Authors: Robert M. Utley, Peter H. Dana
ISBN-13: 9780803295643, ISBN-10: 0803295642
Format: Paperback
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Date Published: November 2004
Edition: (Non-applicable)
Robert M. Utley, former chief historian for the National Park Service and a founder of the Western Historical Association, is the author of fifteen books on the Western frontier, including Billy the Kid: A Short and Violent Life and Custer and the Great Controversy: The Origin and Development of a Legend, both available in Bison Books editions. After Lewis and Clark was originally published as A Life Wild and Perilous.
In 1807, a year after Lewis and Clark returned from the shores of the Pacific, groups of trappers and hunters began to drift West to tap the rich stocks of beaver and to trade with the Native nations. Colorful and eccentric, bold and adventurous, mountain men such as John Colter, George Drouillard, Hugh Glass, Andrew Henry, and Kit Carson found individual freedom and financial reward in pursuit of pelts. Their knowledge of the country and its inhabitants served the first mapmakers, the army, and the streams of emigrants moving West in ever-greater numbers. The mountain men laid the foundations for their own displacement, as they led the nation on a westward course that ultimately spread the American lands from sea to sea.
1 | Colter and Drouillard : continental crossing | 1 |
2 | Colter and Drouillard : mountain man prototypes | 11 |
3 | Robinson, Hoback, and Reznor : doomed trio | 23 |
4 | Jedediah Smith : atypical mountain man | 39 |
5 | Jedediah Smith : South Pass and the Siskadee | 55 |
6 | Etienne Provost : L'homme des montagnes | 69 |
7 | Jedediah Smith : California, Oregon, and the Cimarron | 83 |
8 | Ewing Young : Gila Trails to California | 103 |
9 | Joe Walker : the Great Basin and the Sierras | 117 |
10 | Bill Sublette : struggle of the fur giants | 131 |
11 | Warren Ferris : trapper as cartographer | 149 |
12 | Tom Fitzpatrick : missionaries to Oregon | 157 |
13 | Jim Bridger : end of an era | 173 |
14 | Kit Carson : mapping the way west | 185 |
15 | Joe Meek and Doc Newell : trappers as colonists | 207 |
16 | Kit Carson : Fremont's third expedition | 223 |
17 | Kit Carson : the continent spanned | 241 |
18 | Jim Bridger : filling in the map | 263 |
The maps | 287 |