Some little time was spent at Fort Leavenworth, where Ruxton found the change from the free life of prairie and mountain very unpleasant. He suffered still more when he reached St. Louis, and was obliged to assume the confining garb of civilization, and above all, to put his feet into shoes.

Ruxton’s journey from St. Louis to New York was uneventful, and in July he left for England, which he reached in the middle of August, 1847.

It was after this that he wrote a series of sketches, entitled “Life in the Far West,” which were afterward published in Blackwood’s Magazine, and finally in book form in England and America. These sketches purport to give the adventures of a trapper, La Bonté, during fifteen years’ wandering in the mountains, and set forth trapper and mountain life of the day. They show throughout the greatest familiarity with the old-time life. The author’s effort to imitate the dialect spoken by the trappers makes the conversation not always easy to read; but they are most interesting as faithful pictures of life in the mountains between 1830 and 1840—at the end of the days of the beaver.