West Routt Library District

The journals of James Clyman, a keen, thorough and precise observer of life in the West during the early nineteenth century.

Offers profiles of a collection of mountain men of the early nineteenth century--a group of adventurers who sought individual freedom and financial reward as beaver trappers in the Rocky Mountains--and discusses their contributions to the opening of the American West.

The North American fur trade, set in motion by the discovery of the New World in the fifteenth century, was this continent's biggest business for over three hundred years. The fur trade influenced every aspect of life, from how Europeans related to the Indians, how and where settlements were built, to how our nation formed. Drawing on primary sources, including the diaries of Ojibwa, American, and French traders of the period, Birchbark Brigade gives...

In 1832, Benjamin Bonneville led the first wagon train across the Continental Divide on the Oregon Trail. Financed by a rival of the Hudson's Bay Company, Bonneville and more than one hundred traders and trappers traveled from Fort Osage on the Missouri River, up to the Platte River and across present-day Wyoming. Washington Irving first gave the U.S. Army officer a brand by chronicling the three-year explorations in the 1837 book The Adventures of...

Explains the role played by mountain men in the expansion of the American west.

The American West of the nineteenth century was a world of freedom and adventure for men of every stripe-- not least those who admired and desired other men. Among these sojourners was William Drummond Stewart, a flamboyant Scottish nobleman who found in American culture of the 1830s and 1840s a cultural milieu of openness in which men could pursue same-sex relationships. Through Stewart's letters and novels, Benemann shows that Stewart was one of...