Word: beaverisms
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This Reckless Breed of Men, by Robbert Glass Cleland. A lively, well-documented tribute to the bold, restless, beaver-trapping mountain men whose exploits (1820-40) helped to push the frontier across the Rocky Mountains and into the Far West. First-rate Americana (TIME, April...
...helped fill the quota, and on April 3, 1823, a year after the ad appeared, Ashley's "enterprising young men" hit the trail. The duties of the new hands: to push their wav to the mouth of the Yellowstone River, erect a fortified trading post there and trap beaver in the surrounding country...
...brought together." The man who became the group's most outstanding graduate was a 24-year-old New Yorker named Jedediah Strong Smith, an ex-clerk on a Great Lakes freighter who had come to town in time to spot Ashley's ad. Three years later, when beaver-rich General Ashley retired from the field and sold his interests to Trapper Smith and two other lieutenants, they lost no time in organizing an 18-man party and plunging into the unexplored land south of the Great Salt Lake in a search for new trapping grounds. Although Mexican-held...
Scalp the Savages. Historian (California's Huntington Library) Cleland's story of the hundreds of other daredevil trappers who opened up the Southwest for U.S. expansion is a tribute to some of history's forgotten men. Equipped with half a dozen five-pound beaver traps, a rifle and a tomahawk, such buckskin-clothed trappers as Antoine Robidoux (who built the first trading post west of the Rockies' main range), Joseph Reddeford Walker (discoverer of Yosemite Valley) and Old Bill Williams stared down danger and brought a fortune in furs out of virgin streams. For most...
...year-long era of the beaver trade came to a close (largely be cause U.S. hatmakers began using silk in stead of beaver in men's toppers), and "it closed forever," writes Author Cleland...