“They were social outcasts – some of them army deserters, some of them men with a legal charge over their heads, some of them bound boys or slaves who had run away – but men were pretty much the same out here.  A black man who could shoot center and eat boudins with you and warn you about a Blackfoot creeping up wasn’t a man you looked out on.  Out here a man wasn’t judged by whether he could read or write, or what his color was, or what kind of family he came from, or how much money he had back there, but by his skill. Social rank here, in rising order was pork-eater, camp-tender, company trapper, clerk, booshway, and top rank – free trapper. The measure of a man was his extent of his skill-his mountain craft.”

– Win Blevins, Give Your Heart to the Hawks