A Life Wild and Perilous: Mountain Men and the Paths to the Pacific - Softcover

Utley, Robert M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 080505989X ISBN 13: 9780805059892

Publisher: Holt Paperbacks, 1998

Synopsis

Early in the nineteenth century, the mountain men emerged as a small but distinctive group whose knowledge and experience of the trans-Mississippi West exted the national consciousness to continental dimensions. Though Lewis and Clark blazed a narrow corridor of geographical reality, the West remained largely terra incognita until trappers and traders--Jim Bridger, Kit Carson, Tom Fitzpatrick, Jedediah Smith--opened paths through the snow-choked mountain wilderness. They opened the way west to Fremont and played a major role in the pivotal years of 1845-1848 when Texas was annexed, the Oregon question was decided, and the Mexican War ed with the Southwest and California in American hands, the Pacific Ocean becoming our western boundary.

About this title

Review:

It's true, Robert Utley writes, that mountain men such as "Crazy Bill" Williams and Jeremiah "Liver-Eating" Johnson were an unlearned, unwashed, drunk, and violent bunch who tore a bloody swath across the then-unconquered American West from the 1810s to the 1840s. Yet their travels across deserts and plains and over high mountains yielded a huge body of geographical knowledge that would enable American pioneers to cross the Mississippi and traverse the continent in relative security. Utley, a historian with a fluent narrative style, tells the stories of hard-fighting men like Jim Bridger, Benjamin Bonneville, Kit Carson, and Joseph Walker, whose names now figure prominently on maps of the region but are otherwise little remembered.

About the Author:

Former historian to the National Park Service, Robert M. Utley is the author of many distinguished works of history, including The Last Days of the Sioux Nation and the award-winning The Lance and the Shield. He lives in Georgetown, Texas.

About this edition

• Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 080505989X
• ISBN 13: 9780805059892
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 400