course, occasionally found its way into the Missouri papers but it was only an echo as compared with the accounts of the activity in the Northwest. Some information has recently come to light from the documents in the Mexican archives, due to the efforts of Dr. Bolton, but a considerable portion of the informa- tion relating to the subject is to be found only in scraps — chance remarks here and there — a great number of which, while suggestive of the general movement, con- tain but few definite concrete details.