Joseph Reddeford Walker looms large in the lore of the early West. From the Missouri to the San Joaquin, from the Gila to the Yellowstone, Walker spent more than thirty years from the 1830s to the Civil War trapping beaver in the Rockies, bartering with the Crow, Ute, Cheyenne, Arapahoe, and Shoshone Indians, droving cattle and horses, and guiding emigrants and explorers.
Walker was associated with Captain Bonneville in the fur trade from 1832 to 1835, but we have only an incomplete account these years in Washington Irving s, The Adventures of Captain Bonneville and Zenas...