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are rarely met with, and still more rarely brought to a parley, so great is their shyness and their dread of strangers.
As their poverty offers no temptation to the marauder, and as they are inoffensive in their habits, they are never the objects of warfare; should one of them, however, fall into the hands of a war party, he is sure to be made a sacrifice, for the sake of that savage trophy, a scalp, and that barbarous ceremony, a scalp dance. These forlorn beings, forming a mere link between human nature and the brute, have been looked down upon with pity and contempt by the creole trappers, who have given them the appellation of "les dignes de pitie," or "the objects of pity." They appear more worthy to be called the wild men of the mountains.
CHAPTER XXVI.
A retrograde move—channel of a mountain torrent—Alpine scenery—cascades—beaver valleys—beavers at work—their architecture—their modes of felling trees—mode of trapping the beaver—contests of skill—a beaver "up to trap"—arrival at the Green River caches.
The view from the snowy peak of the Wind River Mountain, while it had excited Captain Bonneville's enthusiasm, had satisfied him that it would be useless to force a passage westward, through multiplying barriers of cliffs and precipices. Turning his face eastward, therefore, he endeavored to regain the plains, intending to make the circuit round the southern point of the mountain. To descend and to extricate himself from the heart of this rock-piled wilderness, was almost as difficult as to penetrate it. Taking his course down the ravine of a tumbling stream, the commencement of some future river, he descended from rock to rock, and shelf to shelf, between stupendous cliffs and beetling crags that sprang up to the sky. Often he had to cross and recross the rushing torrent, as it wound foaming and roaring down its broken channel, or was walled by perpendicular precipices; and imminent was the hazard of breaking the legs of the horses in the clefts and fissures of slippery rocks. The whole scenery of this deep ravine was of Alpine wildness and sub-