The era of the mountain men comes to life in the works of a number of twentieth-century historians and biographers. Prominent among them is General Hiram M. Chittenden, graduated from West Point in 1884 and assigned to the Corps of Engineers with which he served with great distinction till his retirement in 1910. His The American Fur Trade in the Far West (2 vols., 1902, 1973) is considered one of the best comprehensive sources by most knowledgeable students of the mountain men and the fur trade. Hardly a scholar who has written on this subject since the appearance of Chittenden's work has failed to cite him as an authority. An outstanding feature of the work is the skilled organization of the vast research into a coherent exposition of the mechanics of the fur business and the lucid, coherent narrative of the trade during the period it flourished from Lewis and Clark to the building of Fort Bridger in 1843.

Another very useful history is David J. Weber's The Taos Trappers: The Fur Trade in the Far Southwest, 1540—1846 (1971). The mountain men centered at Taos contributed importantly to the wealth that flowed along the Santa Fe Trail. Even churchmen and government officials illegally entered this lucrative trade. In tracing this complex enterprise through more than three centuries, Weber has performed a feat of organization. Gordon Speck's Breeds and Half-Breeds (1969) gives an excellent view of one aspect of the fur trade elsewhere treated only tangentially. He concentrates on the Indians, Negroes, French, and other racial groups and mixtures who were trappers. He presents a very good treatment of George Drouillard, Ed Rose, and Jim Beckwourth, for example. The Knopf prizewinning history, America's Western Frontiers (1967) by John A. Hawgood, a scholar from England who has spent extended periods researching his subject in America, is a highly readable study of the West the mountain men and settlers won.

Bernard DeVoto's The Course of Empire and Across the Wide Missouri are indispensable. The former concentrates largely on showing how the United States relentlessly extended its boundaries from the Atlantic to the Pacific. DeVoto traces the ever-growing feeling of Americans that they must become "a single society occupying this continental unit." The last half of the book describes the barriers to this progress and the violent competition of various national groups to win in what became a race for very high stakes. The twenty-three excellent maps which accompany the text are particularly elucidating. They show clearly "The Spanish Entrances," "Early Ideas of North America," "Hudson Bay Region," "Vérendrye's Progress," "Escalante's Journey," "Santa Fe Trail," "The Gates of the Continent," and several others. The last two chapters–"Westward the Course of Empire," and "The Passage to India"–are a marvelously climactic expression of DeVoto's unique enthusiasm about the West.

Across the Wide Missouri restricts its main narrative to the seven-year period, 1832—1838, when the Scottish dude, Sir William Drummond Stewart, with his lavish retinue, trekked about the West. The Dramatis Personae DeVoto prefaces to the book indicates that he incorporated almost every major mountain man with each fur company from Colter to the dying out of the fur trade by mid-century. "The Chronology of the Mountain Fur Trade" and the notes and bibliography make the most congenial, reliable, concise guide to the general reader–as the book itself will make him an enthusiast and a well-oriented amateur.

Although the significance of mountain men has been recognized in many histories, they are seen in all their infinite variety in biographies, dictated memoirs, and personal journals. The most comprehensive collection of biographies is that edited by LeRoy Hafen, The Mountain Men and the Fur Trade of the Far West (1965—1972) (nine volumes of text and one of bibliography). It consists of a 160-page account of the fur trade by Hafen and biographies of some three hundred mountain men written by more than seventy-five scholars. There are the notables like Jim Beckwourth, the five Bents, Kit Carson, Henry Chatillon (Francis Parkman's guide), Thomas Fitzpatrick, Hugh Glass, Moses "Black" Harris, Andrew Henry, Dr. John McLaughlin, Peter Skene Ogden, Daniel Potts, Etienne Provost, Osborne Russell, the four Robidouxs, Jedediah, "Peg Leg," and three other Smiths, the five Sublettes, "Old Bill" Williams, Nathaniel J. Wyeth, Ewing Young, and others. The biographies individualize these men of every capacity and personality.

A number of the mountain men treated in the Hafen set are also the subject of first-rate biographies. Notable among these is that of William "Old Bill" Williams. Old Bill Williams, Mountain Man (1936) by Alpheus H. Favour, is one of the earliest and best of the biographies of mountain men. Favour (1880—1939) was born of Puritan ancestry in Natick, Massachusetts, and as a young lawyer went to practice in Prescott, Arizona. He early developed an interest in the fabulous adventures of William Shirley Williams. Born in North Carolina, brought up in Missouri near St. Louis, Williams was at first an itinerant preacher and missionary to the Osage Indians. Ironically, they converted him, and after acting as guide with the Lt. Sibley survey of the Santa Fe Trail, he went to the Southwest where he became acknowledged by others–as well as himself–as "the master trapper." His long life was filled with hazardous adventures. He was a close friend of the noted Joseph Reddeford Walker, and he went trapping with and knew well the most famous trappers in the West.

In view of Williams's usual integrity it is surprising to learn of his absconding with the money he received for selling some furs for the Utes. But it is as a guide in the southern Colorado Rockies with John Charles Frémont in Frémont's disastrous 1849 expedition that the worst-but totally unsubstantiated–charges were made about him. Frémont charged that Williams cannibalized his companions in their desperate attempt to reach safety. Frémont proved himself ruthless in driving his men in that fateful attempt to cross the impassable southern Colorado Rockies in winter exactly as Zebulon Montgomery Pike had tried to do forty years before. Favour's thoroughly researched account of Old Bill Williams was his lifelong endeavor, and in it he leaves a convincing portrait of Williams as a natural leader in whatever group he found himself. Favour notes with satisfaction that a river and a mountain and a city were named after him.

Another especially noteworthy mountain man of varied accomplishments was William Sublette, partner of Jedediah Smith and David Jackson in the fur company they purchased from General Ashley in 1826. He had begun trapping as an Ashley man, joining the second expedition in the spring of 1823. John E. Sunder's Bill Sublette, Mountain Man ( 1959) is comprehensive and detailed. One reviewer of this book has said: ". . . the author shows a fine gift for bringing life to events long past; and several of Sublette's near-brushes with death find the reader holding his breath. . . ." Sublette was a skilled trapper himself and the effective leader of brigades of company traders. He actually kept the company going while Smith was away on his two exploring expeditions along the Pacific coast. With unusual acumen he conducted the company business with suppliers in St. Louis. He helped develop the rendezvous system, laid out the first wagon route through South Pass, and established what was later Fort Laramie. He helped to break John Jacob Astor's early monopoly on the fur trade. Returning to Missouri, he amassed a great fortune in business and was influential in the founding of Kansas City.

Jim Beckwourth, another Ashley man, must be at once the most colorful and controversial of the mountain men. Jim Beckwourth: Black Mountain Man and War Chief of the Crows (1972) by Elinor Wilson is a most meticulous study. Beckwourth was known as "the Gaudy Liar" largely because of the elaborate tales of his valor he dictated to T. D. Bonner, who published them as The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth (1856). The 1972 biography is based on evidence gleaned from records of Beckwourth's travels in all parts of the West. The chief excellence, however, is the care with which Wilson has assessed these materials, distinguishing between what can be documented and corroborated from other sources and what is inherently contradictory or unlikely. She concludes Beckwourth was not nearly "the Gaudy Liar" he has been thought.

Stanley Vestal in his Joe Meek: The Merry Mountain Man (1952) sees this Ashley man not as the chief liar but as the chief jester among mountainmen. He did extensive trapping and Indian fighting with such stalwarts as Jim Bridger, Tom Fitzpatrick, Louis Vasquez, Moses "Black" Harris, and Kit Carson, to name a few. After the last rendezvous in 1840, he went on to Oregon as a settler, became a peace officer, a legislator, and an envoy from Oregon to consult President Polk. He was notorious for his practical jokes, tall tales, Jacksonian democracy–and Indian women. He felt the old-time Indians were truly religious. Vestal's account of Meek is highly informative, analytical, and pleasant reading.

One of the most famous of the mountain men is the subject of J. Cecil Alter's Jim Bridger (1962), a revised and enlarged edition of James Bridger: A Historical Narrative (1925). In this lifelong study Alter has compiled a comprehensive, coherent narrative of every known event in Bridger's life, including good detail of his relations with everyone else he met. For example, Alter describes the 1826 encampment on the Bear River, in Willow Valley, named Cache Valley by Beckwourth, who tells of the trappers' caching seventy-five packs of beaver pelts. At this time Bridger was sent down the Bear River to find its mouth; in doing so he discovered the Great Salt Lake. Tasting the water he supposed it was an arm of the Pacific Ocean. The book, of course, describes Dr. Whitman extracting an arrowhead from Bridger's back at the Green River camp on August 12, 1835. It also recounts his troubles with the Mormons. Especially valuable are the numerous descriptions of Bridger: his speech, skill in sign language, his intuitive geographic sense, his character, and his values. Alter cites the evaluations of Bridger made by Father De Smet, Casper Collins, General Dodge, and others. This is a rich and satisfying account of one of the most skilled of mountain men.

Jedediah Smith and the Opening of the West by Dale L. Morgan (1953) is the preeminent biography of a mountain man by a western historian who has no superior. In a mere eight years in the West Smith became the mountain man à outrance. For him this meant not only trapping beaver and leading successful brigades of trappers. It meant his becoming an entrepreneur and explorer, and seeing more of the West than any other man of his time. He had joined the Ashley party in 1822 and survived the 1823 massacre of thirteen of Ashley's ninety-man second Missouri expedition by the Arikara Indians. Within a year he was head of an Ashley party; in two years he was Ashley's partner, and a year later he bought Ashley's company as senior partner along with David Jackson and Bill Sublette.

Smith and his men were at the 1825 rendezvous in Cache Valley and the area north of Salt Lake, which he considered his "home of the wilderness. " He set off for California in the spring of 1826, proceeding south through Utah and across Nevada and the Mojave Desert to the incredibly rich San Gabriel Mission with its vast meadows and fields, vineyards, and orchards. Smith and his men were astounded to see the herd of 40,000 cattle, 2,000 horses, 400 sheep, and all the rest. Smith records in his diary that he approached this Catholic stronghold with great trepidation, for he had heard tales that aliens had been detained and persecuted for their heretical religion or prosecuted as spies. He received from Father Jose Sanchez, however, a bountiful hospitality, new clothes, excellent food and lodging, wine, and even "Segars." This stay at the mission is a rare portrayal of the meeting of three radically diverse racial groups: the Catholics with their combination of piety and earthiness, the Indians superficially converted and essentially enslaved, and the American mountain men, intruding aliens. Smith, with his Protestant sternness and austerity, was ill at ease in the presence of the Mexican and Indian women whose dress and behavior seemed improper.

With chapter twelve, "The California Quagmire," Morgan recounts the trials and tragedies of Smith's second (1827) expedition to California and on to Oregon. Following the same route as the year before, Smith approached the Mojave villages not suspecting that they "dissembled well." Suddenly raising a war cry they fell upon the party and "within seconds Brown, Campbell, Cunningham, Deromme, Gobel, Lacross, Ortago, Ratelle, Relle, and Robiseau were dead." Smith escaped. After visiting San Gabriel again, he picked up his men who had stayed in California the previous year and headed north for the Oregon country. Here he was set upon by the Umpqua Indians, who slaughtered nineteen of his men. Surviving this third massacre, he and his three remaining men straggled into Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River. There "Big Doctor" John McLaughlin, his ardent Hudson's Bay rival, generously took care of all the needs of Smith and his men that winter and in the spring sent a party out to recover what could be found of Smith's goods. (A total of ninety-four mountain men of the Smith and Ashley brigades were killed by Indians between 1823 and 1829.)

Smith sold his share in the company, left the rendezvous of 1830, and returned to St. Louis, where he reinvested his capital in trade goods and "twenty-two mule-drawn wagons" to enter the Santa Fe trade. Riding off some distance from the wagon train looking for desperately needed water, he was killed by Comanches on May 27, 1831.

Everybody knows Smith was a religious man–likely one of the very few in this calling; he was most affectionately attached to his family, often referring to himself in letters as "your unworthy son"; he was especially solicitous of the welfare of his men. On one occasion when crossing the Nevada desert one of his men dropped to the sands dying of thirst, and Smith took a little brass kettle and trudged miles till he found water and came back to revive him. Morgan's biography of Smith concludes with a passage by an unknown eulogist: ". . . yet was he modest, never obtrusive, charitable `without guile' . . . a man whom none could approach without respect, or know without esteem . . . . he must not be forgotten." Having used every known source about Smith and given more than one hundred pages of notes, Morgan has here produced a masterpiece.

The long-lost manuscript journal of Smith's first expedition to California, which Dale Morgan had confidently predicted would some day be found, was recently discovered and published: The Southwest Expedition of Jedediah S. Smith: His Personal Account of the Journey to California 1826—1827, (1977) edited with an introduction by George R. Brooks. It contains also the Daybook, both accounts and narrative, by Harrison G. Rogers, Smith's clerk, on which Brooks suggests Smith evidently drew occasionally to fill in details and events he had neglected to record. Jedediah Smith's journal is surely the best kept by a mountain man. Its genius lies in its meditative quality, its philosophic inquiring into the meaning of his actions and his life itself.

Journal of a Trapper (1965) by Osborne Russell, edited by Aubrey L. Haines, is another notable mountain man document. Born in a little town in Maine, Russell found himself in Independence, Missouri, in April 1834, at the age of twenty, where he joined the Columbia River Fishing and Trading Company, which was fitting out for an expedition to the mouth of the Columbia. His book is particularly well written and is fascinating because of the author's intense interest in the new western environment. He is ecstatic about the Wind River Mountains and the mountains in the Yellowstone and Three Forks regions. He is fascinated to find petrified sea shells on the mountains and geysers and an oil spring on a fork of the "Popo-azia" River, as he calls it. He takes books out of the Fort Hall Library when he goes trapping and meditates on politics, literature, religion, and the risks of death in the mountains.

A few mountain men were so adept at avoiding death in the mountains that their exploits inspired legends, and none of the western adventurers was more legendary than Kit Carson. In Dear Old Kit: The Historical Christopher Carson (1968) Harvey Lewis Carter has tried "to set the record straight," to replace the hero worship and legend with documented fact, and especially to repudiate one of the most egregious creators of a pseudo-Carson, Oliver P. Wiggins. In pursuing his task of presenting the historical Carson, he has let Carson speak for himself accurately for the first time. Carson's reminiscences were dictated, Carter has discovered, to John Mostin. But the inaccurate elaborations included by Dr. Dewitt C. Peters have here been excluded. Every person, place, and event Carson mentions is identified. The double column format adds to the ease of understanding the materials. The Kit Carson Memoirs, 1809—1856 are in one column and Carter's extensively researched notes and comments are adjacent. Carter's essay, "Carson the Man: A New Appraisal" is a concise summary of Carson as trapper, trader, army guide, and man of character. This last is a view that few Navajos, at least, have held of him since 1864 when he helped the Army defeat them and drive them on the Long March to Fort Sumner.

Fort Sumner was a military post, but some forts such as Bent's Fort and Fort Laramie began as fur trading posts that figured importantly in the lives of the mountain men. In the 1830s such outposts began to serve the travelers that flooded over the Oregon Trail and the Santa Fe Trail. By mid century the demise of the fur trade was evident, and many of these trading posts were bought and made into forts by the army as the incursions of whites into Indian territories promoted hostilities. Histories of some of these forts, memoirs, and letters of soldiers, journalists, and travelers of all sorts bring to life the interrelationships of mountain men, Indians, soldiers, immigrants, missionaries, dudes, scientists, surveyors, and others. Brief mention of a few of these histories will clarify the major confrontations and conflicts that characterized life beyond the frontier during the period of exploration.

Bent's Old Fort was built on the Arkansas River in 1833 by the brothers Charles and William Bent and their partner, Ceran St. Vrain. It served on the Santa Fe Trail much as Fort Laramie did on the Oregon Trail. The southwestern Indians and mountain men traded their furs and pelts for supplies brought to the fort from St. Louis. Santa Fe traders, adventurers, and soldiers found the old fort a welcome place of accommodation, rest, and celebration. David Lavender in his Bent's Fort (1954) delineates the history and brings alive the people and activities associated with it. Kit Carson, Old Bill Williams, and Jim Beckwourth frequented the place, and travelers like Francis Parkman, George Frederick Ruxton, and Lewis Garrard stayed there briefly and left interesting descriptions. Many extolled the flapjacks, pumpkin pies, and other delectations prepared by Black Charlotte.

With the murder of his brother Charles, governor of New Mexico, in an uprising in Taos, the decline of the fur trade, and the rising Indian hostilities, William Bent loaded his goods, employees, and family into wagons in 1849 and set fire to the fort. He moved down the Arkansas a few miles and built a new fort which he operated for eight years and finally leased to the army. He retired to his ranch on the Purgatoire where he died in 1869. It has been said by one scholar that no other book on the Santa Fe Trail can match Lavender's work. Lavender communicates a "blend of narrative power, pictorial sense, scrupulous scholarship, and awareness of the great American melodrama." Some place Lavender's history alongside the works of Parkman and Prescott. The Old Bent's Fort was reconstructed in exact detail and is now operated by the National Park Service.

George E. Hyde's Life of George Bent, Written from his Letters (1967), adds significantly to an understanding of the complicated relationships and often violent encounters between the Cheyennes and other Indians and the whites in the vicinity of Bent's Fort. The subject of this biography is not William Bent's young brother by that name, but his son by Owl Woman, his Cheyenne wife. She was the daughter of Gray Thunder, one of the most powerful of the Cheyennes. The fascinating study of authentic Indian white relations is based on George Bent's letters to Hyde over a period from 1905 to the eve of his death in 1918.

Bent's Fort was only one of the more than two hundred civilian and military posts in the West. A good study of a number of those outposts is Robert G. Athearn's Forts of the Upper Missouri (1967). Action-filled with struggles and danger, it was written by one of the most knowledgeable scholars on this subject: it makes a unique contribution in bringing together a diverse body of history, and explains the role these forts played over about eighty years in developing trade in furs, encouraging and protecting settlers, and in subduing hostile Indians, especially the Sioux.

The soldiers were not just Indian fighters. Indeed, so important and pervasive was the military's role in the exploration of the West that western military memoirs and histories constitute a vast body of literature which is discussed in a separate chapter in this volume. But several military memoirs and histories must also be mentioned in this chapter, because they demonstrate so well that soldiers were among the major western adventurers. George Winston Smith and Charles Judah's Chronicles of the Gringos: The U. S. Army in the Mexican War, 1846—1848 (1968) consists of five hundred pages of accounts of eyewitnesses and combatants and is totally unlike anything else published on the Mexican War. Orrin H. and Lorraine Bonney's Battle Drums and Geysers (1970) presents the life and journals of Lt. Gustavus Cheney Doane, a soldier who seems to have volunteered for every exploring assignment in western Wyoming and Montana, the Yellowstone area and the Snake River country. Agnes Wright Spring's Caspar Collins: The Life and Exploits of an Indian Fighter of the Sixties (1927, 1969) is an account of a genuine hero who led his 120 men on a charge into a force of 600 Cheyennes, 1,800 Sioux, and 200 Arapahoes.

Soldiers were not, of course, the only government officials who helped to explore the West, and one of the most noted of the government's civilian employees was J. Ross Browne. A very welcome addition to western literature is J. Ross Browne: His Letters, Journals, and Writings (1969), edited, with an introduction and commentary, by Lina Fergusson Browne. Browne spent twenty-five years in the West, about twice as long as Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Francis Parkman, Richard Dana, and Bayard Taylor combined. He traveled extensively throughout California, Nevada, Arizona, Texas, Oregon, and Washington; and his letters, journals, articles, and reports constitute the fullest and most reliable account of life in the West left by a single person in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Browne was surely one of the most honest and fearless federal agents in American history. There is something poignant in seeing this immigrant heir to American democracy encountering in California's own Gilded Age a luxuriant flowering of graft among government officials–and who with no apparent disillusionment was dismissed from his position for arguing relentlessly for its abatement. He was a compulsive writer, and his articles, forty-two of which appeared in Harper's alone, were some of the most popular of the time. His cartoons portray as no words can the ironic view he had of himself and the turbulent life in the West he experienced so fully.

During the nineteenth century hundreds of notable visitors came to America to play, observe, or study. A large number were attracted to the West, and many have written perceptively about it. In 1870 Viscount James Bryce, English statesman and historian, made the first of five extended visits to study American government and civilization. Bryce was particularly interested in the West, about which he wrote in his classic work, The American Commonwealth (1888, 1978): "The west is the most American part of America: that is to say, the part where those features which distinguish America from Europe come out in the strongest relief."

Bryce's opinion was shared by many other Europeans who wrote about their adventure in the West. George Frederick Ruxton, a young English military man, explorer, and adventurer, crowded a great deal of adventure and literary achievement into his twenty-seven years. His name is familiar to and highly regarded by western scholars because he kept notebooks and diaries rich in authentic detail, from which he could distill superb scholarly articles on the ethnology of Indians and graphic accounts of his adventures. He captured the character and vernacular of mountain men and traders better than anyone else has done. No novelist could presume to achieve verisimilitude in portraying fictional mountain men without drawing upon Ruxton.

He was certainly no greenhorn when at twenty-five he finally added the American West, Mexico, and Canada to his explorations. He had already served as a soldier in Ireland and Spain, had explored in Morocco and South Africa, and had considered exploring Borneo and the Indian Archipelago. Wallace Stegner observed in The Uneasy Chair (1974) that Bernard DeVoto had "correctly" suspected that Ruxton was a British agent–and that Sir William Drummond Stewart may have been one too. However that may be, Ruxton's great affection for the wilderness West was genuine: "Although liable to an accusation of barbarism, I must confess that the very happiest moments of my life have been spent in the wilderness of the Far West; and I never recall but with pleasure the remembrance of my solitary camp in the Bayou Salado, with no friend near me more faithful than my rifle, and no companions more sociable than my good horse and mules, and the attendant coyote which nightly serenades us."

There are two books, both edited by LeRoy Hafen, which scholars agree are indispensable to an understanding of Ruxton and an appreciation of his contribution to western literature. The pieces in Ruxton of the Rockies, collected by Clyde and Mae Reed Porter (1950), are autobiographical writings, almost all of which were never before published. Ruxton's best-known work is Life in the Far West (1849; 1951, with a foreword by Mae Reed Porter). Though Ruxton would assert that "Life in the Far West is no fiction," it is nonetheless fictionized history, for he admits about the incidents portrayed: "I have invented not one out of my own head. They are all matters of history in the mountains, but I have, no doubt, jumbled the dramatis personae one with another, and may have committed anachronisms in the order of their occurrence." Actually little of the narrative consists of Ruxton's own experience; most consists of campfire tales he heard. The result is the liveliest and, in a sense, the truest historic portrayals of the mountain men; the analysis of the character of the mountain man indicates close observation. The mountain man, he says, has a loathing of the restrictions of civilization; according to Ruxton he makes "quick determination and resolve in cases of extreme difficulty and peril." He has "fixedness of purpose"; "dash and daring with equal subtlety and caution"; "energy, enterprise, and hardihood of character"; "gaiety and dissipation." He concludes that these traits are basic in the American character. In the uninhibited West they are simply given full expression.

Another Englishman, Thomas H. Gladstone, came to the United States in 1856, with John T. Delane, the editor of The Times–the mighty London newspaper for which Gladstone was a correspondent. A kinsman of the eminent English statesman, Gladstone was deeply interested in the antebellum conflict over "bleeding Kansas." Kansas, he said, seemed buried beneath "a mass of contradictory assertions." In Washington he listened to congressional debates about the problem and determined to go to Kansas and make his own inquiry. After spending several months in the South studying its culture and racial attitudes, he went first to Missouri and finally to Kansas. He observed very closely and disinterestedly and reported what he saw there from the burning of Lawrence through a whole year of the depredations of the Border Ruffians. He compiled factual reports on every aspect of Kansas: the character of the settlers, their economy, the natural resources, its place as the beginning of both the Santa Fe Trail and the Oregon Trail. The Englishman in Kansas (1857, 1971) consists of the letters Gladstone sent to The Times.

Marshall Sprague's A Gallery of Dudes (1966) is an interesting collection of nine informative and entertaining sketches of European travelers (as well as Theodore Roosevelt), all of whom between 1833 and 1890 sought adventure or profit in the West. "My dudes," says Sprague, "were comic, but they had more than comedy to offer. They were highly educated, and they had traveled widely. Most of them saw the West in a broad and fresh perspective."

One of Sprague's best sketches is "Scotsman on the Green," an account of Sir William Drummond Stewart's fabulous adventures from 1833 to 1843 in the heart of mountain man country. During this period he attended every rendezvous. He saw Dr. Marcus Whitman remove the iron arrowhead from Jim Bridger's back at the 1835 rendezvous on the Green. No doubt one of the most important things Stewart did was to take along the young New Orleans artist, Alfred Jacob Miller, on his 1837 excursion. Miller's paintings, genre scenes, landscapes, and portraits of Stewart with mountain men, Indians, and buffaloes in the Rocky Mountain settings are generally believed to be some of the best portrayals of early western life. Stewart traveled usually with a retinue of at least fifty people, guides, hunters, gentlemen, and an immense amount of equipment. He met Chouteau, Bridger, Sheridan, Custer, Frémont, William Sublette, Ashley, Baptiste Charbonneau, and almost everyone else of importance in the West of his time.

In Stewart's 1843 "hunting frolic" he invited Matthew C. Field, assistant editor of the New Orleans Picayune, and a former actor, to join his party. Field's journal and reports to his newspaper, Prairie and Mountain Sketches (1957), edited by Kate L. Gregg and John Francis McDermott, show Field was an excellent reporter of everything of human interest, especially the ironic or humorous. He filled at least six notebooks with such happenings as an uproarious Fourth of July celebration six hundred miles beyond the frontier, three days of horse racing ten thousand feet above sea level across the Great Divide, and performing Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of the Shrew for a large audience of Shawnee Indians. Field is as confident as he is humorous and sprightly. Sir William provided the best of food and drink, entertainment, and hunting. He seems, however, to have been rather arbitrary in keeping with the habitual exercise of his noble prerogatives. Some of his American guests resented this, since Field says he heard muttering in camp, including some sarcastic epithets for Sir William as "His Omnipotence." He confided in a letter to his wife: "I do most frankly beleive [sic] that I can eclipse Irving, Lewis & Clark, Farnham, Father De Smet, and all other writers in describing the grand and wonderful scenes of this region." Field's sketches are rich in content and delightful in style.

Marshall Sprague has also written the introduction to the 1967 reprint of the Earl of Dunraven's book, The Great Divide: Travels in the Upper Yellowstone in the Summer of 1874 (1876, 1967). Twenty-eight years after Parkman scouted about Fort Laramie with the Oglala Sioux and hunted buffalo east of the Rockies, the Earl of Dunraven and his companions disembarked from the Union Pacific train in Corinne, Utah, with their famous guide, Jack Omohundro, and made their way north past Fort Hall to Virginia City, Bozeman, and the Yellowstone River. In recounting his hunting adventures, in carefully analyzing the Crow Indians, in describing the natural wonders of the Yellowstone Park region, Dunraven proved himself a writer of considerable talent. In analyzing Indian-white relations and in providing sparkling, ironic humor, his book is likely the best of all the reports left by European dudes about their western experiences.

Europeans were not the only sojourners in the West. Many Americans from the eastern regions went west for adventure or for their health. In the spring of 1831, Josiah Gregg, a young medical doctor, joined a trader's caravan setting out for Santa Fe, because he had been advised to take a trip for his health. He became a merchant in the Santa Fe trade for the next nine years, all the while recording in his notebooks the most insightful observations of the land and its people, Mexicans and Indians, that have been written. He served as a correspondent in the Mexican War, but in 1849 he joined the Gold Rush to California, where he died, on an ill-supplied expedition, of exposure and starvation. His book, Commerce of the Prairies (1844), edited in 1967 by Milo Milton Quaife, has been regarded as a classic since its publication. Quaife's edition is an abridgment containing only those chapters which comprise his personal narrative. About half of the original book (which contained his treatises on geography, minerals, animals, Indian tribes, etc. of the Southwest) has been omitted.

Susan Shelby Magoffin had a copy of Dr. Gregg's Commerce of the Prairies, and her own book is, after his, one of the best accounts of the Santa Fe trade. Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico (1926), edited in 1962 by Stella M. Drumm with a foreword by Howard R. Lamar, is the diary of Magoffin's trip down the Santa Fe Trail in 1846—1847. She was accustomed to ease and comfort, being from a wealthy and historically noteworthy family. At eighteen she married Samuel Magoffin (twenty-seven years her senior), for sixteen years a prosperous merchant in the Santa Fe trade. She traveled in style: a mule-drawn carriage with driver and two servant boys, her dog, books and all comforts; and she had a maid with a separate carriage. Her diary is a very personal response to the daily routine of swearing teamsters, frightening visits by Indians, as well as her accounts of nature– roses and antelopes and buffaloes. The notes by the editor and foreword by Lamar make clear the political and economic situation in 1846.

In that "year of decision" which saw Susan Magoffin, George Ruxton, and Francis Parkman on the Santa Fe Trail, a seventeen-year-old Philadelphia youth named Lewis Hector Garrard also traveled along that route, and he later described his adventures in Wah-To-Yah and the Taos Trail (1850; 1955). At Westport Garrard outfitted himself for the trip, buying a "paint" horse for fifty dollars. He traveled the Santa Fe Trail in the company of Ceran St. Vrain's merchant caravan heading for Bent's Fort. Unlike Susan Magoffin, who was offended by the colorful epithets of the French Canadian teamsters–"sacre enfant de garce!"–Garrard was amused. Like her, he observed the method of burial on the prairie; like her, he noted the "pasó por aquí" signatures on Pawnee Rock, herds of buffalo, and skulking, begging, or spying Indians. He had a sensitive ear for the vernacular of the mountain men and traders and was immensely amused to find a trader with the Cheyennes named, of all things, John Smith. He was fascinated by the Indians' pipe ceremony and wrote a rhapsody on the "enlivening delights" of the untaught savages. The character of the New Mexican interests him, but unfortunately he proves to have the typical American racist bias of the period: "The New Mexicans, when weakest, are the most contemptible, servile objects to be seen; and with their whining voices, shrugs of the shoulder, and dastardly expression of their villainous countenances, they commend themselves unreservedly to contempt."

Just as unflattering as Garrard's descriptions of the New Mexicans are Francis Parkman's sketches of the Indians. Parkman was not yet twenty three when he left his prolonged studies at Harvard in the spring of that critical year 1846 for a "tour of curiosity and amusement" in the wilderness far beyond the Missouri River frontier towns.

Parkman, who had received his LL.B. degree in 1846, was very well educated and widely traveled; he was no greenhorn–like Magoffin at eighteen and Garrard at seventeen–when he started West. He was an expert rifleman and after his three summer seasons of roughing it through the woods, mountains, rivers, and lakes of New England and eastern Canada was a master at the arts of survival in the wild. All of this–and the trip west–were part of Parkman's preparation for realizing his life's work. At eighteen he had dedicated himself to writing the comprehensive history of the long struggles between Britain and France, with their Indian allies, for control of North America. His purpose, then, was not just a pleasure excursion: he wanted to observe the least-tamed of Indians, particularly to see how skilled they were in battle, both in strategy and execution of cooperative plans.

Along with his cousin, Quincy Shaw, Parkman arrived at St. Louis by train and put up, of course, at the Planters' House while outfitting for the trip. He had the good fortune to hire Henry Chatillon as guide and hunter. He hired another French Canadian, Deslauriers, as muleteer, cook, and camp tender. They took the steamboat to Westport and made a brief stop at Fort Leavenworth. Here they were right on the very frontier; and what Park man was soon to see was a surprising and ironic array of the contradictions between civilization and the wild brought together. They sought out the trader to the Kickapoo Indians (almost certainly William H. Hildreth). "The trader," Parkman says, "was a blue-eyed, openfaced man who neither in his manner nor his appearance betrayed any of the roughness of the frontier. . . ." His home was clean, cool, and neatly carpeted and his wife, a charming Creole beauty who "lived on the sunny side of life," served them excellent claret and lunch. There Parkman saw with something near astonishment "a very mischievous looking knife" resting on a set of Milton in a well-stocked bookcase.

DeVoto has observed that it is strange Parkman should have been totally oblivious to the Mexican War going on at the time. Virtually his only allusion to the war is about a derelict soldier he found at Bent's Fort, whom he dubbed Tete Rouge, and helped to get back to Fort Leavenworth. Many have wondered, also, at Parkman's total lack of appreciation for the flood of immigrants he saw headed west. Parkman could see no sense in their abandoning their homes to risk their lives trying to get to Oregon or California. He was disgusted with the Mormons he met because they always wanted to preach their religion to him, an agnostic, or as his sister said "a reverent agnostic."

The Oregon Trail by Francis Parkman, edited by E. N. Feltskog in 1969, is the only edition a scholar or serious general reader would use. It is definitive in its collating the carefully considered changes Parkman made from his field notes (which he first dictated to Shaw) through subsequent editions. Feltskog traces meticulously what Parkman did with the manuscript through the serial publication in Knickerbocker Magazine (1847, 1849), and in each of the eight book editions to follow to the 1892 edition, which he uses as his copy text.

Feltskog has noted and compared some seven thousand substantive variants comprising three hundred pages, plus one hundred more pages of introduction and bibliography. Having access to the scholarship of Mason Wade and others, in addition to Parkman's original field notes, Feltskog shows how Parkman consciously adopted changes in style and point of view. In the notebooks Parkman records his adventures and dangers with uninhibited exuberance and delight; but, as Feltskog demonstrates, in his rewriting he removes himself successively into a more objective, less personal point of view.

Back in St. Louis Parkman gave Chatillon his fine rifle as a parting gift and wrote a beautiful rhapsodic passage on his natural grace and sterling character. It is the culmination of a great book, and Feltskog has made it available to readers as it has never been before.