When Miller painted the starving trappers (Killbuck and Le Bonté) for the Walters commission in 1858 – 1860, he changed the title to Free Trappers in Trouble, indicating that the men were not at that time associated with any of the companies competing for the fur trade. He showed a useless weapon in the foreground (they had exhausted their ammunition) and a campfire at the right, where they were roasting two rattlesnakes that Killbuck had killed with the “wiping stick” (cleaning rod) from his rifle. While the men were “gaunt and lantern-jawed,” Ruxton did not describe them as being in quite as bad a shape as Miller seems to have pictured them, with the one on the right (La Bonté?) appearing near death. (Ruxton, 1951, p. 131; Ross, 1968, text accompanying plate 163)
Miller shows the trappers in the foreground, with Independence Rock behind them and the caravan arriving in the distance. Again, he has been precise in depicting their clothing. He has dressed the one on the left (Killbuck?) in a fringed blue cloth coat, his (empty) powder horn over his shoulder and a knife in his belt. He has changed the dress of the prone man a bit in that neither the suspender nor the neckerchief appear, and he now wears a neck pouch (gage’d amour), in which he appears to have tucked his pipe. (see CR# 52, CR# 52C, and CR# 55 for other examples of neck pouches)
