"Mountain Men" - A Book Review

      A good friend of mine gave me a book entitled "Mountain Men - Frontier Adventurers Alone Against the Wilderness" by Tony Holliman.  This book is a collection of short (very short) biographies of seven different American trappers, guides and woodsmen of renown.  It is a short book of only about 230 pages.  It is not by any means a text book, as it is not annotated at all.  There is however, a list of sources at the end of the book.  Nevertheless, it is a good read for gaining a general understanding of the lives of these men.  It has been my "bathroom book" for the last several months.  I think you know what I mean by a "bathroom book."  If you have no idea what that means, then we truly live in two different worlds.  

      The "mountain men" included in this book are Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Jim Bridger, Jim Beckworth, Jedediah Smith, Peter Skene Ogden, Kit Carson, and John George "Kootenai" Brown.  Each biography consists of about 20 to about 30 or 35 pages, so it is not a book you will use to write a thesis.  As noted above, it will give you a general understanding of these men.  There are enough details that if you are ever sitting around a campfire, or a living room and someone starts talking about one of them you will have something to say, rather than just stare at the fire and drool.  You might even be the one to bring it up and get to sound smart in front of your friends!  
      Thirty five pages isn't much for a biography, as compared, for instance with the book on Lord Selkirk I took information from for the post the other day on the business practices of the HBC compared to the NWCo.  That book was over 500 pages long and was fully annotated.  Unfortunately for anyone wanting to check on that book, I can't even remember the name of the author.  I spent about five hours reading through it at a mid-winter rendezvous craft and trade fair one day at someone's book table.  I took plenty of notes, and wrote down the name of the book on a separate piece of paper to try and find a copy for myself, as this book was no longer in print, and therefore not for sale (I thought I might find it on E-Bay).  Of course I lost that piece of paper.  I read every part of the book concerning Selkirk's "hostile takeovers" of many of the NWCo fur posts.  I was specifically looking for information regarding his attack on Fort St. Louis which used to sit on the edge of the Duluth-Superior Harbor.  That story is not for here though - back to the "Mountain Men."  
      Each of the biographies has a section on the man's early life.  Although each one came from different backgrounds, a couple things were true for all of them.  (the following is a series of GENERAL statements)  They were set up for a successful career by their parents, whether as an apprentice, or in a school, or something of the like.  They all chose to leave that profession, and were often a big disappointment to their parents because of this. 
      After reading through them one common thing I saw is that they had itchy feet.  They couldn't stay in one place for very long.  Settling down for a lifetime was not a part of their thinking.  In many cases this wanderlust came from working somewhere where they heard stories from travelers, particularly those of the trappers.  They heard these stories when they were in their mid teens, and in most cases they were nowhere near the supervision and advice of their parents (because of our modern society's much delayed adulthood and accompanying independence, today that happens to a lot of kids in college - from the wild parties and arrests to becoming an out of work artist, author, or field researcher who exclusively studies diatoms from the late Carboniferous Period in the tundra of Central Canada - "But we sent you to college so you could become an accountant and work right here in the firm with me."). 
      When these men left their parentally chosen professions to pursue adventure and travel (yes, that was their teen age induced motive), their feet seemed to never be able to stop after that.  Some of them would become big wigs in the HBC, or for Astor, or run very successful posts of their own, and would suddenly get the "I gotta get the heck outta here" bug.  They would leave all their accomplishments behind to go chasing off into the hills again.  
      Many of them got married and had children, but were what I would call terrible husbands and fathers.  They would up and leave for years at a time.  Their wives would have to fend for themselves, and try to raise their kids alone.  Then suddenly they would show up again on their doorstep full of badly healed wounds and maybe a pocketful of money.  Then after about six months to a few years, they would leave again for a few years.  Once in a while they would take their families with them to some new place. 
      As I said before, these short biographies are not something to use as a major source for a thesis, but they are perfect for writing an occasional post in a short daily blog.  Over the next unspecified while I will write an occasional post highlighting one of these men.