At the Fur-Trappers Museum

Painting on display in the Fur Trappers Museum, outside of Chadron, NE. Haunting beauty featuring a time all but forgotten, when the world, out here, was held and run by fur companies and their men, who may well have gotten along with the native populations better than any of the settlers who followed them west.

What all the fuss was about. Hard to believe that a furry fad in Europe--beaver hats--prompted new world corporations to travel thousands of miles in rugged, unmapped North American territory in search of these fat, furry creatures.

Tomorrow night--snow, they say. I'm sneezing badly this morning because the dust in the air that rises from hundreds of bean fields being harvested by machines with giant hungers. Got to get 'em in before a drenching, before the seasons change because it won't be long, as everyone knows, and the cold will be upon us. How on earth did natives and those fur-trappers, miles from shelter, ever make it in all that bone-chilling cold. Rabbit mittens, for starters. . .

. . .for starters, because the world of the wilderness wasn't always this beneficent. Look at the smoke from the fire, not even a breeze. I can't imagine that there weren't moments of sheer awe, however, and that's what's celebrated in this painting in the Fur Traders Museum.

Medieval torture machines. Actually, traps. Big ones, to be sure, but the tools of the trade. No, the whole enterprise isn't pretty. Yes, there's suffering. I almost hate to admit it, but the truth is some of the mornings on the river, back when I was a boy, some of those mornings rank with experiences as rich as anything in my childhood. Our traps were a tenth as large, but they looked just as painful--and were. But I loved it.

The truth is, of course, fur is beautiful--and that isn't its only attribute. It keeps the beaver warm and doesn't do a half-bad job on human beings.

When beaver hats went out of style, the fur-trading enterprise looked for new quarry--and found it quickly in the 50 million buffalo that made most of the region went of the Mississippi their home. They were everywhere. Just about ever small-town museum anywhere close to the Missouri River has a buffalo coat. They became so popular that when we killed them all off--or most of them--fur companies created fake buffalo robes, like this one--phony baloney.

I know--doesn't have much to do with fur trapping, but I couldn't help snapping this picture because this war bonnet looked so beautiful. Maybe it's just me. Still, the fact of the matter is that this little-known era of American history may well have been the best times of Euro- and Native American relations. Jedediah Smith and his cohorts knew that needed the Lakota and the Arikara, the Omaha and Yankton Sioux, not only to gather furs themselves, but also to help them navigate what was once all wilderness. There is a history of fierce fights--remember Hugh Glass!--but there is also a fleeting pax Americana that ended only when our numbers got overwhelming and people like my own great-grandparents moved west to land they believed they could have without cost.

About that, they were wrong.