History

Lecture 4

Taming the Wild West

A. The Mountain Men

1- Form 1803 to 1834, practically the only U.S citizens in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains are Indian traders and fur trappers-- the Trans-Mississippi West remains Indian Country.

2- This is the heyday of the mountain men, tough and intrepid Americans who spend years at a time in the wilderness seeking their fortune by hunting and trapping fur-bearing animals, esp. beaver.

3- Mountain men like John Colter, Jedidiah Smith, and Jim Bridger are the first Americans to explore much of the Far West, learning to survive in the Rockies form the Indian hunters and French trappers who precede them.

4- Immersed in Indian folkways, fraternizing with Indian women, indistinguishable from Indians in dress and manners, they seek freedom from the restraints of Eastern civilization: marriage, religion, government, debt, etc.

5- These creolized frontier individualists remain the forward agents of the Eastern establishment-- many are employees of big fur companies, dependent on international markets and European fashions.

B. Opening the Far West

1- By the last rendezvous in 1834 (Ham's Fork, Wyoming), the decline of the beaver population and the European fad for beaver hats compels them to change from trappers to scouts for soldiers and pioneers.

2- One of the creates mountain men is Kit Carson, who flees apprenticeship in Missouri as a teenager and makes his living as a trapper and hunter all over the Trans-Mississippi West.

3- In the 1840s, the U.S government sends soldier John C. Fremont on surveying expeditions into the Rockies-- Several times, the expedition is saved only by Carson's courage and resourcefulness....