Bent’s Fort was a landmark of the American frontier, a huge private fort on the upper Arkansas River in present southeastern Colorado. Established by the adventurers Charles and William Bent, it stood until 1849 as the center of the Indian trade of the central plains. David Lavender’s chronicle of these men and their part in the opening of the West has been conceded a place beside the works of Parkman and Prescott.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-5753-5
479 Pages
Softback
5 1/4″ x 8″
University of Nebraska Press, 1972
Bill Sublette – Mountain Man
Renowned as a hardy mountain man, he ranged the Missouri, Big Horn, Yellowstone, and Sweetwater River country between 1823 and 1833. He hunted beaver, fought Indians, and unwittingly opened the West for settlers by proving that wagons could be used effectively on the Oregon Trail. But financial success and silk hats, which strangled the fur trade, eventually led him to take up a less adventuresome life in St. Louis as a gentleman farmer, businessman, and politician.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-1111-7
279 Pages
Softback
5 1/4″ x 8″
The University of Oklahoma Press, 1959
Did you know…that bison have a thick, shaggy coat that is so insulated that snow can settle on their backs without melting. Bison have poor eyesight, but acute hearing and excellent sense of smell. They are the largest land animals in North America, and can be found in plains, prairies and river valleys.
Black Robes Enter Coyote’s World – Chief Charlo & Father De Smet in the Rocky Mountains
Black Robes Enter Coyote’s World brings to life the complicated history of Jesuit missionaries among Montana’s Native peoples — a saga of encounter, accommodation, and resistance during the transformative decades of the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Sally Thompson tells the story of how Jesuit values played out in the lives of the Bitterroot Salish people. The famous Black Robe (Jesuit) Father Pierre-Jean De Smet actually spent little time among his “beloved Flatheads.” Instead, he traveled extensively between the Pacific and the Rockies, mapping the pathways and noting the valuable resources. His popular writings helped spark the westward movement of the white settlers.
Thompson picks up the story of the Salish peoples and black-robed missionaries at a Potawatomi mission on the Missouri in 1839 and follows their intertwined experiences throughout the lifetime of Salish chief Charlo, who eventually cursed the day white immigrants came into his country. Chief Charlo attributed the missionaries’ disconnected beliefs and exploitive actions to their status as orphans rejected from their place of creation, as he had learned from the story of Eden. Despite Charlo’s valiant efforts to protect his homeland, the Salish endured a forced removal from their beloved Bitterroot Valley to the Flathead Reservation in 1891. Charlo died in 1910, just before the massive giveaway of more than half of the Salish’s treaty-guaranteed lands through implementation of the Allotment Act. Despite it all, his people endure.
ISBN – 978-1-4962-3961-7
350 Pages
Hardback
6.5″ x 9.25″
The University of Nebraska Press, 2024
Blood and Thunder – The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West
In the summer of 1846, the Army of the West marched through Santa Fe, en route to invade and occupy the Western territories claimed by Mexico. Fueled by the new ideology of “Manifest Destiny,” this land grab would lead to decades-long battle between the United States and the Navajos, the fiercely resistant rulers of a huge swath of mountainous desert wilderness.
ISBN – 978-1-4000-3110-8
575 Pages
Softback
5 1/4″ x 8″
Vintage Books, 2006
Blood Memory – The Tragic Decline and Improbable Resurrection of The American Buffalo
The American Buffalo — our nation’s official mammal — is an improbable, shaggy beast that has found itself at the center of many of our most mythic and sometimes heartbreaking tales. The largest land animals in the Western Hemisphere, they are survivors of a mass extinction that erased ancient species that were even larger. For nearly ten thousand years, they evolved alongside Native people who weaved them into every aspect of daily life; relied on them for food, clothing, and shelter; and revered them as equals.
Newcomers to the continent found the buffalo fascinating at first, but in time they came to consider the animals a hindrance to a young nation’s expansion. And in the space of only a decade, buffalo were slaughtered by the millions for their hides, with their carcasses left to rot on the prairies. Then, teetering on the brink of disappearing from the face of the earth, they were at last rescued by a motley collection of Americans, each of them driven by different — and sometimes competing — impulses. This is the rich and complicated history of a young republic’s heedless rush to conquer a continent, but it is also one of the dawn of conservation era — a story of America at its very best and worst.
ISBN – 978-0-593-53734-3
329 Pages
Hardback
6 1/2″ x 9 3/8″
Knopf Publishers, 2023
Broken Hand – The Life of Thomas Fitzpatrick Mountain Man, Guide and Indian Agent
Known by the Indians as “Broken Hand”, Thomas Fitzpatrick was a trapper and a trailblazer who became the head of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. With Jedediah Smith he led the trapper band that discovered South Pass; he then shepherded the first two emigrant wagon trains to Oregon, was official guide to Fremont on his longest expedition, and guided Colonel Phil Kearny and his Dragoons along the westward trails to impress the Indians with howitzers and swords. Fitzpatrick negotiated the Fort Laramie treaty of 1851 at the largest council of Plains Indians ever assembled. Among the most colorful of Mountain Men, Fitzpatrick was also party to many of the most important events in the opening of the West.
ISBN: 0-8032-7208-1
359 Pages
Softback
5 1/2″ x 8 1/2″
University of Nebraska Press, 1981
The beaver is North America’s largest rodent. It is one of the most important animals in the history of western expansion in North America. Beavers were hunted by Indians, European settlers and trappers. Mountain men hunted the beaver to meet the European fashion demand. By the mid-19th century the beaver had become nearly extinct. Fortunately, it was saved when the demand for silk hats replaced the desire for beaver felt hats.
Bucka Beaver Jr. measures 5 1/4 inches tall from the sitting position and 3 inches at the widest part.
Butch Cassidy – The Wyoming Years
Author Bill Betenson is the great-grandson of Butch Cassidy’s younger sister Lula. He inherited his great-grandmother’s archives and her interest in setting the record straight. Now he focuses on Butch’s exploits in Wyoming and tries to unravel the sometimes conflicting information with care and honesty. Butch Cassidy is alive for Bill Betenson, and this book brings him to life for readers.
ISBN – 978-1-937147-22-8
188 Pages
Softback
6″ x 9″
High Plains Press, 2020
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
The perfect magnet for your vehicle or even for your refrigerator.
Measurements:
5″ x 3 1/8″
It features the Museum of the Mountain Man logo.
Logo Meaning:
The circular Beaver Plew represents the treasure that attracted the mountain men to the wilderness. After skinning the beaver, the pelt was stretched on a willow frame to cure prior to shipping.
The trap was the mountain man’s principal tool. He generally carried 6 of them weighing 5-6 ponds each.
The emigrant grave marker and the spur represent some of the same forces that eventually spelled the end of the fur trade era — the beginning of the westward migration and the coming of the ranchers that eventually tamed the wilderness.
The arrow symbolizes the close connection between the native tribes of the Rocky Mountains and the mountain men — both as allies and enemies.
The mountain man’s rifle was used for hunting game as well as for protection. Flintlock and percussion style were used with Henry or Hawken rifles being common.
Carl Roters and the Rendezvous Murals
Following the Lewis and Clark expedition, “mountain men” fanned out across the Rocky Mountains to explore the promise of a new frontier, trapping beaver and opening up the trade routes that become the famous Oregon Trail. From 1825 – 40, trappers, traders and American Indians journeyed thousands of miles to the annual Rendezvous, a monthlong gathering for trading, swapping stories, carousing and enjoying all manner of raucous entertainment. Carl Roters’ epic Rendezvous Murals bring to life this colorful era of American history. His vibrant images, created with innovative media and techniques, are published here for the first time.
CarlRoters.com
ISBN – 0-9748030-0-6
149 Pages
Hardback
12 1/4″ x 13 1/2″
Venture Development Group, 2004
Carvings on the Aspens and Collection of Poems – A Commemorative Edition by the Sublette County Artists’ Guild
The Sublette County Artists’ Guild has kindly chosen to share its 75th anniversary celebration with the people of Wyoming — and what a celebration that has come to be.
In paying tribute to Lora Neal Jewett, Josephine Jons Jones, Marie Meyer, Mary Annette Murdock, Louise McCabe Rathbun and May McAlister Sommers, the guild is paying tribute to a group of people who have inspired hearts and touched lives with their strong personalities and vivid writing.
Their art fills this book, which brings together “Carvings on the Aspens” and “Collection of Poems,” two of the earliest publications for the Sublette County Artists’ Guild. Formed in 1928, the guild specializes in the sort of uniquely personal tales that bring alive the plains of Wyoming.
ISBN – 1-57579-280-X
217 Pages
Hardback
6 1/4″ x 9 1/4″
Sublette County Artists’ Guild, 2004
Clark the Mountain Beaver and His Big Adventure!
Clark the Mountain Beaver is a shy secretive critter that lives alone in his burrows. On the rare occasion when he does venture out into the world, he is always being confused with the more popular American Beaver. It’s a little frustrating for him because other critters never seem to know who he is or that he even exists. One day, Clark decides to go on a big adventure to meet the critters that live around him.
ISBN: 978-1-9431641-7-2
64 Pages
Hardback
11 1/4″ x 8 3/4″
AVIVA Publishing, 2015
The Encyclopedia of Trade Goods – Volume 4, Clothing & Textiles of the Fur Trade
Clothing & Textiles of the Fur Trade is the result of more than sixty years of research. It contains nearly 900 images, most in color, illustrating over 2,000 samples of textiles that were traded to the native people of North America. The book covers wools, worsteds, linens, cottons, silks, and notions, as well as clothing worn by fur traders and Indians. – Museum of the Fur Trade
ISBN – 978-0-912611-21-1
636 Pages
Hardback
11 1/4″ x 11 1/4″
Museum of the Fur Trade, 2014
Competitive Struggle: America’s Western Fur Trading Posts, 1764 – 1865
Competitive Struggle recounts the 101-year history of America’s western fur trade. From the founding of St. Louis in 1764 through 1865, the demand for beaver pelts and buffalo robes spawned a competitive fervor that enveloped mountain men, traders, national governments, and Native Americans.
ISBN: 978-0-87004-510-3
330 Pages
Softback
6″ x 9″
Caxton Press, 1999
