The Life of a Mountain Man

The system that Mr. Ashley created worked so well that by the 1826 rendezvous, he was ready to retire, selling out to Jedidiah Smith and two other mountain men.  Four years later, Smith along with Jim Bridger, Joseph Walker, Milton Sublette, and Tom Fitzpatrick became partners in the Rocky Mountain Fur Company.


The company bought pelts from hardy, self-sufficient mountain men, who could live through 
subzero temps, wade in icy cold water daily, outwit and often outshoot hostile Indians.  Most of the year mountain men lived alone or among friendly Indians.  Many times with their skin tanned and roughened by sun and wind, they looked like an Indian.  They dressed in decorated buckskins and seldom bathed.

Intense loyalties in the uncertain lifestyle were few.  The ultimate code was "each man for himself."  Mountain men left seriously injured people alone to heal or die without a weapon.  At yearly rendezvous events they drank and fought deadly duels over trifle gambling disputes or the favors of a squaw - even just a harsh word said in anger.  Danger lurked at every corner, the extremes were a reasonable situation.

Buffalo provided food - soup from buffalo blood and bone marrow, broiled buffalo ribs, raw buffalo liver.  To the easterners the mountain men's stories sounded like a fairytale of romance, adventure and freedom.  When in reality one writer wrote: "habitual watchfulness destroys every frivolity of mind and action.  They ride like men whose breasts have so long been exposed to the bullet and the arrow that fear finds within them not a resting place." 

The life of a mountain men living in the wild west...

Next time...Jedediah Strong Smith
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Today in Pioneer History: "On  March 31, 1836, the first monthly installment of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, by 24-year-old writer Charles Dickens, is published under the pseudonym Boz.