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    Tales of the Wild West: Mountain Men
    Tales of the Wild West: Mountain Men
    Tales of the Wild West: Mountain Men
    Ebook79 pages1 hour

    Tales of the Wild West: Mountain Men

    By Rick Steber

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    About this ebook

    "Born into every generation are a few restless souls who long for adventure. In the early 1800s this wild breed became mountain men who headed up the Missouri, crossed the Rock-ies and continued west, hunting, trapping and exploring as they went.

    One mountainman,reflecting the general attitude of the day, wrote, 'We found the richest place for beaver we had yet come across, and it took us forty days to clean that section.' Valley by valley, stream by stream, the mountain men eliminated the beaver. They reasoned they would never pass that way again and, anyway, why should they leave fur for the competition?

    A typical mountain man had grown up in Kentucky, Virginia or Tennessee hunting squirrels, deer, coon and turkey gobblers. When civilization pressed in he escaped, in search of places no white man had been. Where beaver were plentiful and would come easily to his traps. Where there were no property lines. No neighbors. No boundaries. Where he could come and go as he pleased and the world, as far as the eye could see, was his. The heyday of the mountain men spanned only a few short decades. By the 1840s wagon pioneers were flooding into the West. And the free-roaming mountain men disappeared.
    "

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRick Steber
    Release dateDec 12, 2012
    ISBN9781301562633
    Tales of the Wild West: Mountain Men

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      Book preview

      Tales of the Wild West - Rick Steber

      Introduction

      Born into every generation are a few restless souls who long for adventure. In the early 1800s this wild breed became mountain men who headed up the Missouri River, crossed the Rocky Mountains and continued west, hunting, trapping and exploring as they went.

      One mountain man, reflecting the general attitude of the day, wrote: We found the richest place for beaver we had yet come across, and it took us forty days to clean that section. Valley by valley, stream by stream, the mountain men eliminated the beaver. They reasoned they would never pass that way again and, anyway, why should they leave fur for the competition?

      A typical mountain man had grown up in Kentucky, Virginia or Tennessee hunting squirrels, deer, coon and turkey gobblers. When civilization pressed in he escaped, in search of places no white man had been. Where beaver were plentiful and would come easily to his traps. Where there were no property lines. No neighbors. No boundaries. Where he could come and go as he pleased and the world, as far as the eye could see, was his.

      The heyday of the mountain men spanned only a few short decades. By the 1840s wagon pioneers were flooding west.And the era of the free-roaming mountain man ended.

      Trailblazer

      The typical mountain man was born on a small farm in the East and soon came to realize that if he stayed where he was, his life was as predictable as the endless string of chores he performed.

      He listened to stories about local men who had gone off to the Rocky Mountains and their exploits with bands of roving Indians, grizzly bears and the fortunes they brought back in beaver furs. He dreamed of that life and finally he kissed his mother and his sisters good-by, shook hands with his father and brothers and walked away. Without turning to wave he disappeared down the path that would lead to a life of wild adventure.

      In St. Louis he signed on to become a company trapper. The company outfitted him and he trapped that first winter on the headwaters of the Missouri River, bringing in several thousand dollars worth of furs. He was compensated with a fraction of that amount.

      This is as bad as working on the farm, except I’m in the great outdoors, he told himself. He swore the company would never own him body and soul like it did some of the men. After a few years he became a free trapper, traveling and trapping where he pleased and selling his furs to the highest bidder.

      In his wanderings he crossed and re-crossed the Rockies as if they were a low bridge. He plunged into the inhospitable frontier, tracing streams to their source and exploring where no other white man had ever set foot.

      It was the farm boy and others like him, living out their dreams, who were the trailblazers. They helped to open the West for all who followed.

      Indian Trappers

      Before the coming of the white man the Indians of North America regularly trapped beaver for their meat and dense fur.

      They employed several time-tested methods. During warm weather months Indians constructed and used box traps made from saplings tied together with rawhide. Another way was to destroy a section of a beaver dam beneath the surface. In the hole they set a trap fashioned of long poles pointed on one end. The beaver soon would realize the water level of its pond was dropping and investigate. Finding the hole it moved into the trap until its head became stuck in the small end of the trap and it drowned.

      In winter Indians walked out on the pond ice and made soundings to determine where the beaver had burrowed escape routes. They chopped holes in the ice and pushed their nets to the bottom, effectively covering the runs. On a given signal, men shoved spears into the pile of sticks that constituted the beavers’ lodge. The frantic beavers tried to escape down their runs. When a beaver bumped into a net it was quickly hauled to the surface and the beaver clubbed to death.

      This primitive method was successful, although the number of beaver taken was limited. The animals were able to regenerate themselves within a season or two and for countless centuries their population remained relatively stable.

      Then the white man came into the

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