Mountain man
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- The Mountain Men is also the name of a 1980 movie starring Charlton Heston.
Mountain men were trappers and explorers who roamed the North American Rocky Mountains from about 1810 to the early 1840s. Although primarily of Canadian or American origin, mountain men were of many ethnic, social and religious backgrounds. These men were primarily motivated by profit, trapping beaver and selling the skins, although some were more interested in exploring the West. Most mountain men today roam in the mountains of the west or the swamps in the southern states.
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[edit] History
An approximate 3,000 men ranged the mountains in the window between 1820 and 1840, the peak beaver harvesting period. While there were many free trappers, most mountain men were employed by fur companies. The life of a company man was almost militarized. The men had mess groups, hunted and trapped in brigades and always reported to the head of the trapping party. This man was called a "boosway", a bastardization of the term bourgeois. He was the leader of the brigade, the head trader and overall CEO.
In 1824, the rendezvous system was invented by William Henry Ashley. Companies would haul supplies to specific mountain locations in the spring, engage in trading with trappers, and bring pelts back to communities on the Missouri and Mississippi rivers in the fall. Major William Henry Ashley started this system through the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. He sold this business to the outfit of Smith, Jackson and Sublette, while still making a profit by selling that firm their supplies. This system continued when other firms, particularly the American Fur Company, entered the field.
A second trading and supply center grew up in Taos, in what is today New Mexico. This trade attracted, besides Anglo Americans, a large number of French Americans from Louisiana and some French Canadian trappers. Some New Mexicans also pursued the beaver trade, as Mexican citizens initially had some legal advantages. Trappers and traders in the Southwest covered territory that was generally inaccessible to the large fur companies, including New Mexico, Nevada, California and central and southern Utah.
Beaver pelts had been needed to make the beaver hats, initially popular in England. Fashions changed in the early 1840s, making beaver less valuable at the same time they became harder to find due to over trapping. The opening of the Oregon Trail and the use of the Mormon Trail provided trappers who wished to stay in the West opportunities for employment as guides and hunters.
[edit] Mode of living
The stereotypical mountain man has been depicted as dressed in buckskin and a coonskin cap, sporting bushy facial hair and carrying a Hawken rifle and Bowie knife, commonly referred to as a "scalpin' knife." They have also been romanticized as honorable men with their own chivalrous code, loners who would help those in need but who had found their home in the wild. Although there was some truth to this romantic image, some mountain men were gruff, while others were well-mannered, some remained in the wilderness for life while others retired as businessmen in eastern communities or established themselves as farmers in the west.
Most trappers traveled and worked in companies and their dress combined woolen hats and cloaks with serviceable Indian style leather breeches and shirts. Mountain men often wore moccasins, but generally carried a pair of heavy boots. Each mountain man also carried basic gear, which could include arms, powder horns and a shot pouch, knives and hatchets, canteens, cooking utensils, and supplies of tobacco, coffee, salt and pemmican. Horses or mules were essential, a riding horse for each man and at least one for carrying supplies and furs.
With the exception of coffee, food supplies duplicated the diet of native tribes in various locations. Fresh red meat, fowl, and fish were generally available. Some plant foods, such as fruit and berries, were easy for the men to harvest. But foods which required time for preparation, such as roots, dried meat and pemmican, were generally obtained from tribes through trading. However, in times of crisis and bad weather, mountain men were known to slaughter and eat their horses and mules.
[edit] Free trappers
A free trapper was a mountain man who, in today's terms, would be called a free agent. He was responsible to no one but himself and claimed no loyalties to any specific fur company, trading his pelts to whoever would provide him with the best price. This contrasts sharply with a "company man" who was typically in debt to one fur company for the cost of his gear and subsequently traded only with them (and was often under the direct command of company representatives). Some company men who managed to pay off their debt could then become free traders using the gear they had earned—even still selling to the same corporation when the price was agreeable.
[edit] Notable figures
- Jim Bridger (1804 - 1881) came west in 1822 at the age of 17, as a member of Ashley's Hundred exploring the Upper Missouri drainage. He was among the first non-natives to see the geysers and other natural wonders of the Yellowstone region. He is also considered one of the first men of European descent, along with Étienne Provost, to see the Great Salt Lake. Due to its salinity, for a time he believed it to be an arm of the Pacific Ocean. In 1830, Bridger purchased shares in the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, working in competition with the Hudson's Bay Company and John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company. He established Fort Bridger in southwestern Wyoming. He was also well known as a teller of tall tales.
- John "Liver-Eating" Johnson (1824 - 1900) was one of the more notable latter-day mountain men. In a biography by Dennis McLelland, Johnston is seen roaming Wyoming and Montana, gathering in beaver, buffalo and wolf hides. Johnston was a free trapper, unaffiliated with a company and charging what he wanted for the hides he worked to secure. Elements of his story were portrayed in the hit movie, Jeremiah Johnson.
- Jedediah Smith (1799 - circa 1831) was a hunter, trapper, and fur trader whose explorations were significant in opening the American West to expansion by white settlers. Smith is generally considered the first man of European descent to cross the future state of Nevada, the first to traverse Utah from north to south and from west to east; and the first American to enter California by an overland route. He was also first to scale the High Sierras and explore the area from San Diego to the banks of the Columbia River. He was also a successful businessman, being a full partner in the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, after the departure of Ashley. Smith was known for significant facial scarring due to a grizzly bear attack along the Cheyenne River. Members of his party witnessed Smith fighting the bear, which ripped open his side with its claws and took his head in its mouth. The bear suddenly retreated and the men ran to help Smith. The trappers fetched water, bound up his broken ribs, cleaned his wounds and sewed up the cuts on his head and ear.
[edit] Further reading
- Fred R. Gowans, Rocky Mountain Rendezvous (Layton, Utah: Gibbs M. Smith, 1985), 13.
- Hafen, LeRoy R., editor. Fur Trappers and Traders of the Far Southwest. 1965, Utah State University Press, Logan, Utah, (1997 reprint). ISBN 0-87421-235-9.
- Orville C. Loomer, "Fort Henry," Fort Union Fur Trade Symposium Proceedings September 13-15, 1990 (Williston, Friends of Fort Union Trading Post, 1994), 79.
- McLelland, Dennis. The Avenging Fury of the Plains, John "Liver-Eating" Johnston, Exploding the Myths - Discovering the Man,
- Morgan, Dale L. Jedediah Smith and the Opening of the American West. Bison Books, University of Nebraska Press, 1964. ISBN 0803251386
