After a year's service in the country of the Sioux, the return to Saint Louis was made, and at that point he outfitted as a free trapper, going out on to the Arkansas to Bent's Fort (1840). George Bent, the notable trappercaptain, whom he met there, he describes as "a little bit of a man, but sharp as lightning.' On this jaunt he also met Kit Carson, who is almost as well known in the annals of the frontier as Daniel Boone of Kentucky. Carson he describes as "a terror" not as a desperado, however, but as a hunter. He was an unerring shot, and dropped many a buffalo. He was stocky and nervy in build, and had something of the Southwestern bluster of manner, yet not so offensively so as many others.
Mr. Matthieu recalls serious hardships on this expedition, passing one stretch of five days without food. But such experiences were little thought of, the trapper always relying upon his rifle without fear. In those days the Indians were very friendly.
Returning eastward the next season, he spent the winter and spring trapping in the Black Hills (1841). However, it seems that this life of a trapper, nomadic and free, and dependent only upon the unlimited bounty of nature, and the friendly offices of the generally tractable Indians, although amusing in many ways to a light-hearted Frenchman, did not wholly satisfy young Matthieu. The desire for settled society, and progressive individual life and home frequently took possession of him; and the opportunity to gratify this was apparently fortuitously afforded at Fort Laramie, early in the summer of 1842.
With his party of trappers he found there the Oregon immigrants of that season. This was the first regular immigration to Oregon across the plains, and aside from the ladies of the mission parties that had crossed in
