Mountain men were dare-devils, who feared neither God nor man, nor grizzlies; nevertheless these tragic heroes did good work in their day and generation. They were the scouts who pushed ahead into the uncharted country, preceding the Western woodsmen and New England farmers, the hardy pioneers of advancing civilisation.
Purveyors of the fur marts, it was their fortunate lot to combine business with recreation. They hunted and trapped for a livelihood, and fought for the sheer fun of it, as much as in self-defence. Devoted to a life of perilous adventure, never daunted by the terrible privations on which they reckoned, they could indulge their somewhat eccentric tastes to the full.
If these men had gone westward from the settlements, not one in a hundred ever returned, and few of them ever slept in the rudest of cemeteries. Probably nineteen in twenty came to violent ends: their bones were left to bleach in the mountains, or their scalps were hung in triumph to a tent-pole. Though they were but scattered handfuls, the balance stood on the credit-side of their account. For the one redeeming quality of these reckless mountaineers, beyond the indomitable pluck which was their common characteristic, was the strong bond of brotherhood. If a man were known to have deserted a comrade, he was doomed to indelible disgrace.
In 1899, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine authored and published a 20-page account of mountain men and their unique lifestyle during a relatively short period of history in the settlement of the west. It appeared in the January 1899 issue of Blackwood's under the title "Romance of the Fur Trade: The Mountain Men," and has been republished here for the convenience of the interested reader.
