$21.99
Captain Benjamin Bonneville’s Wyoming Expedition – The Lost 1833 Report
The era of the Rocky Mountain fur trade, a period of fifteen years from 1825 to 1840, has been variously characterized by historians of the American West as glorious, romantic, golden, a heyday or some other such celebratory description. Bust just as easily it can also be portrayed as a perilous, daring, confrontational or even dark period of adventurism beyond America’s frontier. It all depends on who’s doing the describing.
Description
Captain Benjamin Bonneville’s Wyoming Expedition – The Lost 1833 Report
In 1832, Benjamin Bonneville led the first wagon train across the Continental Divide on the Oregon Trail. Financed by a rival of the Hudson’s Bay Company, Bonneville and more than one hundred traders and trappers traveled from Fort Osage on the Missouri River, up to the Platte River and across present-day Wyoming. Washington Irving first gave the U.S. Army officer a brand by chronicling the three-year explorations in the 1837 book The Adventures of Captain Bonneville. Historians have long suspected that the captain, under the guise of commercial fur trading, was preparing for an eventual invasion of Mexico’s California territory. Bonneville’s 1833 report concerning his first year in the Wind River Range and beyond remained lost for almost a century before resurfacing in the 1920s. Author Jett B. Conner examines the intriguing details revealed in that historic document.
ISBN – 978-1-4671-4864-1
142 Pages
Softback
6″ x 9″
The History Press, 2021