Each year the great mountain rendezvous of the
trappers--now at Bent's Fort on the Arkansas, now at Horse Creek
in Wyoming, now on Green River in Utah, or even farther beyond
the mountains--demanded supplies of food and traps and ammunition
to enable the hunters to continue their work for another year.
Perhaps many of the pack-trains which regularly supplied this
shifting mountain market already had traded in the Spanish
country.
It is not necessary to go into further details regarding this
primitive commerce of the prairies. It yielded a certain profit;
it shaped the character of the men who carried it on. But what is
yet more important, it greatly influenced the country which lay
back of the border on the Missouri River. It called yet more men
from the eastern settlements to those portions which lay upon the
edge of the Great Plains. There crowded yet more thickly, up to
the line between the certain and the uncertain, the restless
westbound population of all the country.
If on the south the valley of the Arkansas led outward to New
Spain, yet other pathways made out from the Mississippi River
into the unknown lands.
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