Mountain Men: America’s First Frontier Legends

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They were not cowboys, although popular culture later often confused the two. Cowboys were mostly associated with the post Civil War cattle frontier. Mountain men came earlier. They were part of the fur trade frontier, and their world was one of beaver pelts, native alliances, brutal weather, and prolonged isolation.

Beaver pelts had long been a coveted North American commodity. The pelts produced iconic waterproof hats and were a fashion necessity for any aspiring gentleman on either side of the Atlantic. During the seventeenth century fur trade, operations centered around the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence and Hudson River valleys, where the beaver lived in abundance.

The dynamics of the early trade in beaver pelts relied heavily on the control that native people maintained over the supply chain. Europeans seldom did the actual trapping. Instead, monopolies like the Hudson Bay Company controlled the trade. From fortified forts in beaver rich regions, the company officials stayed at the forts and waited for native trappers to bring them the pelt.

The forts became centers of an elaborate barter system in which native traders swapped pelts for technology such as firearms and other items like blankets, beads, and glass. The trade flourished until beavers were hunted to near extinction in the upper Midwest. The trade pitted tribe against tribe and European nations against each other. As I discussed in a previous episode on the beaver, the beaver wars were the harsh reality of the competition for the increasingly scarce pelts in the East.

This scarcity drove the beaver trade further west. In the wake of the Louisiana Purchase, the beaver trade pushed across the Mississippi River, over the Great Plains, and into the Rocky Mountains. But this new era looked very different from its eastern predecessor. The new system broke the old native monopoly that had functioned as the center of the beaver pell trade. The days of forts had passed.

The risks associated with these type of forts had simply become too great. Outside of the basic risk of simply overhunting an area and having a fort as an expensive relic of trade, there was the challenge of fort security. Several tribes, most notably the Blackfeet, viewed encroachment as an act of hostility and responded with violence.

The new nineteenth century Western trade in beaver pelts was conducted by a new type of trapper, the mountain man, as well as a new economic system, the rendezvous. The rendezvous system was a highly efficient, mobile marketplace invented in 1825 that revolutionized the Rocky Mountain fur trade by replacing permanent frontier forts with an annual wilderness gathering.

Every summer, a massive overland supply train would travel from St. Louis to a prearranged mountain valley, bringing vital goods such as gunpowder, whiskey, and tobacco directly to the field. Hundreds of mountain men and thousands of Native American trappers would converge on the site to barter their spring harvest of beaver pelts for supplies.

This system eliminated the steep financial overhead and severe security risks of maintaining forts in hostile territory, creating a temporary multi-week trading zone. The mountain men who gathered at this rendezvous often left the site in debt. The trapper would spend nearly the entire year gathering pelts in some of the most dangerous terrain in the country, risking their lives fighting the elements and hostile natives to secure enough pelts to trade at the rendezvous.

They had no other options for getting supplies. What they brought to the rendezvous would be traded for what they need and for many things they didn't. After acquiring fresh gunpowder, new traps, lead, dried meats, soap, and, of course, a full cache of whiskey, the trappers left the rendezvous heavily in debt. And it was a vicious cycle. The only way to pay the debt was to trap for another year and hope that the haul you brought to the next rendezvous would help eliminate the debt.

Shockingly, there was no shortage of candidates who wanted to live this lifestyle.

The history of the Mountain Man is filled with some of the most unique characters in American history. Many of their stories may be well known to moviegoers thanks to iconic films like The Mountain Man, The Revenant, and of course Robert Redford's Jeremiah Johnson. The films may not always be accurate, in fact they seldom are, but they do manage to depict the period's challenges of living such a life.

Jeremiah Johnson is perhaps the most famous of the mountain man archetypes, but defining who Johnson was is no easy task. There are a few things we know for certain about him. First, if you were to address him as Jeremiah, he likely wouldn't know that you were talking to him. Author Vartus Fisher invented the name Jeremiah in the mid twentieth century for his novel The Mountain Man, which served as the basis for Robert Redford's nineteen seventy two film Jeremiah Johnson.

Secondly, while Jeremiah Johnson is no doubt a classic film of this genre and ranks as Robert Redford's favorite movie he ever made, it's not an accurate portrayal of the mountain man it was trying to depict. In the movie, Jeremiah Johnson is a veteran of the Mexican-American War who leaves that life behind in search of greater meaning in the wilderness. The movie actually has more Robert Redford in the story than the original Mountain Man book.

In the movie, Johnson is portrayed as a kind and thoughtful, even introspective man who begins life as a trapper as part of a spiritual journey. Reality was significantly different. The true inspiration for the tale was a New Jersey native named John Garrison, who, after serving in the Navy, became a military fugitive for striking a superior officer. Abandoning his military past, he adopted the alias John Johnson and embarked on a new existence as a mountain trapper.

John Johnson, the mountain man, is much more of a mystery. Part of the movie was Jeremiah Johnson's ongoing feud with the Crow people. Evidence suggests that John Johnson also had a feud with the crow, one that originated after his wife, a member of the Flathead Band, was killed while he was away on a trapping expedition. Blaming the Crow, Johnson initiated a campaign of vengeance against the tribe. The film covered this, and historians generally consider it to be broadly accurate.

However, it's what the film didn't cover that made Johnson famous. Another name for Johnson is liver-eating Johnson. After his trapping days were over, Johnson joined the Hardwick Wild West show in Montana. During the show, Johnson leaned into his reputation as an Indian fighter. He even embraced his reputation as a scalper and the eater of livers.

The supposed reason for eating his enemy's liver was to deny them access to the afterlife. And while very dark, the account is probably not true considering Johnson's own words. He noted quote We had a three hundred yard run to the bushes. I threw him down just at the edge of the brush. Then I scalped him and then I sang and danced some more. Then I ran my knife into him and killed him and part of his liver came out with the knife.

Just then a sort of squeamish old fellow named Ross came up running. I waved the knife with the liver on it in the air and cried out Come on, have a peace, it'll stay in your stomach till dinner. And I kind of made believe to take a bite. End quote. It's the consensus of historians that Johnson did not engage in ritualistic cannibalism of his victims.

Johnson's last days were spent in a veterans home in Santa Monica, California. When he died in the year nineteen hundred, authorities buried him in a local military cemetery near a busy freeway. However, Johnson had told people that he wanted to be buried near the mountains and the animals. A coalition was formed to insist on a reburial. After some difficulties over completing claims with the neighboring town of Red Lodge, Montana, the coalition secured a spot at Old Trail Town in Cody, Wyoming.

One of the pallbearers at his new final resting spot in nineteen seventy four was none other than Robert Redford.

An equally famous account of the life of a legendary mountain man was Leonardo DiCaprio's 2015 film The Revenant, which tells the story of the famous trapper Hugh Glass. Glass was born in the seventeen eighties and was part of the first wave of trappers drawn to the mountain west in search of solitude and fortune. Glass's claim to fame was his iron will to live. A grizzly bear attacked glass in 1823 while on a trapping expedition, which caused horrific injuries to him.

According to the History Channel, quote, Glass suffered extensive wounds, including a broken leg, punctured throat, and deep back lacerations exposing several ribs. His fellow frontiersmen felt certain he would die from his wounds by the morning, but he didn't. So they carried him for two days on a litter made from tree boughs.

Deep in hostile Indian territory, the group felt an urgency to keep moving. So the leader recruited two volunteers to stay with Glass until he died and give him a proper burial. End quote. The two men did stay with glass, but after five days, they abandoned him to die. And before leaving, they took his survival tools and his most prized possession, his rifle. Glass did not die. Near death, he crawled for more than 200 miles towards the Missouri River, living on berries and snakes.

One thought drove him onward, to reclaim his rifle and punish the men who had left him for dead. With the help of the Lakota people, Glass obtained a canoe and reconnected with his former group at Fort Kiowa in South Dakota. He also met one of the men who had left him, a teenage trapper and explorer named Jim Bridger.

Bridger would go on to become famous for discovering the Great Salt Lake and many of the features of what is now Yellowstone National Park. He explained that they thought his death was imminent and that they didn't want his tools falling into native hands. Glass forgave Bridger, but continued searching for the other man, John Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald had ultimately joined the army, knowing that vengeance against a soldier was nigh impossible.

Glass had to settle for a legal remedy, suing the US Army to recover his beloved Flintlock rifle. Glass got his gun back, along with a handsome three hundred dollament for his troubles.

The Mountain Men occupied a brief but unforgettable chapter in the history of the American West. They weren't settlers in the traditional sense, nor were they cowboys, but trappers, traders, guides, and wanderers who lived at the edge of the known world. The era of the mountain man may have only lasted a few decades, but their image still shapes how we imagine the American West today.

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