Mountain Men and The Path to the Pacific

Reading this book was like listening to tall tales told around the dancing flames of a faraway campfire. One can almost meet the Grizzlys roar, the rushing river, the war cries of long forgotten warriors, and almost smell the mountain forests. Therein lies the key to the authors approach to historic storytelling in this book, as in his many other histories written for popular consumption on American Hesperian subjects, he vividly and impeccably writes grip and diminutive narratives ab turn out well researched biased individuals on the frontiers of the nineteenth century.He successfully provides the context for these narratives with an easy to understand explanation of Americas western expansion, and seamlessly bundles the entirety into a stylishly written story.Utley focuses on the period between the Lewis and Clark Expedition in1804 and the end of the western expansion era in the 1850s. He chooses his subjects non only because they provided the critical first move custodyt of America into its Far due west, besides because, he argues, their memoirs, maps, and knowledge of geography and the local Native Americans made rising settlement possible. I found his thesis well proven.The author provides a brief historical context in each(prenominal) chapter and relates his subjects adventures from the layabout up often quoting vivid primary sources that exposes their contradictions their courage and illiteracy, ambition and uncouthness, their hunger for adventure and appetite for violence, and their often inevitable tragic endings. Each chapter focuses on unity or two colorful personalities, men with names like Crazy Bill Williams and Jeremiah Liver-Eating Johnson. The compelling personalities whitethorn not contrisolelye to proving the authors thesis, but they do make the book an enjoyable adopt.The author devotes more than just one chapter to his favorite, Jedediah Smith, a man as austere as his colleagues were abrasive, who carefully mapped and detaile d his travels. Smith perfectly embodies the authors thesis, that the mountain mens maps and journals were essential to the opening of the Far West. Utley believes that Smith was point man in the fillment for Oregon1, and did more to open the Far westerly frontier than any other early pioneer did. Utley notes that Smith was a man in acutely contrast to most other mountaineers, much(prenominal) as Jim Bridger, who were stereotypical mountain men, full of whiskey and gall and telling tall tales, as did Bridger, about petrified forests with peetrified birds render peetrified songs.2Utley writes a revealing key passage about President Jefferson that delineates the books central approach to the subject of the Mountain Men. In 1802, Jefferson read a British trappers memoir about his travels in the NorthWest. Alexander Mackenzies book inspired Jefferson to send a band of hearty men on a reconnaissance to scout the unkn avow Far West, to discover the continental passage, colonize the Pacific Coast and tap its fur resources, and establish commerce with the Orient.3 In Utleys view, this was no mere reconnaissance, it was the first step in what was to be a century of nation building.Utley expands the scope of his book by elevating Lewis and Clark, who Jefferson delegated to lead this tour into the new territories of the Louisiana Purchase, and those who later continued the Western exploration, as being more than explorers and trappers, they were expansionists who guided America to its westward boundary on the Pacific. By elevating the signification of his subjects, Utley elevates the overall importance of his book.Utley begins in 1804, with the Corps of Discoverys expedition to survey the new lands. Frontiersmen and others familiar with the ways of the Native Americans joined Lewis and Clarks expedition, such as John Colter, a riverboat pioneer, and George Drouillard, a hunter who was half Shawnee and fluent in Indian sign language. The Corps of Discovery mapped the new land, but they withal reported a wilderness ripe for trapping and settlement.What the Lewis and Clark Expedition reported on their return enthralled the nation and fired the imaginations of Americans hungry for opportunity. The first to die the movement west were independent entrepreneurs hoping to enrich themselves by harvesting the abundant wildlife the hunter-trappers.The book chronologically and geographically charts the progress of the mountaineers, always using the mountain mens history of discovery, exploitation of resources, and mutual cooperation. Utley uses copious primary sources, including the detailed day-to-day diary of Jedediah Smith, who catalogued minutia, such as the changing beaver population, and high drama, such as having his scalp sewn back on to his head after a Grizzly clawed him. If you have a needle and thread, git it out and sew up my wounds around my head, he asked of a fellow trapper 4. Utley quotes other primary sources, such as John Bradley, a naturalist who kept a detailed journal traveling with a trapping expedition to the Pacific led by John Jacob Astor. 5Utley addresses what motivated these early pioneers of the Far West, quoting Warren black Angus Ferris, Westward Ho It is the sixteenth of the second month, A.D. 1830 and I have joined a trapping, trading, hunting expedition to the Rocky Mountains. Why, I scarcely know for the motives that bring forth me to this step were of a mixed complexionCuriosity, a love of wild adventure, and perhaps also a hope of profit. 6Utley draws on primary sources to describe a run-in between Hugh Glass and a Grizzly with cubs He lay on his back, bleeding from gashes in his scalp, face, chest, back, shoulder, arm, hand, and thigh. With each gasp, blood bubbled from a puncture in his throat. Glass companions, thinking him near death, left him and went ahead. But Glass was made of true mountain man grit. He rallied, and crawled back to civilization. Utley writes, Berries and a torpid f reight train smashed with a stone provided his first nourishment.The Grand River supplied water. He dug edible roots with a sharp rock. Chance turned up a dead buffalo with marrow still rich in the bones. Later wolves brought down a buffalo calf that he succeeded in seizing. In a six-week demonstration of incredible strength, fortitude, luck, and determination, Glass crawled back to Fort Kiowa, nearly two hundred miles. This story exemplifies Utleys dramatic flair by using colorful characters and events in writing history designed to appeal to the mass audience.Utley addresses the social identity of the mountain men, profiling the diverse sampling of immigrants and culturally dysfunctional individuals uncoerced to live a solitary existence, disconnected from family and community. He examines their alliances with Native tribes, occasionally even marrying into the tribe, and develops a theme that these alliances produced a significant contribution in maintaining imperturbable relati ons, and obtaining future tribal cooperation in exploration and provisioning.Utley also recounts the annual trapper Frolics, when mountaineers gathered to sell their furs and skins to retail traders, replenish their weapons and supplies, swapped tall tales, and threw the frontier equivalent of a redbrick fraternity toga party.While Utley always presents colorful events and personalities, he always returns to his primary theme that the detailed maps and knowledge that the mountain men recorded and shared with each other made it possible for others to later navigate the unknown and difficult mountain regions. That their information filled the vacuum of understanding about the new territories and at a time prompted the great western expansion, revealing the best routes to cross rivers and mountain passes in summer and winter, as well as where there was relative safety and where peril was to found.In a later, secondary wave of exploration, Utley relates how one veteran mountain man, Kit Carson, led several military expeditions in the early and mid-1840s to the Far West to consolidate the governments domain and control of the new territories. Commanded by John C. Fremont, who would become known thereafter as The Pathfinder, the expeditions continued and completed the Western exploration started by Lewis and Clark. Utley argues that these military expeditions promoted the great waves of emigration by wagon trains across the Sierra Nevada Mountains to Oregon and California.A note about Utleys illustrations, generally period artwork and primary source period maps. At first glance they seemed lifeless, but they ultimately provided something akin to a Rosetta Stone that helped this reader to clasp the enormity what the mountain men faced and endured.The joy the author demonstrates through-out the book reveals his almost spiritual identification with his subjects and the terrain they pioneered. His enthusiasm and command of detail serves to fully engage the reader, which to me is the gift of a great history book.But as much as the book succeeds, its methodology raises questions about its limitations the author is invested in his own formulaic pattern of popular storytelling, one wonders whether he is choosing his subjects for marketability over significance. The book is informative, engaging, and enjoyable, even inspiring, but its formulaic approach may remove the potential for subverter perspective or revealing interpretation. This may be an inevitable consequence of success for any historian, and I suppose one most historians would welcome, but it may limit the books scholarly potential.One additional criticism in Utleys view, the Mountain Men pursued commerce and produced national growth, but the narrative accepts their chauvinist behavior without judgment and accepts their cruelty virtually without comment, which many could interpret as a lack of balance.The ideal popular demographic soft touch for this book are those who love American hi storical adventure those who love John Fords films, or Ken Burns genteel War documentary, or books about Mountain Men. If one enjoyed the film about Jeremiah Johnson starring Robert Redford, this is a history book made for you. For scholars, it provides an engrossing and interesting read that doesnt sacrifice its historical themes. For young students, it successfully presents those details that fire the imagination. In other words, its sweeping panorama deserves its sweeping audience. I enjoyed reading it, acquire from it, and re1 P.67 2 p.173 3 p.3 4 p.56 5 p.24 6 p.149