"Trapper" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cold winter moved slowly along, and they remained on the island, though Henry and Ross ranged far and wide. On one of these expeditions the two scouts met a wandering trapper, by whom they sent word again to their people in the south ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... end of the portage I waited for Simmo to come round the bend, and took him back to see the work, denouncing the heartless carelessness of the trapper who had gone away in the spring and left an unsprung deadfall as a menace to the wild things. At the first glance he pronounced it an otter trap. Then the fear and wonder swept into his face, and ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... long and hard at this old trapper's yarn, and weak as I was myself, I was disposed to join him. Orme was the only one who did not ridicule the story. Auberry himself was disgusted at the merriment. "I knowed you wouldn't believe it," he said. "There is no use tellin' a passel ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... the bad rapids. As to this method, unused as yet by either of us, we had received careful verbal instruction from Mr. Stone, who had made the trip two years before our own venture; and from other friends of Nathan Galloway, the trapper, the man who first introduced the method on ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... passed an uneasy day, the "jug" for once receiving scant attention. Late in the afternoon "Trapper John," an old half-breed who hunted and trapped about the woods, stopped at the camp ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... exposure, and to insure wakefulness, the uses of coffee and tea have long been practically recognized by all classes. The sailor, the trapper, and the explorer value them even above alcohol; and in high latitudes we are assured of their importance in bracing the system to resist the rigors ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... said Landless. "We did not think to see the face of a white man—pioneer, ranger, trapper or trader—for many a league yet. He has built his house in the jaws of ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... of as Spanish River, from the report that Spaniards occupied its lower valleys. Colorado was also one of its names, and this is what it should have remained. The commonest appellation was Green, supposed to have been derived from a trapper of that name. Just when the term "Colorado" was first applied to the lower river is not now known. It bore several names, but finally Colorado took first place because of its appropriateness. Both the walls and the water are usually red, though the name is undoubtedly derived ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... the dances. They were all that one could have desired, and there was no limit to either of them. But still, after a time, even this grew tiresome to one of Ninon's spirit, and she took the first opportunity to sail up the Missouri with a certain young trapper connected with the great fur company, and so found herself at Cainsville, with the blue bluffs rising to the east of her, and the low white stretches of the river flats undulating down to where the sluggish stream wound its way ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... wondered just what Kid Wolf's business was. He did not appear to be a cow-puncher, or a trapper or an army scout. A reata was coiled at his saddle, and two big Colts swung from a beaded Indian belt. No matter how curious the stranger might be, he would have thought twice before ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... Fremont, who was then quite famous by reason of his recent explorations and the still more recent conflicts with Kearney and Mason, I rode out to his camp, and found him in a conical tent with one Captain Owens, who was a mountaineer, trapper, etc., but originally from Zanesville, Ohio. I spent an hour or so with Fremont in his tent, took some tea with him, and left, without being much impressed with him. In due time Colonel Swords returned from ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... trapper flamed into purple and his lips opened for an oath. Quick as the heat lightning that flutters on the waters of Winipigoos in the hot summers the cruel club came down. McElroy heard its dull impact, and the husky crumpled ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... The Indian trapper is a man of close observation, quick perception and prompt action. As he goes along, nothing escapes him. Often not another step is taken until some mystery that presents itself is fairly solved. He will ...
— Reading Made Easy for Foreigners - Third Reader • John L. Huelshof
... and a Tree Trapper," said the Doctor, while the children laughed merrily at Dodo's ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... invited in and learned that the man was a hunter and trapper. He was exceedingly hospitable and insisted on his guest partaking of a breakfast of beaver tail which is considered a great delicacy, but which the voyager found rather too fat to agree with his palate. Noticing that his guest was not particularly fond of the beaver tail, the trapper wanted ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... in His image, yet I saw You stoop and seize a blind mole from the snare. Blind. Blind with terror ... Blind Your teeth gleamed bare behind the taut, white lips. The trapper's law knows neither hate nor love. You watched it paw, Frantic with lust of life, the yielding air And were amused. God's Image! Did you care, pitying one moment, see the swift hands claw For life and darkness, know and hate your trap? I saw your knuckles gleam, your hand swing free; A cry; The ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... this western continent. Here is no lack of diversity, here are studies in unity, both simple and complex, and here, too, even civilized man need not necessarily be unpicturesque; witness Launt Thompson's 'Trapper,' Rogers's bits of petrified history, or Eastman Johnson's vivid delineations of scenes familiar to us all. We have no reason to follow in any beaten, hackneyed track, but, within the needful restrictions of good sense, good taste, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Well, never mind us. Tell me more about your work," she besought, setting the feminine pitfall—half unconsciously—into which trapper and prey so often walk hand ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... drifted to the coast a couple of years before on a fishing schooner from Newfoundland, whence he had come from Nova Scotia. From the coast he had made his way the hundred and fifty miles to the head of Eskimo Bay, and there took up the life of a trapper. Rumour had it that he had committed murder at home and had run away to escape the penalty; but this rumour was unverified, and there was no means of learning the truth of it. Since his arrival here the hunters ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... trappin', they went around plunderin' an' stealin' from every one they come across. They had stole three or four horses from us, an' had often come to our cabin an' called for whisky; but that was an article father never kept on hand. Although he was an ole trapper, an' had lived in the woods all his life, he never used it, an' didn't believe in sellin' it to the red-skins. The captain of the outlaws was a feller they called "Mountain Tom," an' he was meaner than the meanest Injun I ever see. He didn't think no more of cuttin' a ...
— Frank, the Young Naturalist • Harry Castlemon
... that, I'll bet a shilling," he said to himself, remembering the lonely old trapper who had dwelt on that mountain in his father's time. He had once seen old man Jinks's powder-horn, with its elaborate carving, done in the long solitary hours when the old man sat weather-bound in his ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... specimen of the North American trapper. Slightly but powerfully made, with a hardy, weather-beaten, yet handsome face; strong, indefatigable, and a crack shot—he was admirably adapted for a hunter's life. For many years he knew not what it was to have a home, but lived like the beasts he hunted—wandering ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... by feeling and ravished by the desire for "the peace of the Holy Grail." The village was, in truth, but a day's march away from him, but he was not alone, and the journey could not be hastened. Beside him, his eyes also upon the sunset and the village, was a man in a costume half-trapper, half-Indian, with bushy gray beard and massive frame, and a distant, sorrowful look, like that of one whose soul was tuned to past suffering. As he sat, his head sunk on his breast, his elbow resting on a stump of pine—the token of a progressive ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... his name is Jack Hoag; he's a little bit of a trapper and a big bit of a bum; stuck me last year. He doesn't come out this way; they say he goes out by the west side of ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... task has dropped his grammar, that he may roam with Oliver or Nell. The traveller has forgotten the fumes of the crowded steamboat, and is far off with our guest, among the green valleys and hoary hills of old England. The trapper, beyond the Rocky Mountains, has left his lonely tent, and is unroofing the houses in London with the more than Mephistopheles at my elbow. And, perhaps, in some well-lighted hall, the unbidden tear steals from the father's eye, as the exquisite sketch of the poor schoolmaster and his little ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... The differences in belief were puzzling to the Indians, who naturally supposed that different sets of white men had different gods. True, the Calvinist traders troubled little with religion. To them the red man was a mere trapper, a gatherer of furs; and whether he shaped his course for the happy hunting ground of his fathers or to the paradise of the Christian mattered nothing. But they were wont to plague the Jesuits and Recollets ...
— The Jesuit Missions: - A Chronicle of the Cross in the Wilderness • Thomas Guthrie Marquis
... made for their hole in the ice, rebroke a six-inch layer, the freeze of a few hours, and filling his bucket, returned to the cabin. Jones had no inkling of the trapper's intention, and wonderingly he soused his bucket full ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... Appalachians. The Indians of the Southwest fought stubbornly, but the wars that meant life and death to them were the merest pastime for an army that had just completed the humiliation of a nation of the size and strength of Mexico. The Indians were swept aside, and the country was opened to the trapper, the prospector, the trader ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... of iron, and tasked it to the utmost of its endurance. The pioneer of western pioneers was no rude son of toil, but a man of thought, trained amid arts and letters. [Footnote: A Rocky Mountain trapper, being complimented on the hardihood of himself and his companions, once said to the writer, "That's so; but a gentleman of the right sort will stand hardship better than anybody else." The history of Arctic and African travel, and the military records of all time, are a standing ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... chiefly valuable as a kind of literary tombstone on which may be read the names of many whose renown has been buried with their bones. The "London Athenaeum" spoke of it as having been described as a "tomahawk sort of satire." As the author had been a trapper in Missouri, he was familiarly acquainted with that weapon and the warfare of its owners. Born in Boston, in 1804, the son of an army officer, educated at West Point, he came back to his native city about the year 1830. He wrote an article on Bryant's Poems for the "North American Review," ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... had pursued the even tenor of the life in the forest on which he set out. They would have been surprised to be told that Old Phelps owned more of what makes the value of the Adirondacks than all of them put together, but it was true. This woodsman, this trapper, this hunter, this fisherman, this sitter on a log, and philosopher, was the real proprietor of the region over which he was ready to guide the stranger. It is true that he had not a monopoly of its geography or its topography (though ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... John Stark, a bold trapper learned in Indian ways and famous in Indian warfare, marched from New Hampshire at the head of several hundred men. Israel Putnam, more famous still for his deeds of daring in the Indian wars, came too. He was busy on his farm at Pomfret, Connecticut, ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... now hardly a six month since he saved a trapper from a bobcat and killed the animal with a knife. It must have been my prayers which saved him from the teeth ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
... his mother sent for her husband; and for the sake of the family name, Mr. Faringfield adjusted matters by the payment of twice or thrice what the horse was worth. Thus the would-be hunter and trapper escaped the discomfort and shame of jail; though by his father's sentence he underwent a fortnight's detention on bread and water in ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... of him!" said Jack. "I got an old hunter and trapper to go with me the next day; we struck his trail on the prairie, and after a deal of trouble tracked him to a settler's cabin. There the rogue had stopped, and asked for supper and lodgings, which he promised to pay for in the morning. The man and his wife had ...
— The Young Surveyor; - or Jack on the Prairies • J. T. Trowbridge
... Johns, in the 30's, wandered, as a trapper, to the Pacific coast, thence north to the mouth of the Willamette River on the Columbia (Oregon), and there lived a bachelor and alone until his death, about 1890. He was neither a fighting man nor a hunter. He travelled, often alone, wholly unarmed, among wild, savage Indians, his peaceable disposition ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... traders. It was bounded on the north and northeast by the chain of the Great Lakes, on the south by the Ohio, and on the west by the Mississippi. The heads of the rivers and streams that flowed into these great watercourses and lakes were connected by short portages, so that the Indian trapper or hunter could carry his canoe for a few miles and pass from the waters that led to Lake Michigan or Lake Erie, into the streams that fed the Mississippi or the Ohio. The headwaters of the Muskingum and its ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... globe-trotting days is attended with little anxiety, much less heart-break, but in those days when Canada was cut off at the Lakes, the land beyond was a wilderness, untravelled for the most part but by the Indian or trapper, and considered a fit dwelling place only for the Hudson Bay officer kept there by his loyalty to "the Company," or the half-breed runner to whom it was native land, or the more adventurous land-hungry settler, or the reckless gold-fevered miner. Only under ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor
... a trapper; and led him into the right path, pointing out a village inn where he could get rest and refreshment. Piotrowski managed to crawl to the place, and then fainted away. When he recovered himself, he asked for radish-soup, but could not swallow it; and toward noon he fell ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... a few days before accidentally stumbled upon it. Indeed, in all the world there is hardly another sheet of water so likely to escape the eye, not only of the tourist and the sportsman, but also of the hunter and the trapper. Day by day as I paddled over the lake or explored its shores the conviction grew upon me that the place had never before been visited by any human being. The more I examined and explored, the more this belief grew upon me. The thought was ever with me. But on this afternoon as ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... disaster, 'like some wild creature caught within a trap, who sees the trapper coming through ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... Cree squaw who married a French trapper. The son of this union became in due time the father of Auguste Dumont. Auguste married a woman whose mother was a French half-breed and whose father was a pure-bred Highland Scotchman. The result of this atrocious mixture ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... we passed wooded shores that sloped up to mountains of prodigious height. Indeed the description of the Rocky Mountains, of which I take these to be a part, have not been overdrawn. From time to time, at the edge of the primeval forest, I could make out the rude shelters of hunter and trapper who braved these perils for the sake of a scanty livelihood for their hardy wives and ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... their pond, and although we waited sometime in the vicinity, we failed to discover him again. The inhabitants say it is nearly impossible to kill a beaver with a rifle, and never, on any occasion does the trapper shoot one. ...
— Illustrated Science for Boys and Girls • Anonymous
... year drew on, the Chis-chis-chash moved to the west—to the great fall buffalo-hunt—to the mountains where they could gather fresh tepee-poles, and with the hope of trade with the wandering trapper bands. To be sure, the Bat had no skins of ponies to barter with them, but good fortune is believed to stand in the path of every young man, somewhere, some time, as he wanders on to meet it. Delayed ambition did not sour the days for the Indian. He knew that the ponies and the women ...
— The Way of an Indian • Frederic Remington
... callers at the ranch house, too. Sometimes a cowboy from a neighboring ranch came to look after a lost pony, or to see if his cattle had strayed off the range through a broken fence. Sometimes a hunter or trapper would stop for a chat on his way to or from Bolo. Once Susie Billings in her khaki suit and cowboy hat came to spend the day; and once, on Sunday, Mr. Jones came to hold service again. Much to the girls' disappointment, Quentina ...
— The Sunbridge Girls at Six Star Ranch • Eleanor H. (Eleanor Hodgman) Porter
... while in the employ of John Simpson (a trapper, who had come there in quest of furs,) they determined on removing farther west. Simpson was induced to this, by the prospect of enjoying the woods free from the intrusion of other hunters (the glades having begun to be ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... you to try and set Reuben at liberty; though I am glad to see you, Roger," said the speaker, whom I now recognised as the old trapper, Samson Micklan. ...
— Afar in the Forest • W.H.G. Kingston
... The muskrat trapper did not prove to be in a very pleasant frame of mind, but, after Mark had given him a quarter, Bascomb consented to answer a few questions. The boys told him about looking for a strange man, describing him as best they could, though they ...
— Lost on the Moon - or In Quest Of The Field of Diamonds • Roy Rockwood
... summer had stamped so many traces, that December had so far been powerless to efface their beauty. Close by to the south lay the country of the great Blackfeet nation—that wild, restless tribe whose name has been a terror to other tribes and to trader and trapper for many and many a year. Who and what are these wild dusky men who have held their own against all comers, sweeping like a whirlwind over the sand deserts of the central continent? They speak a tongue distinct from all other Indian tribes; they have ceremonies and feasts wholly different, ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... one of the two groups much has been lost in the great height of the arches. Figures like "The Alaskan," "The Trapper," and "The Indian," for instance, are particularly fine and they would be very effective by themselves. "The Mother of Tomorrow" in the Nations of the West is a ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... a rare fine canoe," observed one, a tall, big-boned, loose-jointed fellow with a straggly red beard, and picturesquely attired in moleskin trousers tucked into the tops of sealskin boots, a flannel shirt, a short jacket, and the peakless cap of the trapper. ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace
... only a single species, N. vestigator (Hersch.); and even this rival of the grave-diggers of the north is pretty scarce. The discovery of three or four in the course of the spring was as much as my searches yielded in the old days. This time, if I do not resort to the ruses of the trapper, I shall obtain them in no greater numbers; whereas I stand in need ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... Republic stretching towards the setting sun, bound and unified by paths of inland commerce. It was Washington who traversed the long ranges of the Alleghanies, slept in the snows of Deer Park with no covering but his greatcoat, inquired eagerly of trapper and trader and herder concerning the courses of the Cheat, the Monongahela, and the Little Kanawha, and who drew from these personal explorations a clear and accurate picture of the future trade routes by which the country could be ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... hand of welcome to the intrepid old trapper, who grasped it warmly, saying: "The frien's of Mam'selle Grace are also the frien's of ...
— Grace Harlowe's Golden Summer • Jessie Graham Flower
... the lake and fort of Winnepeg. Beyond that lake we knew there would be nothing but prairie, stretching far and wide, over which we must steer as though we were at sea, or else be guided by the mysterious instinct of some trapper. We met many Redskins in the woods, all busy hunting. Game was very abundant—waterfowl on the streams, flights of prairie hens (a sort of grouse), and herds of buck, which constantly crossed our line of march Here and there was ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... was the most stupid animal of the prairies. In small flocks, he eluded the hunter well enough; but in herds of thousands, he cared not a whit for the shooting at the flanks of his army. Any Indian or trapper, stationed behind some shrubs or earth hill, could kill dozens of buffalo without disturbing the herd by the swish of the arrow, the report of the rifle, or the dying groans of the wounded animals. A general stampede ensued at times, which often led the herd into morasses, or ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... of the trees, belonged to tribes whose hunting-grounds were many leagues away. They were not Shawanoe, Huron, Pottawatomie, Osage, Miami, Delaware, Illinois, Kickapoo, or Winnebago. Sometimes a veteran trapper recognized the dress and general appearance that he had noted among the red men to the northward, and far beyond the Assiniboine; others who had ventured hundreds of miles to the westward, remembered exchanging shots with similar dusky warriors on the slopes of ...
— Camp-fire and Wigwam • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... and most of them can tell of many very thrilling adventures personally undergone with wild beasts; but probably none of them ever went through an experience equalling that which Arthur Spencer, the famous trapper, suffered in ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... came. The house was packed. Up went the curtain. Buntline appeared as Cale Durg, an old Trapper, and at a certain time Jack and I were to come on. But we were a little late, and when I made my appearance, facing 3,000 people, among them General Sheridan and a number of army officers, it broke me all up and I could ...
— Beadle's Boy's Library of Sport, Story and Adventure, Vol. I, No. 1. - Adventures of Buffalo Bill from Boyhood to Manhood • Prentiss Ingraham
... Russian half-breed, and Job Chapies, a pure blood Cree Indian. These three men were expert hunters and canoemen, having been born and brought up in the James Bay country, and they came to me from Missanabie, some 700 miles west of Montreal. The fourth was Gilbert Blake, a half-breed Eskimo boy trapper, one of the two young lads of the rescue party George Elson had sent back two years before, when his heroic, but unsuccessful, efforts to save Mr. Hubbard's life had brought him to Donald Blake's ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... hang him twice for a spy. At the battle of Wilson's Creek he ran half a mile with his captain wounded on his back. He's got a bullet in his leg right now, just above the knee. It's been there all these years. He let me feel it once. He was a buffalo hunter and a trapper before the war. He was sheriff of his county when he was twenty years old. An' after the war, when he was marshal of Silver City, he cleaned out the bad men an' gun-fighters. He's been in almost every state in the Union. He could ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... the guerilla warfare which is characteristic of Indians—a country in which even an Indian of another tribe would be lost! White frontiersmen were imported to guide the army, but according to the testimony of Beckworth, the Rocky Mountain hunter and trapper, all gave up in disgust. The Government was forced to resort to pacific measures in order to get the Seminoles in its power, and eventually most of them were removed to the Indian Territory. There was one small band which persistently ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... bitter pill to swallow; but it had to be swallowed under pain of penalty for even a grimace. Some of the patients could not let the purgative down; they deliberately let nature take its course—the sequel to which was the mobilisation of the Trapper Reserves for active service. And still the slimness of the native contrived to dodge the wiles of civilisation. With the assistance of some Coolie shop-keepers (who acted as middlemen) he yet managed to drink a fair share. But the middlemen, too, were hauled ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... spy, that was it! Someone or something must have him under observation, or his activities of the day before would not have been so summarily countered. And if there was a spy, then there was his answer to the riddle. To trap the trapper. Such action might be a project beyond his resources, but ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... lantern made no sign, Swept the train, and upon the bridge That binds a canon from ridge to ridge. Never a watchman like old Carew; Knew his duty, and did it, too; Good at scouting when scouting paid, Saved a post from an Indian raid— Trapper, miner, and mountain guide, Less one arm in a lumber slide; Walked the line like a panther's guard, Like a maverick penned in a branding-yard. "Right as rain," said the engineers, "With the old man ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... pioneers was Peregrine Sessions. He, with some others, moved north from the pioneer camp and settled in what is now Davis county. Further north, at the junction of the Weber and Ogden rivers, there lived, before the pioneers came, a trapper and trader by the name of Goodyear. He claimed a large area of land, nearly all of what is now Weber county, saying that the Mexican government had granted it to him. This claim he sold in 1847 to Captain James Brown of ...
— A Young Folks' History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints • Nephi Anderson
... Mississippi River, in the days when emigrants made their perilous way across the great plains to the land of gold. There is an attack upon the wagon train by a large party of Indians. Our hero is a lad of uncommon nerve and pluck. Befriended by a stalwart trapper, a real rough diamond, our hero achieves the ...
— Robert Coverdale's Struggle - Or, On The Wave Of Success • Horatio, Jr. Alger
... and Per-ee took charge of the snarling Malemutes, and, surrounded by Williams' men, the trapper stalked to the company's office. He was Jean de Gravois, the most important man in the Fond du Lac country, for whose good-will the company paid a small bonus. That he had made a record catch even the children knew by the size of the packs on ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... party determine to start for Bear River Sickness at the mines What happened to a drunken Indian An old trapper and his stories Captain Sutter's first settlement Indians partial to horse-flesh A score of horses stolen An expedition to revenge the theft A rancheria demolished A chorus of yells Indians routed and then brought to labour ...
— California • J. Tyrwhitt Brooks
... yourself as a darned sight better than me. I never had no schooling. It's a hell of a job for me to write a letter. But since I was so high"—his hand measured a distance of about three feet from the floor—"I've earned my living. I guess I've been all over this country. I've been a trapper, I've worked on the railroad and for two years I've been a freighter. I guess I've done pretty nearly everything but clerk in a store. Now you just get busy and forget all the nonsense you've got in your head. You're nothing but an ignorant woman and I'm ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... tried to walk he had to lean on the shoulder of his brother, and the pain from his bruises compelled him at times to stop and rest. The burly trapper offered to help, but Victor thanked him and got on quite well with the assistance of George. The man walked a few paces behind the two, that he might not hurry them too much, and because it belonged to the boys to ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... French speaker had finished, there was a short silence. Then an old trapper came forward, and, picking up the war belt, declared that he was ready to take sides with the Indians against the English. Several of his rough comrades ...
— Four American Indians - King Philip, Pontiac, Tecumseh, Osceola • Edson L. Whitney
... hunter and trapper by nature, the son and grandson of men who for their own safety had to be trained in the subtle methods of the Indian, who himself had had no small experience in this respect, and easily followed a trail which was no trail to ordinary eyes, found little difficulty in watching ...
— The Light That Lures • Percy Brebner
... to strike from the meanest Indian trapper, the basest trader or camp-follower, as the senator from New York styled these people, their equal privileges, this sovereignty of right, which is the birthright of every American citizen. This sovereignty may—nay, it must—remain in abeyance until society ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... divers bivouacs of snow, plains, pines, or hills to the bark shelter; past the dog-tent, the A-tent, the wall-tent, to the elaborate permanent canvas cottage of the luxurious camper, the dug-out winter retreat of the range cowboy, the trapper's cabin, the great log-built lumber-jack communities, and the last refinements of sybaritic summer homes in the Adirondacks. All these are camps. And when you talk of making camp you must know whether that process is to mean only a search for rattlesnakes ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... now," says Bill, rolling up his trousers and examining some bruises on his shins. "We're playing Indian. We're making Buffalo Bill's show look like magic-lantern views of Palestine in the town hall. I'm Old Hank, the Trapper, Red Chief's captive, and I'm to be scalped at daybreak. By Geronimo! ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... rabbit trapper's camp amongst those trees; he had made a fire to boil his billy with gum-leaves and twigs, and it was the scent of that fire which interested the exile's nose, and brought a wave ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... of his debts in his wallet, gathered his wife and his younger sons about him, and, shouldering his hunter's rifle, once more turned towards the wilds. The country of the Great Kanawha in West Virginia was still a wilderness, and a hunter and trapper might, in some years, earn enough to pay his debts. For others, now, the paths he had hewn and made safe; for Boone once more ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner
... and it is reported (we do not know with how much truth) that at one time there was an improper intimacy between him and the lady who despatched him. If so, we pity Sal.—Coyote "Trapper." ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... prostrate! "Approaching" is sometimes a better method than "running." The hunter thus saves his horse—often a jaded one—and is likely to kill a greater number of buffaloes, and get so many more hides, if that be his object, as it sometimes is. When he is a traveller only, or a beaver-trapper, who wants to get a buffalo for his dinner, and cares for no more than one, then "running" is the more certain mode of obtaining it. In this way, however, he can kill only one, or at most two or three; for, while he is ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... animals, we all know. An eager trade destroys them, too. The moment they become either valuable to man, or disagreeable to man, they cease to live.' This sounds very like Dr. Johnson, without Dr. Johnson: for any farmer, trapper, or trader knows, that as the United States territory becomes settled, furred animals increase, because the refuse of civilization—the hen-roosts, the corn-fields, &c.—feed, directly and indirectly, the smaller animals, ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... to remain for the two months, he has found even greater difficulty in writing interestingly about his experiment. Apart from his account of a great moose-fight, the fascinating scenes in his book are those in which his former experiences as a trapper and hunter are described. But Mr. KNOWLES has not finished with his adventure; he is going to live stark-naked in the wilderness for another two months, but this time under inspection, so that the unbelievers can ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 18, 1914 • Various
... mind. A slight mound marked the site of the porker, but there was no footprint near it. Looking up the hill, he saw where Reynard had walked leisurely down toward his wonted bacon till within a few yards of it, when he had wheeled, and with prodigious strides disappeared in the woods. The young trapper saw at a glance what a comment this was upon his skill in the art, and, indignantly exhuming the iron, he walked home with it, the stream of silver quarters suddenly setting ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... called Captain Adoniram Tugg, a Connecticut Yankee, and skipper of a two-stick schooner called the Sea Spell. He followed an odd business. He was a wild animal trapper, and gathered Natural History specimens of many kinds for museums and menageries. He had just disposed of his last season's catch, had shipped the last specimen northward by steamship, and was about to sail for the Straits of Magellan again, near ...
— Swept Out to Sea - Clint Webb Among the Whalers • W. Bertram Foster
... grass. I would have every man so much like a wild antelope, so much a part and parcel of Nature, that his very person should thus sweetly advertise our senses of his presence, and remind us of those parts of Nature which he most haunts. I feel no disposition to be satirical, when the trapper's coat emits the odor of musquash even; it is a sweeter scent to me than that which commonly exhales from the merchant's or the scholar's garments. When I go into their wardrobes and handle their vestments, I am reminded of no grassy plains and flowery meads which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... new outburst from the giant. It nettled Houston; further, it caused him pain to be jerking constantly about the bed in an effort to evade the tickling touch of the trapper's big fingers. Once more Ba'tiste leaned forward and wiggled his fingers as if in preparation for a new assault, and once more Barry withdrew his pedal extremities to a ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... temporary or unnecessary: and any unpleasant odour, such as that of fruit sprays in spring, or fertilizer newly spread on the land, can be borne and even welcomed if it is appropriate to the time and place. Some smells, evil at first, become through usage not unpleasant. I once stopped with a wolf-trapper in the north country, who set his bottle of bait outside when I came in. He said it was "good and strong" and sniffed it with appreciation. I agreed with him that it was strong. To him it was not unpleasant, though made of the rancid fat of the muscallonge. All ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson
... that distant trail leading into the forest. Thence Hugh, under shelter of night, would carry them—lonely, terrible journeys that taxed even his strength. When Pete grew big enough to load, he was sent to the trading-station, and Hugh became an expert trapper. The savings were not entirely spent, but they were no longer touched; the pelts ...
— Snow-Blind • Katharine Newlin Burt
... field to an author in search of a strange or picturesque tale. Readers of the short story demand life and variety, and here are all races and tribes and conditions of men, living in all kinds of "atmosphere" from the trapper's hut to the steel skyscraper and from the crowded city slums to the vast open places where one's companionship is with the hills or the stars. Hence a double tendency in our recent stories, to make them expressive of New World life and to make each story a reflection ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... was, he is a man of the nineteenth century, as was Irving, in the way he instinctively chose near-at-hand native material: he knew the Mohawk Valley by long residence; he knew the Indian and the trapper there; and he depicted these types in a setting that was to him the most familiar thing in the world. In fact, we have in him an illustration of the modern writer who knows he must found his message firmly upon reality. For both Leather-stocking and Chingachgook are ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... long and proudly upon those two magic words. One day as he sat studying the paper a desire came into his heart to know all of those wonderful words before and after his name. He could not read, never having gone to school. In fact he never wanted to do so. His one aim was to be a mighty hunter and trapper like his father. But now, a longing had entered his soul; a spark from the mysterious fire of life had found a lodging which needed only a little fanning to produce a bright and ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... Uncas, Hist, and the Huron warriors. Inferior to these, but still vigorously though somewhat roughly drawn, were the waifs and strays of civilization, whom duty, or the hope of gain, or the love of adventure, or the outlawry of crime had driven to the wilderness—the solitary trapper, the reckless young frontiersman, the officers and men of out-post garrisons. Whether Cooper's Indian was the real being, or an idealized and rather melodramatic version of the truth, has been a subject of ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... could induce any one to listen to it, and ever afterward called him "the boy that fit that ar' Greaser." Old Bob Kelly beamed benevolently upon him every time they met, and more than once told his companion that the "youngster would make an amazin' trapper;" and that, in Dick's estimation, was a compliment ...
— Frank Among The Rancheros • Harry Castlemon
... a horse at the end of his lazo—a magnificent animal, that snorted and started back at sight of the fire. Pepe, however, had already given him more than one lesson, and his obedience was nearly complete; so that, after a short conflict, the trapper succeeded in bringing him nearer and attaching him to the trunk ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... elevate the soul, and to give to it, as well as to the body, an increase of strength and energy. There reign, in countless multitudes, the wild horse and the bison; the wolf, the bear, and the snake; and, above all, the trapper, surpassing the very beasts of the desert in wildness—not the old trapper described by Cooper, who never saw a trapper in his life, but the real trapper, whose adventures and mode of existence would furnish the richest materials ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... pale faces and bright hair. They came at intervals, a few wagons crawling down the valley and then the long, bare road with the buffaloes crossing it to the river and the occasional red spark of a trapper's camp fire. In '43 came the first great emigration, when 1,000 people went to Oregon. The Indians, awed and uneasy, watched the white line of wagon tops. "Were there so many pale faces as this in the Great Father's country?" one ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... blood from the field of Lexington, went through the land. None felt the appeal more than the old soldiers of the French war. It roused John Stark, of New Hampshire—a trapper and hunter in his youth, a veteran in Indian warfare, a campaigner under Abercrombie and Amherst, now the military oracle of a rustic neighborhood. Within ten minutes after receiving the alarm, he was spurring towards the sea-coast, and on the way stirring ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... rabbits which he had found on the bluffs below. He spoke of the fine view and of the splendid sunset he had seen. Rob was examining the rabbits, each of which had been shot squarely through the eye. "Dead-shot John, the old trapper!" said he. ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... the easy-opinioned Shorty, exactly as if he had always maintained this view. "Chap started for Sunk Creek three weeks ago. Trapper he was; old like, with a red shirt. One of his horses come into the round-up Toosday. Man ain't been heard from." He ate in silence for a while, evidently brooding in his childlike mind. Then he said, querulously, "I'd sooner trust ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... never understood the Indian, and the example set the Western tribes of the plains by our white brethren has not been such as to inspire the red man with either confidence or respect for our laws or our religion. The fighting trapper, the border bandit, the horse-thief and rustler, in whose stomach legitimately acquired beef would cause colic—were the Indians' first acquaintances who wore a white skin, and he did not know that they were not of the best ...
— Indian Why Stories • Frank Bird Linderman
... trail was made by the big, basket-shaped shoes worn by Indians and trappers on the Barrens. In addition to this, the trail was well beaten. Whoever had traveled it recently had gone over it many times before, and Billy gave utterance to his joy in a low cry. He had struck a trap line. The trapper's cabin could not be far away, and the trapper himself had passed that way not many minutes since. He examined the two trails and found where the blunt, round point of a snow-shoe had covered an imprint left by Couche, ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... first chiefly on wild berries, nuts, roots, and herbs. As his implements improved and his skill increased, he became hunter, trapper, and fisher. A tribe of hunters, however, requires an extensive territory and a constant supply of game. When the wild animals are all killed or seriously reduced in number, privation and hardship result. It was a forward step, therefore, when man began to tame ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... the draw, about a mile from the cabin, lookin' for a piece of birch likely enough for an axe-handle. Comin' back I heard the darndest goings-on where we had a bear trap set. Some trapper had left the trap in an old cache an' Rocky'd fixed it up. But the goings-on. It was Rocky an' his brother Harry. First I'd hear one yell and laugh, an' then the other, like it was some game. An' what do you think the fool game was? I've saw some pretty nervy cusses down in Curry County, ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... photographs of the Rocky Mountains, and when he desired to forget his surroundings he had but to look on the seamless dome of Sierra Blanca or the San Francisco peaks, or at the image of the limpid waters of Trapper's Lake, and like the conjurer's magic crystal sphere, it cured him of all his mental maladies, set ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... greater in their deeds—for they were men so great that they did not build upon a line that was without tradition. The route they followed was made by the buffalo and the elk ten thousand years ago. The bear and the deer followed it generation after generation, and after them came the trapper, and then the pioneer. It was already a trail when the railroad engineer came with transit and chain seeking a path for the ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... ermine, and such tiny fry, that, clad in fur white like the snow, scurried hither and thither through the silent wastes hunting for food, yet finding in many cases swift death through the skill of the trapper. At length the lake was reached. In summer it was a sheet of muddy yellow water abounding in fish, and many acres in extent. Now it was a wide snowfield, except at one end, where for some unexplained reason it was open water still. ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... working with guns, poison, dogs, traps, or all of them together. And he has one general rule, which is an endless puzzle to the hunter: 'Whatever you decide to do, do it quickly and follow it right up.' So when a trapper and a Roachback meet, the Bear at once makes up his mind to run away as hard as he can, or to rush at the man and fight to ...
— The Biography of a Grizzly • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... he saw how near he came to losing her. She had completely recovered, was ruddy and pretty with new health, and was Pet's first bridesmaid. Overtop thought pleasantly of her, and combed back his intractable cowlick. Matthew Maltboy was happy because he had taken a serious fancy to Miss Trapper, the second bridesmaid, a charming but peculiar girl, and the particular juvenile friend of Mrs. Frump. Matthew had met this young lady two or three times, and had suffered sweetly from her black eyes. Marcus Wilkeson was happy in his contented bachelorhood, in the happiness of his niece ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... vegetables, dairy products, beer, and circus wagons (the city is the headquarters of the Ringling and the Gollmar circuses). The first permanent settlement here was made in 1839. Baraboo was named in honour of Jean Baribault, an early French trapper, and was chartered ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... he rode out into the open. Trapper's Lake lay before him, a beautiful sheet of water, mirroring the black slopes and the fringed spruces and the flat peaks. Over all its gray, twilight-softened surface showed little swirls and boils and splashes where the ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... this could be done and that they could keep in the shelter of the woods most of the distance, and this they accomplished, reconnoitring the roads most carefully before crossing them. Huey was an inveterate trapper; and as his pursuit was quite as profitable as raising "sass," old Jehu gave the boy his own way. Therefore he knew every path through the ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... since imperial Rome perished from the earth, ever unrolled a surface so vast and so variegated, so manifold in its fertilities and so various in its aspects of beauty and sublimity. From the Northern wastes, where the hunter and the trapper pursue by force or guile the fur-bearing animals, to the ever-perfumed latitudes of the lemon and the myrtle,—from the stormy Atlantic, where the skiff of the fisherman rocks fearlessly under the menace of beetling crags amid the foam of angry ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... a drifted mountain, opalescent pink from its foot to its cone-shaped head. The snow on the mesa was not deep, and Douglas realized that Judith had followed an old trapper's trail that worked ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... is his enemy? There are no whites in this part of the country, but here and there a trader, or a trapper, or a ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... get the most after the thaws begin to come. The rats seem to have a lot of burrows and shift around among thim. One time I'm ahead, and the nixt day they go to you: But it don't mane that you are any better TRAPPER than I am. I only got siven to-night. That's a sweet day's work for a whole man. Fifteen cints apace for sivin rats. I've a big notion to cut the rat business, and compete with ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter
... what,' said Jack, with the air of a trapper, 'I shall reserve my peas till I've fired away all the corks, and take a deliberate aim ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... some semblance of fairness. Most of my bear hunts proved to me that I ran more risks than the bears. To set traps, however, to hide big iron-springed, spike-toothed traps to catch and clutch wild animals alive, and hold them till they died or starved or gnawed off their feet, or until the trapper chose to come with his gun or club to end the miserable business—what indeed shall I call ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... flesh that I did not try as bait; but morning after morning, as I rode forth to learn the result, I found that all my efforts had been useless. The old king was too cunning for me. A single instance will show his wonderful sagacity. Acting on the hint of an old trapper, I melted some cheese together with the kidney fat of a freshly killed heifer, stewing it in a china dish, and cutting it with a bone knife to avoid the taint ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... better if I give you a short account of the way in which the furs of different animals are obtained, and then I can explain the terms, Voyageur, Coureur des bois, Trapper, and Freeman, as well as a few other things which you may ...
— History, Manners, and Customs of the North American Indians • George Mogridge
... bear is certainly the most ferocious of his tribe—even exceeding, in this unamiable quality, his white cousin of the icy north; and many a melancholy tale of trapper and Indian hunter attests his dangerous prowess. He is both carnivorous and frugivorous—will dig for roots and eat fruits when within his reach; but not being a tree-climber, he has to content himself ...
— Quadrupeds, What They Are and Where Found - A Book of Zoology for Boys • Mayne Reid
... wilderness in which they dwell—seem a natural growth of ancient fields of the West. Leatherstocking, a hunter in the Pioneers, a warrior in the Last of the Mohicans, and now, in his extreme old age, a trapper on the prairie, declined in strength, but undecayed in intellect, and looking to the near close of his life, and a grave under the long grass, as calmly as the laborer at sunset looks to his evening slumber, is no less in harmony with the silent desert ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... shotgun, which was his first great personal possession, became, in his skilled hands, a deadly thing. Wild turkey and ruffed grouse, and sometimes larger game, he contributed to the family larder, and he had it half in mind to seek the remoter west when he grew older, and become a mighty hunter and trapper, and a slaughterer of the Sioux. The Chippewas of his own locality were scarcely to be shot at. Those remaining had already begun the unpretending life most of them live to-day, were on good terms with everybody, tanned buckskin admirably, and he approved of them. With the Sioux it was quite ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... during my first visit to the Hudson's Bay Post on Lake Temagami, when the only white man living in all that beautiful region was old Malcolm MacLean, a "freeman" of the H. B. Co., who had married an Indian woman and become a trapper, I was invited to be the guest of the half-breed Hudson's Bay trader, Johnnie Turner, and was given a bedroom in his log house. The window of my room on the ground floor was always left wide open, and in fact was never once closed during my stay of a week or more. ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... they would set out in advance and wait at the crossing of the Kansas till we should come up. Accordingly R. and the muleteers went forward with the wagon and tent, while the captain and his brother, together with Sorel, and a trapper named Boisverd, who had joined them, followed with the band of horses. The commencement of the journey was ominous, for the captain was scarcely a mile from Westport, riding along in state at the head of his party, leading his intended buffalo horse by a rope, when ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... Their history has not yet been written. Pen paintings, drawn from the imagination, founded upon distant views of their exploits and adventures, have occasionally served, as do legends, to "adorn a tale." The volume now offered to the public, gives their history as related by one whose name as a trapper and hunter of the "Far West," stands second to none; by a man, who, for fifteen years, saw not the face of a white woman, or slept under a roof; who, during those long years, with his rifle alone, killed over two ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... truth that both boys became epicures. Their valley furnished so much, and they had a seasoning of hard work and open mountain air that was beyond compare. They even imitated Indian and trapper ways of cooking geese, ducks, quail, sage hens, and other wild fowl that the region afforded. They could cook these in the ashes as they did the trout, and they also had other methods. Albert would take a duck, cut it open and clean it, but leave the feathers on. Then he would put it ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... say—only he always gets the words out first," said John. "I am like the old trapper who came hurrying up to General Washington saying he could lick all the Redcoats on earth with one hand tied behind his back. But the war was all over then, though he did not know it, and so he didn't get a chance to try. He meant well, you see, but ...
— Far Past the Frontier • James A. Braden
... lots of pumpkins bigger 'n that at our house," she was saying, her face turned toward "Frenchy," an up-river trapper who studied geography and English spelling between his rounds of the sloughs. "Why, ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates |
