WHILE engaged in writing an account of the grand enter-
prise of Astoria, it was my practice to seek all kinds of oral
information connected with the subject. Nowhere did I pick
up more interesting particulars than at the table of Mr. John
Jacob Astor, who, being the patriarch of the fur trade in the
United States, was accustomed to have at his board various
persons of adventurous turn, some of whom had been engaged
in his own great undertaking; others, on their own account,
had made expeditions to the Rocky Mountains and the waters
of the Columbia.

Among these personages, one who peculiarly took my fancy
was Captain Bonneville, of the United States army; who, in a
rambling kind of enterprise, had strangely ingrafted the trap-
per and hunter upon the soldier. As his expeditions and ad-
ventures will form the leading theme of the following pages, a
few biographical particulars concerning him may not be unac-
ceptable.

Captain Bonneville is of French parentage. His father was
a worthy old emigrant, who came to this country many years
since, and took up his abode in New York. He is represented
as a man not much calculated for the sordid struggle of a
money-making world, but possessed of a happy temperament,
a festivity of imagination, and a simplicity of heart that made
him proof against its rubs and trials. He was an excellent
scholar; well acquainted with Latin and Greek, and fond of
the modern classics. His book was his elysium; once im-
mersed in the pages of Voltaire, Corneille, or Racine, or of his
favorite English author, Shakspeare, he forgot the world and
all its concerns. Often would he be seen, in summer weather,
seated under one of the trees on the Battery, or the portico of
St. Paul's Church in Broadway, his bald head uncovered, his
hat lying by his side, his eyes riveted to the page of his book,

-3-