After This Summing Up Of Our Forces, It May Not Be Amiss To Glance At
The Characters Of The Two Men Who Accompanied Us.
Delorier was a Canadian, with all the characteristics of the true
Jean Baptiste.
Neither fatigue, exposure, nor hard labor could ever
impair his cheerfulness and gayety, or his obsequious politeness to
his bourgeois; and when night came he would sit down by the fire,
smoke his pipe, and tell stories with the utmost contentment. In
fact, the prairie was his congenial element. Henry Chatillon was of
a different stamp. When we were at St. Louis, several gentlemen of
the Fur Company had kindly offered to procure for us a hunter and
guide suited for our purposes, and on coming one afternoon to the
office, we found there a tall and exceedingly well-dressed man with a
face so open and frank that it attracted our notice at once. We were
surprised at being told that it was he who wished to guide us to the
mountains. He was born in a little French town near St. Louis, and
from the age of fifteen years had been constantly in the neighborhood
of the Rocky Mountains, employed for the most part by the Company to
supply their forts with buffalo meat. As a hunter he had but one
rival in the whole region, a man named Cimoneau, with whom, to the
honor of both of them, he was on terms of the closest friendship. He
had arrived at St. Louis the day before, from the mountains, where he
had remained for four years; and he now only asked to go and spend a
day with his mother before setting out on another expedition.
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