Pierre Bottineau and the map of Minnesota

It was said that the legendary frontiersman Pierre Bottineau traveled every foot of Minnesota and the Northwest. Accordingly, his life and legacy fall into their clearest perspective through the locations he crossed on his journey into history. Selected bibliography

Grand Forks, North Dakota

Pierre Bottineau was born in 1817 in a hunting camp on the buffalo trail near Grand Forks. Despite being technically within the United States, the Red River Valley was part of a British trading colony that encompassed present-day northern Minnesota, eastern North Dakota and southern Manitoba, Canada. Pierre's father, Charles Bottineau, was a French-Canadian Protestant who worked as a voyageur, a ranger in the employ of the fur companies. His mother, Margaret Ahdik Songab (Clear-Sky), was a half-Sioux Ojibwe of the Lake of the Woods band.

Pierre's birthright was that of total outsider, making his lifelong civic accomplishments are all the more striking. The Métis (MEH-tee, French for "mixed", referring to their inter-racial origins), who formed their own subculture in the Northwest, were often regarded with antipathy by both sides of their bloodline. Whites associated them with Indians, and Indians with whites. While both sides relied on the Métis to cohere trading interests, they also tended to keep them at the fringes of society.

The Métis ranged the sparsely-populated prairies and forests of the Northwest, subsiding through hunting, trapping and trade. They also ran the ox-cart caravans vital in transporting people and goods between the fur-rich borderlands to the north and the commercial towns below St. Anthony Falls that were connected to the eastern states via the Mississippi River.

The Métis were famously hearty and independent. Some Métis, including Pierre Bottineau, determinedly became Americans. Others resisted the domesticated values of settlement. A Métis movement for nationhood would eventually run afoul of federal forces, and the Métis holdouts, like the Indian nations, were displaced, hunted and coerced into assimilation by the American and Canadian governments in the latter half of the 19th Century.

Reared into an itinerant hunting and trapping life in the Red River Valley, Pierre and his brothers were trained to survive the harshest, most remote conditions. To be a voyageur was to be everything and nothing at the same time. The profession was akin to the teamster, except that the voyageur often had no team to carry his burden and no road to follow between the far-flung outposts of the fur companies. Voyageurs escorted emigrants into the interior of the fur country and carried game, crops, pelts, trade goods, supplies and news – everything that needed to be transported – sometimes by canoe, sometimes by ox cart or sled, sometimes on horseback and often on their own backs. They trapped and hunted and traded with Indian bands, reckoning their way through uninterrupted wilderness, in all seasons, at the bidding of company agents who wielded nearly absolute authority.

The voyageurs lived unsettled lives on the margins of civilization. Over two centuries between the establishment of the European fur trade in North America and the settlement of the Northwest Territory, a handful among them gained prominence either as hunters, trappers, traders or bandits. But most were wage laborers enjoying neither wealth nor influence. Voyageurs, and especially the proud but pedigree-less Métis among them, had freedom over their persons and mastery of the elements as their chief rewards in life.

And life in their situation tended to be harsh and abbreviated. Pierre Bottineau’s father died of the occupational hazard of exposure at age 48. He would have been considered an old man in that time and place. Pierre was taken in by Alard LeCompte, another storied voyageur of the Red River Valley. Pierre, 15 at the time, began to accompany LeCompte in delivering messages and escorting migrants to American trading centers along the Upper Mississippi, ranging as far as Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. back to map

Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

Pierre Bottineau's youth was spent in the Red River trading colony, also called the Selkirk Colony after the British lord who established it in Winnipeg on behalf of the Hudson Bay Company in 1812. The British military had wrested control of the fur-rich Upper Mississippi Valley from the United States that year. Though much of the territory was returned to the Americans in the 1815 Treaty of Ghent, British and Canadian traders retained practical control through their unchallenged presence.

Yet it was not war among nations that most affected the fortunes of the colony, but war between the Hudson Bay Company and its rival trading operation, the North West Companies. When Lord Selkirk established his trading colony deep in what they considered their turf, agents of the North West Companies began a campaign of harassment against the Hudson Bay Company employees that erupted in violence in 1816.

That year Pierre's father, Charles, along with several Métis from his wife's tribal band, was ordered by his employers at the North West Companies to take part in a bloody attack on a Hudson Bay Company village. He refused and was later arrested. The trading companies effectively controlled the Canadian government, and the conflict between them led predictably to judicial stalemate. Charles Bottineau, along with many other hunters, voyageurs and would-be militants on both sides, was released during a series of show trials. Such highly-expert employees were scarce, and no good end was seen in having them stuck in jail.

The Northwest frontier, with its abundant resources and harsh winters, was a proving ground for trading networks, governance and development. Settlements often failed because they could not provide food and security, nor cohere the interests of local Indians and the various European pioneers who populated them. The "Pemmican War" of 1816 so sapped the finances of the two trading giants in Canada that they were forced to merge in 1821, and the Selkirk colony never achieved the prosperity in agriculture that was planned to encourage greater development for Canada. Soon the Americans, aided by the success of Fort Snelling in Minnesota, began to assert their control of the Upper Mississippi and Red River Valleys. Voyageurs like the young Pierre Bottineau found increasing work in guiding emigrants from southern Canada into America. In 1837, Pierre and members of his family, along with many remaining Selkirkers, came in from the prairie to settle in the Fort Snelling military reservation. back to map

Fort Snelling, Minnesota

The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and subsequent expedition of Louis and Clark unleashed America's westward expansion. In 1805, the U.S. military sent Lieutenant Zebulon Montgomery Pike up the Mississippi River to bring to heel the British and Canadian traders that continued to operate in U.S. territory. While Pike had some success in negotiating treaties to acquire strategic land from the Dakota Sioux (most significantly the future site of Fort Snelling), his efforts to establish American control of the Upper Mississippi had less success. Overcome by the harsh Minnesota winter for which his expedition was unprepared, Pike and his men survived only by sheltering with British traders.

American ventures into the territory halted for a time when it fell into British hands during the 1812 War. It took the German immigrant Jacob Astor and his American Fur Company to revive the U.S. effort to re-enforce sovereignty. In a challenge to the British-owned Hudson Bay Company and the Canadian North West Companies, both of which continued to trap and trade south of the Canadian border, Astor sent American traders into Minnesota in 1819, backed by an Army detachment led by Col. Josiah Snelling.

When it was established in 1819, Fort Snelling (as it was later named) constituted the northernmost U.S. outpost on the Mississippi River, a foothold deep in the frontier. Col. Snelling built an impressive diamond-shaped stockade of stone and heavy timber. He cleared hundreds of acres of land for planting, built roads to link local points of interest, and set up a grist mill upstream of the fortress at St. Anthony Falls. Advantageously located on a high bluff with a commanding view of the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers, the fort quickly became a burgeoning center in the Indian trade and a way-stop for exploration. British trade operations quickly folded in the area.

Pierre Bottineau first visited Fort Snelling in 1834, aged 17 but already a veteran voyageur of the territory. There he saw conditions he had never encountered. First was the impressive planning of the American effort there and the prosperity it provided. Built of stone, the American fort was not the ragged outpost typical of garrisons guarding the territory's trade operations. The U.S. Army was determinedly making room for development – clearing land, planting crops, building roads, improving river landing sites and beginning a robust millworks upriver at St. Anthony falls.

The thoughtful planning, solid construction and ultimate success of Fort Snelling signaled the fortunes of the Twin Cities community that would grow up around it. Compared to the Red River Valley, where Bottineau was raised amid bitter conflicts between hegemonic trading companies, the development in and around Fort Snelling must have indicated clearly that the Americans, by building a strong federal presence to protect and regulate trade, offered better prospects for success.

Second was the pronounced difference in the American traders' regard for the Métis. Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company, looking to establish itself quickly in the Northwest wilderness, permitted non-whites to advance within the operation. Like the French before them, the British traders in Canada treated the Métis disdainfully, with few exceptions relegating them to the grunt-work while promoting Europeans to management positions. Bottineau moved his family, along with many other families from the troubled Selkirk trading colony in Winnipeg, to Fort Snelling in 1837.

Bottineau’s abilities quickly brought him in contact with Henry Sibley, then the ambitious head of the American Fur Company operation at Mendota, which was thriving under the protection of nearby Fort Snelling. Choosing the young Bottineau to guide missions of logistical and economic importance, Sibley opened doors that led to opportunities for Bottineau as a government and railroad contractor and, through Sibley’s social network, as a land speculator. With the aid of Bottineau, who spoke nearly every Indian language in the territory and knew his way around the wilderness like few others, Sibley was able to deliver treaties, commercial deals and development plans that propelled Minnesota to statehood and himself to the office of governor.

The U.S. Army removed the collection of whites and Métis who had squatted on the Fort Snelling reservation in 1839 after tensions with local Indians mounted. Most, including Bottineau and his family, drifted to a good portage just downriver. This rough encampment, known mainly as the local source of moonshine whiskey, would become the city of St. Paul. back to map

St. Paul, Minnesota

This view of St. Paul in 1851 includes Baptist Hill, site of Pierre Bottineau's former claim, now Lowertown. Minnesota Historical Society

Returning in 1840 from a season of buffalo hunting in the Red River valley, Pierre Bottineau found his fellow squatters evicted from the Fort Snelling reservation. He joined them downriver at St. Paul, holding down a quarter-section of land in the scrappy young town. His claim would eventually become the heart of Lowertown. He acquired more land, cleared it, and tried his hand at farming when not engaged in expeditions for the American Fur Company and the officers of Fort Snelling. Raising crops was not all he found well within his capabilities; he also started the prodigious enterprise of fathering 24 (some accounts say 28) children.

This husbandry must have changed the outlook of the voyageur, implanting in him both the need for a secure base and the desire to rise above the rough-and-tumble outpost mentality. At the time St. Paul was a wild town, a large mud field full of rowdy soldiers from the nearby fort and whatever spilled off the steamboats looking for a good time after weeks on the river. Bottineau also remained drawn by opportunity beyond the settled landscape. He had attracted educated and industrious friends in St. Paul, and along with them he started purchasing land above the St. Anthony Falls, site of Fort Snelling's grist mill.

Bottineau quit St. Paul after six years. Some accounts say that after consolidating his claims at St. Anthony and moving his family, he sold his 100 prime acres of downtown St. Paul for $300. One account says he traded the land for a dog and a cow. back to map

St. Anthony, Minnesota

In 1842, Pierre Bottineau began an operation running Mackinaw transport boats upriver from St. Anthony Falls, the site of Fort Snelling's millworks. There, atop the falls, which provided immense power for local industry and marked the northernmost navigable point for Mississippi River steamboats, he made two purchases of riverbank land, apparently paying less than $200 for both. By 1846 he consolidated these claims into a 320-acre tract. Then the canny frontiersman, who had never seen a city, had his land platted to enlarge the growing village of St. Anthony. “Bottineau’s Addition” would become the Bottineau neighborhood of Northeast Minneapolis, home to many generations of immigrants.

Now in his early 30s, Bottineau had become a leading citizen. When the Minnesota Territory was organized in 1849, he was appointed Supervisor of Roads for Ramsey County, which at that time included St. Anthony. His home was the popular gathering place for other local leaders, well-heeled travelers, incoming settlers and Métis ox-cart drivers alike.

In the mid-1850’s, the Upper Mississippi opened to settlement. St. Anthony Falls powered a lumber industry that would soon become the world’s largest. It was said that Bottineau both made a fortune selling parcels of his St. Anthony land and was cheated of thousands of dollars by unscrupulous purchasers. It was also said that he lost his claim to Nicollet Island in a hand of poker. Contemporary records and accounts describe Bottineau more as a man of means than wealth, suggesting both a mercurial nature and an inbred lack of fanciness. No matter the size his St. Anthony "take," Bottineau's entrepreneurship there established him as a central figure in the territory’s settlement and put him on the path to becoming a career town builder. back to map

Elk River, Minnesota

In 1849, Pierre Bottineau took over the trading post at Elk River, at the time a day’s ride from his home in St. Anthony. Like Fort Snelling, the Elk River trading post was situated on a bluff at the intersection of two rivers. The area was a source of hardwood and, like St. Anthony, water power. Bottineau also opened an inn there in 1850 and held these investments long enough to participate in founding the nearby town of Orono.

Bottineau’s talent for knowing where to situate development in the northwestern frontier would make him an indispensable guide for the trading companies, the U.S. military and, later, the railroad builders. Hunter, farmer, trader, government contractor, proprietor and land speculator, Bottineau’s enterprise would have kept most men tied down. But Bottineau never tired of the ranging life. He continued to spend much of his time trekking across the Minnesota Territory and the Northwest, guiding expeditions through the Dakotas, Idaho and Montana. By the 1850s he had become a celebrity adventure guide, leading wealthy tourists into the wilderness on hunting trips from his base in the boomtown of St. Anthony. These trips led to massive investment, building both the lore and the business networks of the Minnesota territory. back to map

Osseo, Minnesota

Bottineau’s frame house near Osseo was a veritable mansion (top, City of Osseo) compared with the crude homes typical of early settlement (bottom, Minnesota Historical Society).

Dakota treaty delegation, 1858 Minnesota Historical Society

In 1851, with the signing of the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux, the Dakota Indian lands west of the Mississippi River opened to white settlement. Even before the treaty’s signing, Bottineau ran a trading post and an inn at Elk River, a way-stop on an Indian migratory path.

In 1852, commuting in the company of friends between the trading post and his home above the St. Anthony falls, Pierre Bottineau happened upon a beautiful clearing at the edge of a forest in what is now the Osseo and Maple Grove border. The small group, all influential land-holders in St. Paul and St. Anthony, agreed to make claims of this land. In 1854 Bottineau erected the area’s first frame house, instantly establishing him as a leading citizen amid the scattered log cabins and sod huts in the area. Once cleared by settlers, the surrounding lands proved excellent farming for vegetables, flowers and potatoes.

Bottineau’s presence in the northwest approach to the towns of St. Anthony and St. Paul (at the time these two towns, with populations approaching 1,000 each, could have been called the Twin Cities, with Minneapolis as yet a minor neighbor) led to rapid settlement that would, in the next few years, expand along the trade paths to the game-rich lands of the Red River Valley. His abilities to speak several Indian languages and throw a good party served him well as a rustic diplomat in Minnesota, especially in the Northwest Corridor, where traveling bands of Indians and white settlers often found themselves in disagreements over grazing rights and access to the land. For his frequent intervention in disputes between Indians and settlers, he came to be called "the walking peace pipe." An interpreter and witness to several Indian treaties in Minnesota, he once accompanied local Ojibwe to Washington, D.C., as a translator during a treaty negotiation.

Until the incorporation of Osseo and Maple Grove, maps bore the name "Bottineau's Prairie" when describing the tracts that make up their common boundary. The old Indian path and trading route that connected the area to Minneapolis, and which was eventually developed into County Road 81, was long called the Bottineau Road.

As exploration and settlement proceeded west from the foothold of the Twin Cities area, Bottineau was sought out by fur traders, the army, the railroad builders and generations of western settlers because of his exceptional talent for traversing the often harsh and forbidding wilderness. When the ox-cart trails were buried in snow and the rivers froze, when sweeping brush fires and clouds of black flies altered the geography, when bands of aggrieved Indians sought revenge on the trade routes and open plains, Bottineau knew the way through. His eye for locating development along providential corridors cannot be over-estimated in the calculus of the state’s rapid settlement. back to map

Breckenridge, Minnesota, and Wahpeton, North Dakota

In 1849, when Pierre Bottineau took over the trading post in Elk River, an estimated 4,000 non-Indians lived in Minnesota. Then followed the fastest 10-year population growth rate experienced by any state in the history of the country. By 1860, the population neared 175,000 – a 4,500-percent increase.

Even when Bottineau moved into his prairie home in Osseo in 1854, things were still relatively quiet. Most pioneers pushing into the former Sioux lands west of the Mississippi River were Upper Mississippi locals, whites and Métis from the ramshackle trading post days.

But by the spring of 1855, Congress had ratified the major treaties that ceded Sioux land in Minnesota to the United States. Now a flood of new faces began to arrive from the eastern states, Midwest and Europe, each looking for a share of the nation's "manifest destiny." The steamboat berths in St. Paul saw outrageous traffic. The hotels filled, and hoards of emigrants slept their first Minnesota night in the city's muddy streets. The initial offering of settlement land was confined to a million acres located in the southeastern corner of the Minnesota Territory, largely speculated by advance men who waited to turn over parcels at great markups. Not to be deterred by boundaries, the pioneers of the day swarmed over the prized farming land beyond.

By the end of 1857, an estimated 700 towns were platted in the Minnesota Territory, capable of receiving 1.5 million people (Minnesota's population hit that figure about 1895, the year of Bottineau's death).

The year 1857, however, held some tough surprises for the prime movers of western settlement, both locally and nationally. On January 1, Pierre and his brother Charles Bottineau left St. Anthony as guides for an expedition to site a town at the junction of the Bois des Sioux and Otter Tail Rivers, headwaters of the Red River of the North, which flows into Winnipeg through the Bottineaus' early stomping grounds. The backers of the 10-member expedition envisioned a second Chicago rising there, controlling a modernized era of trade with western Canada.

Near St. Cloud the expedition encountered the worst Minnesota blizzard in memory. Snow buried the ox-cart trails and made progress painfully slow, even for the famed voyageur. Navigation was virtually impossible except by instinct. Miraculously, none of the party died on the 200-mile journey. But the oxen bearing the supplies had to be put down or killed for meat along the way. The men slowly ran through their provisions and were saved from starvation by the chance sighting of buffalo and Pierre's ability to fell two of them in blinding snow. They arrived at the intended site after 27 days of frozen hell. The exhausted party set up camp and endured the rest of the winter, only to be flooded out by a rapid spring melt.

The men persisted, platting the townsite that would become Breckenridge, Minnesota, and another townsite across the Red River that would become Wahpeton, North Dakota. By the time they had finished this work, news of the Panic of 1857, then the nation's worst-ever financial crisis, had made its way west. "Townsite fever" was at an end in Minnesota. Nonetheless, the rapid spread of settlers through the territory had its intended effect. Minnesota attained statehood the next year, 1858, with Breckenridge on its western border and Wahpeton consigned to the newly-created Dakota territory.

In 1862, seven tribes of Sioux Indians, starving and tired of waiting in vain for remuneration for the millions of acres of land they had bartered away, attacked several villages across western Minnesota, killing 500 settlers and U.S. soldiers. Pierre Bottineau happened to be at Fort Abercrombie, near Breckenridge, when the Indians laid siege. The wily frontiersman snuck out of the fort under cover of night, crossing the Leaf Hills to Sauk Center and alerting troops who mounted the decisive counter-attack against the Sioux. The uprising demoralized the settlement movement for a time. Thousands of settlers reportedly fled Minnesota, their worst fears about the dangers of the frontier confirmed.

But that same year, Congress passed the Homestead Act, granting 160 free acres to anyone who could erect a permanent dwelling and farm the land for five years. Those who could raise $200 could purchase their 160 acres after living on the land for six months. The act proved a great relief valve for social pressures amid the Civil War and economic stagnation lingering from the 1857 crash. It drew 75,000 new emigrants to Minnesota within three years. This meant new life for the railroads and more than a decade of employment for Pierre Bottineau as guide for expeditions to negotiate Indian treaties, plan new rail lines, establish new forts, and otherwise show the way west.

In 1869, Bottineau was the celebrity guide for a 70-member expedition headlined by railroad magnates, government leaders and journalists. The ostensible purpose was to plot the route of the Northern Pacific Railroad from Duluth westward, though a good bit of public relations was accomplished as well. Escorted by a squad of federal soldiers, the expedition traveled from St. Cloud to the Missouri River near Bismarck, North Dakota, and back. Outbound, the group passed though Breckenridge, which it agreed would make a great whistle stop.

The party exchanged rifle fire with Sioux warriors one dark night on the prairie, but the over-riding message of the blue-ribbon expedition was clear: the northern prairies were safe for settlement. The pitch was heard back east. The allure of unbounded opportunity overcame the many physical and economic risks of life on the frontier. People continued to come and townsites continued to boom, served by new railroads and networks of forts.

In 1871, the St. Paul and Pacific Railroad reached Breckenridge, providing the first rail link between the Twin Cities and the Red River Valley.

Even so, the fortunes of the Breckenridge-Wahpeton area (current combined population 16,000) somehow failed to overtake those of Chicago (metro population 9.5 million). back to map

Red Lake Falls, Minnesota

Pierre Bottineau spent his youth hunting and trapping in the Red River Valley of northwestern Minnesota under the tutelage of his French-Canadian father, a voyageur in the employ of the Canadian trading companies that operated freely in the area before the Americans were able to assert their control. His father had been embroiled in the Pemmican War of 1816, a series of skirmishes between two of the largest trading companies in Canada. The internecine conflict had diminished Canadian influence in the area, while American control of trade routes grew with the success of Fort Snelling. By the 1860's, the Red River Valley was being settled in a way that was beyond the dreams of the founders of the Selkirk trading colony in Winnipeg, who had tried, with little effect, to introduce agriculture to the region. The place had simply been too remote, and the mix of white and Indian interests too volatile, during the period of Canadian control of the trade routes in the American fur country.

Thanks in no small part to the services of Pierre Bottineau, the veteran expeditionary guide, and interpreter, rail was mitigating the distance between farm and market. It was also diminishing the role of the ox cart caravans that had moved people and goods through the corridor for a hundred years. In 1863, Bottineau helped negotiate the sale of 11 million acres of key Red River Valley land by the Pembina and Red Lake Ojibwe to the United States. This accession meant U.S. control of the prime Red River crossing into Canada and the West. In 1869, Bottineau guided a much-ballyhooed expedition to explore routes through the area for the Northern Pacific Railroad. By the 1870s, Bottineau no doubt saw that his native frontier was closing, and he was motivated to claim its fertile heart before it could be over-run by opportunists from distant parts.

In May, 1876, Bottineau led 119 families from St. Paul into the Red River Valley. Like Bottineau, most of these families were of French-Canadian descent, early settlers of Ramsey and Hennepin Counties. The wagon train wound its way up the Northwest Corridor from the Twin Cities, passed through St. Cloud and then the dozens of outlying settlements strung out along the ox-cart trails. At Crookston the Bottineau party turned north and east, arriving 17 days after its departure at the cradle of the Red Lake and Clearwater Rivers. Bottineau's Ojibwe ancestors had occupied the area 200 years before. A French trading post had started operating nearby in 1798. Yet the wave of American homesteading had ignored this place, which contained some of the most fertile soil in the world.

There the Bottineau party set up the towns of Red Lake Falls and Gentilly. At first times were tough. Tales were told of living all winter on a barrel of flour and jack rabbits. But the area soon flourished. In 1878, Bottineau traveled into Canada and recruited yet more settlers.

It was in Red Lake Falls, within 50 miles of his birthplace at Grand Forks, that the famous ranger Pierre Bottineau more or less retired, though he was said to have been as strong and active at 65 as he was at 30. In 1879, influential Minnesotans secured him a Congressional pension of $50 per month in recognition for his long service. He sat on the village council of Red Lake Falls from 1882-1887 and was elected its president in 1885. He remained active in regional affairs and was involved in another land treaty with the Pembina Ojibwe in 1889.

Bottineau died in 1895, aged 78, vigorous to the last. It was said he took ill while on a moose hunt near Thief River Falls. He was eulogized across the state as the last of the breed of hearty frontiersman that put Minnesota on the map. A memorial to Bottineau stands in the cemetery at Red Lake Falls. back to map

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Two historic buildings (foreground) were combined with a new addition to create the Pierre Bottineau branch library in Minneapolis

St. Anthony, the seminal Minnesota town that Pierre Bottineau helped found in the wilderness of the Fort Snelling military reservation in the mid-1840's, was absorbed by Minneapolis in 1872. Bottineau's original land holdings became the Bottineau neighborhood, home to several generations of immigrants as the modern city developed. The frontiersman's legacy is well remembered in Minneapolis, where a school, park and branch library also bear his name. back to map

Maple Grove, Minnesota

Pierre Bottineau's pioneering claim in the lands northwest of Minneapolis was an important step in the growth of the Twin Cities metropolitan area. "Bottineau's Prairie" was located on the border of what is now the Cities of Maple Grove and Osseo. Maple Grove celebrates this connection annually with its Pierre Bottineau Parade, a fixture of the Maple Grove Days summer festival. back to map

Pierre Bottineau memorial, Bottineau, North Dakota

Bottineau, North Dakota

A city and county along North Dakota's border with Canada were named Bottineau to honor the frontiersman's contributions, largely at the behest of the railroad companies that so benefited from his services. The town hall features a memorial statue of Bottineau, replete with a fur hat, backwoodsman's hide coat, and a rifle. back to map