Category Archives: books

The Mountain Men – Judged by Skill….

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“They were social outcasts – some of them army deserters, some of them men with a legal charge over their heads, some of them bound boys or slaves who had run away – but men were pretty much the same out here.  A black man who could shoot center and eat boudins with you and warn you about a Blackfoot creeping up wasn’t a man you looked out on.  Out here a man wasn’t judged by whether he could read or write, or what his color was, or what kind of family he came from, or how much money he had back there, but by his skill. Social rank here, in rising order was pork-eater, camp-tender, company trapper, clerk, booshway, and top rank – free trapper. The measure of a man was his extent of his skill-his mountain craft.”

– Win Blevins, Give Your Heart to the Hawks

A few thoughts on The Way West

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A few years back, I read A.B. Guthrie, Jr’s incredible mountain man novel, The Big Sky.  An adequate description of that novel deserves more than a passing mention, but suffice to say, it truly stands as one of the best of the best in mountain man literature.  The language is just fantastic, and having been written in the late 1940s, I can only imagine the author wasn’t too far removed from some folks who may have been kin to the original source material.

After having found out there was a sequel, I hemmed and hawed on it a bit, slightly less interested in the story of a mountain man leading a pioneer train down the Oregon Trail vs. a more period novel.    However, I recently took the plunge and was really glad I did.

As I learned in reading the memoir, Sixty Years on the Plains, though the “age of the mountain man” was short lived (generally recognized as 1800-1840, or thereabouts), the mountain men themselves didn’t just head back into civilization once the fallen price of beaver pelts killed the rendezvous system.

In The Way West, we get a glimpse of mountain man Dick Summers, a character from The Big Sky.    Whereas The Big Sky shows him as a much younger trapper, in The Way West, he’s now the “old hand,” brought out of an agricultural semi-retirement to lead a wagon train of pioneers from Missouri and points east to what’s thought of as the Oregonian Promised Land.

In one scene, the author is contrasting mountain man Dick Summer’s slim equipage vs that of the other members of the wagon train:

Evans was looking at Summers’ little pile of plunder.   There wasn’t much there, not near enough by the rules – a blanket and an old buffalo robe that covered just a teensy keg of whisky, a little bit of meal, about a shirttail full of it, and salt meat and coffee and tobacco and a kettle and a couple of knives and two rifles, his Hawken ad an over-and-under double barrel with one bore big enough for bird shot.   He had a little of Indian goods, too, blue and white beads and fishhooks and tobacco and a roll of scarlet strouding and some vermilion. All of his plunder put together wasn’t’ more than a couple of pack horses could carry easy. Even so, it was more than he needed. He could travel from hell to breakfast with no more than a gun and a horse, and would get there in time for dinner without the horse.

Makes me think that a pretty good challenge would be to approach an event with a similar outfit of gear, minus the trade goods of course.    (Though, it may be good to trade for better vittles instead of camp dogging).

There is a cool scene where the erstwhile mountain man reminisces about his time with his former colleagues, the author noting the change in Summers’ language as he interacts with his fellows:

“How be you?  Fat, I’m thinkin’.”  Voices calling across the years, mouths laughing, hands slapping him on the back.   “Worth a pack of beaver to see you, you ol’ bastard, and if you got a dry, here’s whisky.”

The deeper the wagon train pushes into the flat wilderness of the plains and western deserts, the more we get a sense of Summers’ sense of loss and reminiscing about the shinin’ times gone by.

Though not strictly a “mountain man” novel per se, The Way West presents an interesting look at the trials and travails which faced these travelers – both nature and man – and the hardship of the journey is adequately summed in one of the closing passages of the book:

How much would he like Oregon except for sweat and grief along the way?   Grief bowed the heart, but made it richer, so that joy was rich.

AB Guthrie, Jr’s fantastic writing sure holds up after more than 60 years, and The Way West holds up as does The Big Sky as some of the more fantastic literature of the early days of the American West.

Thoughts on The Revenant – The Book

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It’s a cheap cliché to say that the book is always better than the movie.

With few exceptions (notably The Count of Monte Cristo, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and The Watchmen), most movies are lackluster adaptions of the books.    Of course this has to do with the way your mind imagines characters and scenarios in the book.   Often you’ll have a different idea for how someone would look or be, and the vision of the director is jarring enough to make it not work.

Or the screenwriter/direction misses a favorite scene.

Or leaves out a favorite character.

Or in the case of Michael Punke’s The Revenant – A Novel of Revenge . . . maybe they never actually read the book?

Admittedly, I was so put off by the beautifully filmed but ridiculously plotted movie that I decided to skip the book for a long time.   I recently finished the book and was – without hyperbole – blown away.

In a life dominated by four kids, a burgeoning farmstead, and a demanding job, I managed to read the book in 5 days – no small feat – and one I haven’t been able to accomplish since my hazy pre-kid days.

With no silly half-Indian kid subplot, the book was based purely on the concept of Hugh Glass wanting revenge on the two people in his crew that took his rifle and gear and left him for dead after being mauled by a bear.    The book is filled with ample historical details and musings about the day-to-day activities of keeping yourself alive in the vast western wilderness of early 1800s America.   Which, by the way, didn’t include hiding yourself in an animal carcass Tauntaun-style to avoid freezing to death.

But what really made the book shine was all of the details speculated on and provided about Glass.   For all of the infamy gained by his tussle with a bear, there was really not a lot I knew about him.   He was really a character who suddenly appeared in Ashley and Henry’s famous 1822 expedition, and then sort of dropped out of the narratives.

The book speculates on Glass’s early life, time as a mariner and pirate – and how he gets his famous rifle.    All of this fantastic narrative was sadly omitted from the movie.    Can you imagine a pirate mountain man movie?  That would have been incredible!

As a historical weapons enthusiast, there’s one scene I really dig on, where Hugh Glass is resupplying at a frontier trading post, after his recovering from the famous bear mauling and crawling his way back to the fringes of civilization.

After choosing between the limited arms available, and the only two rifles – a .32 caliber Kentucky rifle, and a beat-up Model 1803 U.S. Harper’s Ferry rifle, Glass:

 . . . picked up the Model 1803, the same gun carried by many of the soldiers in Lewis and Clarks’ Corps of Discovery.

After choosing the “Harper’s Ferry” Rifle in .53 caliber, Glass gets the rest of his kit.    Punke continues:

They returned to the cabin and Glass picked out the rest of his supplies.   He chose a .53 pistol to complement the rifle.    A ball mold, lead, powder, and flints.     A tomahawk and a large skinning knife.   A thick leather belt to hold his weapons.   Two red cotton shirts to wear beneath the doeskin tunic.   A large Hudson’s Bay capote.   A wool cap and mittens.   Five pounds of salt and three pigtails of tobacco.  Needle and thread.   Cordage.   To carry his newfound bounty, he picked a fringed leather possibles bag with intricate quill beading.    He noticed that the voyageurs all wore small sacks at the waist for their pipe and tobacco.   He took one of those too, a handy spot for his new flint and steel.

Sounds like a pretty good load-out for an AMM event, eh?

Is the book 100% historical accurate?   Of course not, and it doesn’t purport to be.  It’s a just a very well-written, exciting story about how things may have gone down.

I definitely recommend any mountain man or history enthusiasts check this one out.