REID, MAYNE. The Scalp Hunters. An antiquated novel, but it has some deep-dyed pictures of Mountain Men.
ROSS, ALEXANDER. Adventures of the First Settlers on the Oregon or Columbia River (1849) and The Fur Hunters of the Far West (1855). The trappers of the Southwest can no more be divorced from the trappers of the Hudson's Bay Company than can Texas cowboys from those of Montana.
RUSSELL, OSBORNE. Journal of a Trapper, Boise, Idaho, 1921. In the winter of 1839, at Fort Hall on Snake River, Russell and three other trappers "had some few books to read, such as Byron, Shakespeare and Scott's works, the Bible and Clark's Commentary on it, and some small works on geology, chemistry and philosophy." Russell was wont to speculate on Life and Nature. In perspective he approaches Ruxton.
RUXTON, GEORGE F. Life in the Far West, 1848; reprinted by the University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1951, edited by LeRoy R. Hafen. No other contemporary of the Mountain Men has been so much quoted as Ruxton. He remains supremely readable.
SABIN, EDWIN L. Kit Carson Days, 1914. A work long standard, rich on rendezvous, bears, and many other associated subjects. Bibliography. Republished in rewritten form, 1935. OP.
VESTAL, STANLEY (pseudonym for Walter S. Campbell). Kit Carson, 1928. As a clean-running biographic narrative, it is not likely to be superseded. Mountain Men, 1937, OP; The Old Santa Fe Trail, 1939. Vestal's "Fandango," a tale of the Mountain Men in Taos, is among the most spirited ballads America has produced. It and a few other Mountain Men ballads are contained in the slight collection, Fandango, 1927. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, published the aforementioned titles. James Bridger, Mountain Man, Morrow, New York, 1946, is smoother than J. Cecil Alter's biography but not so savory. Joe Meek, the Merry Mountain Man, Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho, 1952.
WHITE, STEWART EDWARD. The Long Rifle, 1932, and Ranchero, 1933, Doubleday, Doran, Garden City, N. Y. Historical fiction.
17. Santa Fe and the Santa Fe Trail
THERE WAS Independence on the Missouri River, then eight hundred miles of twisting trail across hills, plains, and mountains, all uninhabited save by a few wandering Indians and uncountable buffaloes. Then there was Santa Fe. On west of it lay nearly a thousand miles of wild broken lands before one came to the village of Los Angeles. But there was no trail to Los Angeles. At Santa Fe the trail turned south and after crawling over the Jornada del Muerto—Journey of the Dead Man—threading the great Pass of the North (El Paso) and crossing a vast desert, reached Chihuahua City.