Each May, just as the Museum of the Mountain Man opens for a new season, Living History Days—one of our most hectic and rewarding events—arrives along with more than 1,000 students from across southwestern Wyoming. For three mornings, the Museum grounds come alive with the si...
Two hundred years ago this month—April 1826—the Rocky Mountain fur trade was in its prime. Demand for felt hats in the eastern United States and Europe was strong, and American trapping brigades pushed ever deeper into the West. They competed fiercely not only with one anothe...
By Museum of the Mountain Man Staff Two hundred years after the height of the Rocky Mountain fur trade, beaver are still busy along the tributaries of the Snake, the Missouri, and the upper Green River and countless other streams that once held these fur bearing mammals. They go ...
By Museum of the Mountain Man Staff February often invites reflection on love and relationships, but courtship in the Rocky Mountain fur trade looked very different from the sentimental ideals of formal dances and letters familiar to many Americans in the early nineteenth century...
By Museum of the Mountain Man Staff In the early 19th-century fur trade, New Year’s often eclipsed Christmas as the primary festive occasion in remote areas. While Christmas was frequently quiet, or entirely unobserved, New Year’s tended to bring camaraderie, feasting, and li...
By Museum of the Mountain Man Staff Celebrating Christmas in the remote reaches of the Rocky Mountains required creativity, and sometimes a bit of improvisation. Fur trade journals offer glimpses into how trappers, traders, and their Native neighbors adapted familiar traditions t...
By Museum of the Mountain Man Staff Mountain men and fur traders in the Rocky Mountains did not celebrate Thanksgiving as we know it today. The national holiday was not established until 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed it during the Civil War, hoping “to heal th...
By Museum of the Mountain Man Staff Here a circumstance occurred which furnished the subject for a good joke upon our green Irish camp keeper. … It was the commencement of the rutting season with the elk, when the bucks frequently utter a loud cry resembling a shrill whistle, e...
By: Museum of the Mountain Man Staff There are few references to large, uncontrolled wildfires in the Rocky Mountains in fur trade journals. One notable exception is George Ruxton’s detailed account of a narrow escape from a wildfire near Pike’s Peak in the spring of 1847. Af...
