With three mighty men like that fighting for each other and whooping up and down the rivers, it seemed there was no one they couldn‘t lick. But there was. The man who had them licked wasn‘t even very good with his fists, and he didn‘t whoop and holler at all. His name was Robert Fulton, and all he did to become the new ruler of the river was invent the steamboat.

Mike hated steamboats even more than he hated to sit still. Every time he saw one coming, its big side-wheels churning the water, he shook his fists at the sky. But the steamboats kept on coming, getting bigger and faster, pushing the keelboats out of the way, and winning every race. Mike still worked on the keelboats, but it wasn‘t like the old days. He wasn‘t the real boss of the river anymore. And Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and New Orleans were growing too civilized for his liking.

That‘s how Mike happened to become a mountain man. Talbot and Carpenter did, too. In St. Louis one day, they signed up with a fur-trapping party to go up the Missouri River, farther west then almost anyone but Lewis and Clark had been before. They went in two keelboats loaded down with traps, guns, and supplies.

The Missouri was muddier than the underside of a mud turtle. It was so full of snags, the men used axes more than they used oars. The wild animals and Indians swarmed around the river banks in such numbers that Mike‘s rifle barrel grew so hot from shooting, it nearly melted. "Come on, you beaver and buffalo and grizzlies. I’m the original mountain-beater and grizzly-tamer, and I can out-trap, out-skin, and out-trade any man west or east of the sun."

Mike turned out to be almost as good a trapper as he had been a river man. That first winter, near the mouth of the Yellowstone River, he brought in so many furs that half the beaver population was left running around naked.