Anyone who has lived a well ordered life, taking advantage of educational and other opportunities, is inclined to be irritated by the fact that many of the trappers, fur traders, and frontiersmen did not take full advantage of their chances to save a modest fortune and set themselves up in respectable circumstances. Roosevelt, in a passage quoted above, poured out his wrath upon the indolence, laziness, and cowardliness of the "excessively undesirable" elements on the frontier. Theoretically, their knowledge of the terrain should have given the trappers especially, an advantage in the selection of settlement sites. This, logically enough, would lead one to believe that sheer priority, plus a knowledge of the soils, plus physical stamina, should have enabled these men to make their success "stick," especially since they had in many instances earned thousands of dollars in the fur trade.

But here enter some of the intangibles of social class. Could these men lay the foundations of respectability? That they could not rise to the opportunities of abundant cheap land is shown in the following: ³⁸

The trappers and traders were dying out quite as rapidly as the beaver. Exposure, drink, and the hostility of the Indians were destroying them one by one. Their wages were spent in the carouses that disgraced the rendezvous and the trading posts. Few had accumulated enough property to return to the civilized world . . . . ". . . so that of all the adventurers engaged, for half a century past, in the fur trade of that licentious quarter, few, very few indeed, ever left it with even a bare competency."

Gunnison, in 1857, wrote that "these trappers have made a thousand fortunes for eastern man, and by their improvidence have nothing for themselves." ³⁹