The Lost Trappers

The subtitle says it all: "A Collection of Interesting Scenes and Events in the Rocky Mountains Together With a Short Description of California: Also, Some Account of the Fur Trade, Especially as Carried on About the Sources of the MIssouri, Yellow Stone, and on the Waters of the Columbia, in the Rocky Mountains." First published in 1850 (original editions are almost impossible to find), this may well be fiction: its authenticity as journalism is hotly disputed. Written by the mysterious DAVID COYNER, about whom little is known except that he also authored an 1870 work entitled Cheap, Healthy and Happy Homes in West Virginia for Northern and New England Emigrants, this purports to be the account of an expedition headed by a Captain Williams gleaned from "an old musty, mutilated journal." Whether it's true or not, though, this is a grand adventure story of the American frontier of the mid 19th century.

Originally published in 1847, The Lost Trappers relates trapper Ezekiel Williams's account of an expedition gone very wrong. Williams, according to his chronicler, David Coyner, had traveled with a group of twenty trappers up the Missouri River into the Rocky Mountains, where all but three died of sickness, hunger, and Indian attacks. The survivors made their way to the Spanish outpost of Santa Fe and eventually to California. Historians have long dismissed Coyner's book as a romanticized fabrication, noting that many geographical details are inaccurate. In this edition, David J. Weber, a distinguished historian at Southern Methodist University, concludes that the basic account is genuine, if layered with inaccurate embellishments. Students of the American West and the fur trade will find his evidence, and Coyner's story, intriguing.