Moutain Men Move West

For the next few posts we are going to look back at somewhere we have already been in this blog - the early mountain men and fur trappers.  We took an extensive trip across the life of Joseph Walker a while back that you can search the blog for if you want an eye-witness account of that kind of life.  Here I am just including a bit because it fits chronologically in the development of the West...

The lucrative fur trade was always a part of the trappers story.  Loving the wilderness, leaving the life of the town and the farm, these hunters/trappers were known as "mountain men".   These rugged men learned Indian ways, had expert survival skills and were extremely tough.  Their days of glory lasted a little more that two decades, but their legend is a permanent part of the history of the American West and the pioneer.

As the pioneer settlers came, the mountain men moved on further west.  They were always two steps ahead of civilization.  They weren't looking for gold, or for land, but for an animal.  At the time it was beaver fur that was fashionable.  The pelts (called "heavy bank notes") were worn as coats and hats in Europe and America.  There was a time when American rivers swarmed with beaver, but money from the beaver pelts made fortunes.  So no one took notice for 20 years, as the beaver was slaughtered to the point that there was none to hunt - and the trappers livelihood ended.

Next time...How it all started.
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Today in Pioneer History: "On March 10, 1864, local hell-raiser Jack Slade is hanged in one of the more troubling incidents of frontier vigilantism in Montana. Slade stood out even among the many rabble-rousers who inhabited the wild frontier-mining town of Virginia City, Montana. When he was sober, townspeople liked and respected Slade, when drunk, however, Slade had a habit of firing his guns in bars and making idle threats. Finally fed up with his drunken rampages and wild threats, a group of vigilantes took Slade into custody. Slade, who had committed no serious crime in Virginia City, was hanged.