Boeuf, and Venango, which had passed into the hands of the English soon after the capture of Fort du Quesne. The feeble garrisons of all these western posts, exiled from civilization, lived in the solitude of military hermits. Through the long, hot days of summer, and the protracted cold of winter, time hung heavy on their hands. Their resources of employment and recreation were few and meagre. They found partners in their loneli ness among the young beauties of the Indian camps. They hunted and fished, shot at targets, and played at games of chance; and when, by good fortune, a traveller found his way among them, he was greeted with a hearty and open-handed welcome, and plied with eager questions touching the great world from which they were banished men. Yet, tedious as it was, their secluded life was seasoned with stirring danger. The surrounding forests were peopled with a race dark and subtle as their own sunless At any hour, those jealous tribes might raise the war-cry. No human foresight could pre mazes. dict the sallies of their fierce caprice, and in ceaseless watching lay the only safety. When the European and the savage are brought in contact, both are gainers, and both are losers. The former loses the refinements of civilization, but he gains, in the rough schooling of the wilderness, a rugged independence, a self-sustaining energy, and powers of action and perception before unthought of. The savage gains new means of comfort and support, cloth, iron, and gunpowder; yet these apparent benefits have often proved but instruments of ruin. They soon become necessi ties, and the unhappy hunter, forgetting the wea pons of his fathers, must thenceforth depend on the white man for ease, happiness, and life itself. Those rude and hardy men, hunters and traders, scouts and guides, who ranged the woods beyond the English borders, and formed a connecting link between barbarism and civilization, have been touched upon already. They were a distinct, peculiar class, marked with striking contrasts of good and evil. Many, though by no means all, were coarse, audacious, and unscrupulous; yet, even in the worst, one might often have found a vigorous growth of warlike virtues, an iron endurance, an undespairing courage, a wondrous sagacity, and singular fertility of resource. In them was renewed, with all its ancient energy, that wild and daring spirit, that force and hardihood of mind, which marked our barbarous ancestors of Germany and Norway. These sons of the wilderness still survive. We may find them to this day, not in the valley of the Ohio, nor on the shores of the lakes, but far westward on the desert range of the buffalo, and among the solitudes of Oregon. Even now, while I write, some lonely trapper is climbing the perilous defiles of the Rocky Mountains, his strong frame cased in time-worn buck-skin, his rifle griped in his sinewy hand. Keenly he peers from side to side, lest Blackfoot or Arapahoe should ambuscade his path. The rough earth is his bed, a morsel of dried meat and a draught of water are his food and drink, and death and danger his companions. No anchorite could fare worse, no hero could dare more; yet his wild, hard life has resistless charms; and, while he can wield a rifle, he will never leave it. Go with him to the rendezvous, and he is a stoic no more. Here, rioting among his comrades, his native appetites break loose in mad excess, in deep carouse, and desperate gaming. Then follow close the quarrel, the challenge, the rusty rifles and fifty yards of prairie. fight, -- two The nursling of civilization, placed in the midst of the forest, and abandoned to his own resources, is helpless as an infant. There is no clew to the labyrinth. Bewildered and amazed, he circles round and round in hopeless wanderings. Despair and famine make him their prey, and unless the birds of heaven minister to his wants, he dies in misery. Not so the practised woodsman. To him, the forest is a home. It yields him food, shelter, and raiment, and he threads its trackless depths with undeviating foot. To lure the game, to circumvent the lurking foe, to guide his course by the stars, the wind, the streams, or the trees, such are the arts which the white man has learned from the red. Often, indeed, the pupil has outstripped his master. He can hunt as well; he can fight better; and yet there are niceties of the woodsman's craft in which the white man must yield the palm to his savage rival. Seldom can he boast, in equal measure, that subtlety of sense, more akin to the instinct of brutes than to human reason, which reads the signs of the forest as the scholar reads the printed page, to which the whistle of a bird - can speak clearly as the tongue of man, and the rustle of a leaf give knowledge of life or death.' With us the name of the savage is a byword of reproach. The Indian would look with equal scorn on those who, buried in useless lore, are blind and deaf to the great world of nature. A striking example of Indian acuteness once came under my obser vation. Travelling in company with a Canadian named Raymond, and an Ogillallah Indian, we came at nightfall to a small stream called Chug water, a branch of Laramie Creek. As we prepared to encamp, we observed the ashes of a fire, the footprints of men and horses, and other indications that a party had been upon the spot not many days before Having secured our horses for the night, Raymond and I sat down and lighted our pipes, my companion, who had spent his whole life in the Indian country, hazarding various conjectures as to the numbers and character of our predecessors. Soon after, we were joined by the Indian, who, meantime, had been prowling about the place. Raymond asked what discovery he had made. He answered, that the party were friendly, and that they consisted of eight men, both whites and Indians, several of whom he named, affirming that he knew them well. To an inquiry how he gained his information, he would make no intelligible reply. On the next day, reaching Fort Laramie, a post of the American Fur Company, we found that he was correct in every particular, a circumstance the more remarkable, as he had been with us for three weeks, and could have had no other means of knowledge than we ourselves. CHAPTER VI. 1760. THE ENGLISH TAKE POSSESSION OF THE WESTERN THE war was over. POSTS. The plains around Montreal were dotted with the white tents of three victorious armies, and the work of conquest was complete. Canada, with all her dependencies, had yielded to the British crown; but it still remained to carry into full effect the terms of the surrender, and take possession of those western outposts, where the lilies of France had not as yet descended from the flagstaff. The execution of this task, neither an easy nor a safe one, was assigned to a provincial officer, Major Robert Rogers. Rogers was a native of New Hampshire. He commanded a body of provincial rangers, and stood in high repute as a partisan officer. Putnam and Stark were his associates; and it was in this woodland warfare that the former achieved many of those startling adventures and hair-breadth escapes which have made his name familiar at every NewEngland fireside. Rogers's Rangers, half hunters, half woodsmen, trained in a discipline of their |