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Jim Beckwourth

Jim Beckwourth

Sometime around 1800 James Beckwourth was born a slave in Frederick County, Virginia, the natural son of Sir Jennings Beckwith and a female slave. In 1810 Sir Jennings moved with his family to the wilderness of St. Louis, Missouri, where Jim was educated and eventually apprenticed to a blacksmith. His father recorded a Deed of Emancipation in his name on three different occasions, sending young Jim out into the world with his blessings.

Jim Beckwourth’s apprenticeship as a fur trapper was served with General William Ashley’s grueling 1824 winter expedition to the Rocky Mountains. Except for a short stint as an army scout during the Seminole campaign, Jim spent the remainder of his long, eventful life in the West, dying among the Crow Indians whom he loved. He was a fur trapper, trader, scout, war chief of the Crow Nation, explorer, hotelkeeper, dispatch carrier, storekeeper, prospector, Indian agent for the Cheyennes-in short a mountain man extraordinaire.

ISBN: 978-0-8061-1555-9
248 Pages
Softback
5 1/2″ x 8 1/2″

University of Oklahoma Press, 1972

Jim Bridger

Jim Bridger – By J. Cecil Alter

J. Cecil Alter tells us Jim Bridger “was among the first white men to use the Indian trail over South Pass; he was first to taste the waters of the Great Salt Lake, first to report a two-ocean stream, foremost in describing the Yellowstone Park phenomena, and the only man to run the Big Horn River rapid on a raft; and he originally selected the Crow Creek-Sherman-Dale Creek route through the Laramie Mountains and Bridger’s Pass over the Continental Divide, which were adopted by the Union Pacific Railroad.

ISBN: 978-0-8061-1509-2
358 Pages
Softback
5 1/2″ x 8 1/2”

University of Oklahoma Press, 1962

Jim Bridger

Jim Bridger – Mountain Man, Stanley Vestal

Even among the mighty mountain men, Jim Bridger was a towering figure. He was one of the greatest explorers and pathfinders in American history. He couldn’t write his name, but at eighteen he had braved the fury of the Missouri, ascending it in a keelboat flotilla commanded by that stalwart Mike Fink, By 1824, when he was only twenty, he had discovered the Great Salt Lake. Later he was to open the Overland Route, which was the path of the Overland Stage, the Pony Express, and the Union Pacific. One of the foremost trappers in the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, he was a legend in his own time as well as ours. He remains one of the most important scouts and guides in the history of the West.

ISBN: 978-0-8032-5720-7
333 Pages
Softback
5 1/4″ x 8″

University of Nebraska Press, 1970

Jim Bridger – Trailblazer of the American West

Jim Bridger – Trailblazer of the American West

Even among iconic frontiersmen like John C. Frémont, Kit Carson, and Jedediah Smith, Jim Bridger stands out. A mountain man of the American West, straddling the fur trade era and the age of exploration, he lived the life legends are made of. His adventures are fit for remaking into the tall tales Bridger himself liked to tell. Here, in a biography that finally gives this outsize character his due, Jerry Enzler takes this frontiersman’s full measure for the first time—and tells a story that would do Jim Bridger proud.

Born in 1804 and orphaned at thirteen, Bridger made his first western foray in 1822, traveling up the Missouri River with Mike Fink and a hundred enterprising young men to trap beaver. At twenty he “discovered” the Great Salt Lake. At twenty-one he was the first to paddle the Bighorn River’s Bad Pass. At twenty-two he explored the wonders of Yellowstone. In the following years, he led trapping brigades into Black-feet territory; guided expeditions of Smithsonian scientists, topographical engineers, and army leaders; and, though he could neither read nor write, mapped the tribal boundaries for the Great Indian Treaty of 1851. Enzler charts Bridger’s path from the fort he built on the Oregon Trail to the route he blazed for Montana gold miners to avert war with Red Cloud and his Lakota coalition. Along the way he married into the Flathead, Ute, and Shoshone tribes and produced seven children.

The Rocky Mountain Fur Trade Journal has published three articles about Jim Bridger by Jerry Enzler while he was researching and writing the new biography:

Volume 5, 2011 – Tracking Jim Bridger: Finding the Trail of Old Gabe
Volume 9, 2015 – Jim Bridger Challenges the HBC in Post-Rendezvous Era
Volume 11, 2017 – Otholoho and Grohean: Two Fast Horses, One Set of Tracks

ISBN: 978-0-8061-6863-0
371 Pages
Hardback
6 1/4″ x 9 1/4″

University of Oklahoma Press, 2021

Joe Meek

Joe Meek – The Merry Mountain Man

Born in Virginia, Joe Meek became a trapper, Indian fighter, pioneer, peace officer, frontier politician, and lover of practical jokes and Jacksonian democracy. He was a boon companion to two other larger-than-life mountain men, Kit Carson and Jim Bridger, and just as important in frontier history.

In 1829, our nineteen-year-old hero joined the Rocky Mountain Fur Company of Jedediah Smith and the Sublettes and headed west on an odyssey of hair-raising high adventure and hilarious low comedy. For the next twelve years, the Rockies rang with tales of Joe’s wild exploits. After the Last Rendezvous in 1840, he helped drive the first wagons to Oregon, served in the legislature of the provisional government, and went to Washington as a special envoy to President Polk. He later returned to Oregon to live out his days in the community that he helped build.

ISBN – 978-0-8032-5206-6
336 Pages
Softback
5 1/2″ x 8 1/2″

University of Nebraska Press, 1963

 

John Colter

John Colter – His Years in the Rockies

John Colter was a crack hunter with the Lewis and Clark expedition before striking out on his own as a mountain man and fur trader. A solitary journey in the winter of 1807-1808 took him into present day Wyoming. To unbelieving trappers he later reported sights that inspired the name of Colter’s Hell. It was a sulfurous place of hidden fires, smoking pits, an shooting water. And it was real. John Colter is known to history as probably the first white man to discover the region that now includes Yellowstone National Park. In a classic book, first published in 1952, Burton Harris weighs the facts and legends about a man who was dogged by misfortune and “robbed of the just rewards he had earned.”

ISBN: 978-0-8032-7264-4
180 Pages
Softback
6″ x 9″

University of Nebraska Press, 1952

Journal of a Trapper

Journal of a Trapper – Osborne Russell

Born in a little Maine Village in 1814, Osborne Russell ran away to sea at the age of sixteen, but he soon gave up seafaring to serve with a  trading a tapping company in Wisconsin and Minnesota. In 1834 he signed up for Nathaniel Wyeth’s expedition to the Rocky Mountains and the mouth of the Columbia. Subsequently he joined Jim Bridger’s brigade of Old Rocky Mountain Fur Company men, continuing with them after a merger that left the American Fur Company in control of the trade. When the fur trade declined, he became a free trapper operating out of Fort Hall, staying in the mountains until the great westward migration began.

ISBN: 978-0-8032-5166-3
203 Pages
Softback
5 1/4″ x 8″

University of Nebraska Press, 1965

Kit Carson’s Autobiography

Kit Carson’s Autobiography

“Notice is hereby given to all persons, That Christopher Carson, a boy about 16 years old, small of his age, but thick-set; light hair, ran away from the subscriber, living in Franklin, Howard County, Missouri, to whom he had been bound to learn the Saddler’s trade….One cent reward will be given to any person who will bring back the said boy.”

This notice appeared in the Missouri Intelligencer of October 6, 1826, at about the same time that Kit Carson, in the humble role of “cavvy boy” in Bent’s Santa Fe caravan, embarked upon his career. Thirty years later, a postgraduate of the University of the Wilderness, and for a decade past a national hero, he was persuaded to dictate to a literate friend his own story of his life to date.

ISBN: 978-0-8032-5031-4
192 Pages
Softback
5 1/4″ x 8″

University of Nebraska Press, 1935

Kunu

Kunu – Winnebago Boy Escapes

Kunu, a ten-year-old boy, and his grandfather vow to return to their homeland in Minnesota. Knowing they will be shot on sight if caught trying to leave, Kunu and his grandfather secretly make plans to escape in a dugout boat.

Readers will gain a great appreciation of the struggles of the Winnebago people through the story of Kunu and his grandfather. Their eventful trip over hundreds of miles of river is told here with all its adventures and danger.

ISBN: 1-880114-03-8
183 Pages
Softback
5 1/4″ x 7 5/8″

Grandview Publishing Company, 1989

Land Is the Cry!

Land is the Cry! -Warren Angus Ferris, Pioneer Texas Surveyor and Founder of Dallas County

Land Is the Cry! is the fascinating story of Warren Ferris, a New York Yankee who deserves to be remembered as the “Father of Dallas County.” Except for a twist of fate, Dallas, Texas, would have been named “Warwick” by its two founders, surveyor Ferris and land speculator William P. King.

Historian A. C. Greene calls Warren Ferris the most “unappreciated figure in Dallas history.” But Ferris has more than regional significance, for his remarkable story encompasses 3 arenas: the Niagara frontier of western New York, the fur-trading country of the Rocky Mountains, and frontier northeast Texas during the years of the Republic. Ferris merited fame even before he came to Texas in 1837. While working as a trapper and fur trader in the Rocky Mountains for six years, Ferris kept a diary of his adventures. This journal, the classic Life in the Rocky Mountains, accompanied by a map which he drew from memory, provided a unique and valuable picture of trapper and Indian life in the 1830s. Ferris also gave the public its first written description of Yellowstone’s amazing geysers.

As a businessman seeking to become a landowner, fur trader Ferris followed his brother Charles to Texas the year after the Texas Revolution. He became the official surveyor for Nacogdoches County, which then included much of northeast Texas west to the Trinity River. Although his brother returned to their hometown of Buffalo, New York, Warren Ferris spent another 35 years of his eventful life in Texas.

Surveying at the Three Forks of the Trinity in 1839, Ferris entered the area before John Neely Bryan, the traditionally recognized founder of Dallas, and Ferris’s surveys determined the line of streets and roads that shaped the future county. In 1847, Ferris settled down to farming east of White Rock Creek where he raised a family and helped build a community. This literate and versatile character was also a prolific letter writer, and much of the family correspondence to and from Buffalo has been preserved.

These Ferris letters, and other family materials covering the period 1828-1885, help reconstruct the exciting life and times of Warren Ferris. Although Ferris might appear to be a stereotypical figure of Frederick Jackson Turner’s trans-Mississippi West—fur trapper, surveyor, farmer—he is a complex and fascinating man. His long and varied career reveals some of the best and worst characteristics of the 19th century frontiersman.

ISBN – 0-87611-161-4
247 Pages
Hardback
6 1/4″ x 9 1/4″

Texas State Historical Association, 1998

Last Rides – Cowboys, Indians, Generals and Chiefs

This book presents the closing days of America’s untamed West as lived and recorded through the lens of three of the best-known photographers of the era: David Francis Barry, John C.H. Grabill, and L.A. Huffman. These men knew Custer and the 7th Cavalry, as well as the leaders of the Native people who fought valiantly to preserve their lands and their historic way of life.

Through the publication of their work, the photographs these men took gave people from coast to coast a realistic and sometimes spectacular image of what was happening on the frontier as the relentless waves of immigrants swept westward in search of land, gold, and new lives.

ISBN – 978-1-941052-32-7

256 Pages

Prong Horn Press, 2018

Letters of a Woman Homesteader

Letters of a Woman Homesteader

As a young widow with a small child, Elinore Pruitt left Denver in 1909 and set out for Wyoming, where she hoped to buy a ranch. Determined to prove that a lone woman could survive the hardships of homesteading, she initially worked as a housekeeper and hired hand for a neighbor–a kind but taciturn Scottish bachelor who she eventually married.

Spring and summers were hard, she concedes, and were taken up with branding, farming, doctoring cattle, and other chores. But with the arrival of fall, Pruitt found time to take her young daughter on camping trips and serve her neighbors as midwife, doctor, teacher, Santa Claus, and friend.

ISBN – 978-0-486-45142-8
130 Pages
Softback
5 1/2″ x 8 1/2″

Dover Publications, 2006

Lewis & Clark Tailor Made, Trail Worn

Lewis & Clark Tailor Made, Trail Worn – Army Life, Clothing, & Weapons of the Corps of Discovery

During the years 1803 to 1806 President Thomas Jefferson sent an official U.S. Army expedition across the North American continent. Although many aspects of the Lewis and Clark Expedition have been written about, the material objects worn and carried by its members have not received much attention. This book describes military life at the time of Lewis and Clark, individual items of clothing they used, and the weapons and equipment that made their trek a success.

Robert J. Moore, Jr. has used materials in archives and museums to locate and verify what the men wore, and Michael Haynes has painted and sketched a rich new version of the expedition based upon painstaking research. Items of Indian clothing and the wardrobes of interpreters and the French boatmen give a full picture of the many cultures that composed and influenced the Corps of Discovery. Weapons and accessories round out this complete record of what the expedition wore — and why.

ISBN – 1-56037-238-9
288 Pages
Hardback
10 1/2″ x 10 1/4″

Farcountry Press, 2003

Lewis & Clark Coloring Book

Lewis & Clark Coloring Book

Follow the Missouri River to the Pacific Northwest’s pristine beaches and back again. Follow the expedition as they discover new-to-science plants and animals, map half a continent, befriend local tribes, and preserve against the odds in an uncharted wilderness.

ISBN: 978-1-56037-713-9
63 Pages
Softback
8 3/8″ x 10 3/4″

Farcountry Press, 2018

Lewis And Clark And Me: A Dog’s Tale

Lewis and Clark and Me – A Dog’s Tale

In 1803, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark set off on a journey to explore the vast territory of the United States west of the Mississippi River. Accompanying Lewis and Clark and their team of explorers through this uncharted wilderness was Lewis’s dog, Seaman.

This is Seaman’s story. From his first meeting with Lewis to being mistaken for a bear by Indians who had never seen such a large dog to his encounters with wild animals both familiar and unfamiliar, Seaman’s tale is filled with joys of companionship and the tingling excitement of adventure.

ISBN: 978-0-8050-6368-4
64 Pages
Hardback
7 1/4″ x 9 1/4″

Henry Holt and Company, 2002

Life in the Far West

Life in the Far West

In this classic of western Americana, George Frederick Ruxton, who died in Saint Louis in 1848 at the youthful age of twenty-seven, brilliantly brings to life the heroic age of the Mountain Man. The author, from his intimate acquaintance with trappers and traders of the American Far West, vividly recounts the story of two of the most adventurous of these hardy pioneers — Killbuck and La Bonte, whose daring bravery, and hairbreadth escapes from their many Indian and “Spaniard” enemies were legend among their fellow frontiersmen.

ISBN – 978-0-8061-1534-4
252 Pages
Softback
5 1/2″ x 8 1/4″

University of Oklahoma Press, 1951