The Language of the Rendezvous: A Mountain-Man Glossary

A trapper who had spent a few winters in the mountains did not talk like a man from the eastern settlements. The speech of the fur trade was practical, vivid, and borrowed from everyone the trappers dealt with: French-Canadian voyageurs, Spanish traders out of Taos and Santa Fe, and the Plains and mountain nations whose country the trade depended on. The result was a jargon that was, as one early account put it, “as far from grammatical correctness as it is possible to imagine.”

Much of that vocabulary is still in use at modern rendezvous, where buckskinners use the old words to stay, in their phrase, “period correct.” The terms below are grouped by what they describe: the trapper and his standing, his gear and trade, the country and the hunt, and the talk of the camp. Spellings follow the phonetic forms the trappers themselves used.

The trapper and his standing

The fur trade drew a sharp line between the free trapper, who worked for himself and sold his catch to whichever outfit offered the best terms, and the company man (also mangeur de lard, French for “pork eater,” or engagé), who was under contract to a fur company and looked down on for it. A newcomer was a greenhorn, a pilgrim, or a flatlander, terms of mild contempt for someone still soft from the settlements. Once the “green was weared off” and he had survived a season, he became a mountain man in earnest; a man who had lasted a winter or two in Indian country was a hivernant or winterer.

• Booshway — from the French bourgeois; the man in charge. In the trade, the partisan who ran a brigade; at a modern rendezvous, the person in charge of the event.
• Free trapper — the independent trapper, his own master, the most prized figure of the trade.
• Voyageur — French for “traveler”; a French-Canadian canoe handler of the northern fur routes.
• Hivernant (also hivernan, winterer) — a man who had wintered over in the mountains and was no longer a greenhorn.

Gear, trade, and the beaver

The beaver pelt was the trade’s currency, and it had its own name. A plew — a single prime pelt — was the unit a trapper measured his year in, by the pack. Dictionaries trace the word to Canadian French pelu (“hairy,” from poilu); a popular alternative ties it instead to the “+” the Hudson’s Bay Company marked in its ledgers against each “made beaver.” The scent used to draw beaver to a trap was castoreum, called dab in the trade: a thick, musky extract from the animal’s own glands. A man’s most important possessions, the small kit he could not survive without, were his possibles, carried in a possibles bag alongside his shooting pouch.

• Plew — a beaver pelt, the basic unit of the trade.
• Possibles — the small, vital kit a trapper kept by his side: the difference, as the saying went, between life and death if he were set afoot without a rifle.
• Fofarraw (also foofuraw, foofaraw) — from the Spanish fanfarrón, “braggart,” mangled by English ears, with French fanfaron and frou-frou likely reinforcing it; trinkets, beads, and doodads carried as trade goods.
• Parfleche — rawhide folded and painted into containers, shields, and a kind of frontier suitcase. From the French.
• Galena pill — a lead rifle ball, cast from galena lead.
• “Up to Green River” — to drive a knife in to the hilt, where the Russell Green River Works stamped its mark near the handle.
• “Reglar Hawken” — the very best of something, after the prized St. Louis plains rifle.

The country and the hunt

The trapper’s world had its own geography of words. A hole was a secluded mountain valley — Jackson’s Hole, Brown’s Hole, and the rest. Sign was anything that told him about the country: tracks, droppings, a cold fire. The buffalo, his staple food, was the buffler, and its dried dung, the only fuel on the treeless plains, was buffler wood. To live on lean meat alone was to be “greez hungry,” hungry for fat; pork-eating was the mark of the soft company man, when a free man could have buffler or elk.

• Hole — a secluded mountain valley.
• Buffler — buffalo, the trapper’s favorite food.
• Old Ephraim (also Bar) — the grizzly bear.
• Painter — a panther or mountain lion.
• Pemmican — pounded dried meat mixed with fat and dried berries, pressed into cakes; eaten as it was or boiled into a rich soup.
• Boudin — a camp delicacy of stuffed buffalo intestine.
• Robe season — winter, when the fur was prime.

The talk of the camp

The most enduring fur-trade words are the ones for good times and hard ones. Shinin’ times were the good days: prime trapping, a full rendezvous, something to remember. To say a thing “shines” was to say it was first-rate (“thet there flinter of yourn shines, it truly does”). A man who had died had “gone under.” And the great gathering itself was the ronnyvoo — the trapper’s pronunciation of rendezvous, the annual summer meeting held every year from 1825 to 1840, save for 1831 when the supply wagons failed to arrive on time.

• Ronnyvoo (also rondyvoo) — rendezvous, the annual summer trade gathering.
• Shinin’ times — a good, memorable stretch; prime days.
• “That shines” — that is good, suitable, or special.
• Gone under — died, or was killed.
• Waugh! (also Waah!) — an exclamation of surprise or admiration, said to sound like a grunt.
• Old hoss — a friendly term for a fellow trapper (“Bill, you ole hoss, I hain’t seed you since last ronnyvoo!”).
• Trapper’s oath — a pledge of truth taken by placing the rifle muzzle in one’s mouth.
• “Year it rained fire” — 1833, after the great Leonid meteor storm on the night of November 12–13 that year, seen across North America.

Common questions