Bill Sublette (1799-1845) led two lives. Renowned as a hardy mountain man, he ranged the Missouri, Big Horn, Yellowstone, and Sweetwater River country between 1823 and 1833 hunting beaver, fighting Indians, and unwittingly opening the West for settlers (he proved that wagons could be used effectively on the Oregon Trail). Financial success and silk hats, which strangled the fur trade, later forced him to a less adventuresome life in St. Louis as a gentleman farmer, businessman, and politician.
Not only did Sublette help develop the rendezvous system in the fur trade and blaze the...
Bill Sublette (1799-1845) led two lives. Renowned as a hardy mountain man, he ranged the Missouri, Big Horn, Yellowstone, and Sweetwater River coun...
"By beginning where the standard works leave off and carrying the story up to its logical conclusion in 1865, this book fills a definite void in the history of the fur trade in the American West. Set in the upper Missouri country, which was bypassed by settlement until the 1860s, it focuses primarily upon the St. Louis firm of Pierre Chouteau, Jr., and Company, usually known as the American Fur Company....This is not the distorted and romanticized approach so typical of much of the literature on the earlier fur trade. Drama is inherent, but it is sound, well-conceived, carefully documented...
"By beginning where the standard works leave off and carrying the story up to its logical conclusion in 1865, this book fills a definite void in the h...
In 1839 a journalist for the New Orleans Picayune, Matthew C. Field, joined a company of merchants and tourists headed west on the Santa Fe Trail. Leaving Independence, Missouri, early in July "with a few wagons and a carefree spirit," Field recorded his vivid impressions of travel westward on the Santa Fe Trail and, on the return trip, eastward along the Cimarron Route. Written in verse in his journal and in eighty-five articles later published in the Picayune, Field's observations offer the modern reader a unique glimpse of life in the settlements of Mexico and on the Santa Fe Trail.
In 1839 a journalist for the New Orleans Picayune, Matthew C. Field, joined a company of merchants and tourists headed west on the Santa Fe Trail. ...
