Nine Years in the Rocky Mountains, 1834–1843

I’m not sure how it works, but our Siblings’ Book Club selections very often include a title like this. From my quick recollection, I think of:

• Trails Plowed Under: Stories of the Old West by Charles M. Russell (1927)
• When the Legends Die by Hal Borland (1963)
• Blood and Treasure: Daniel Boone and the Fight for America’s First Frontier by Tom Clavin and Bob Drury (2021)
• Man in the Wilderness by Jack Dewitt (1971)

…and that’s just a list from the last two years! Our club is slightly male heavy, so that could explain the phenomenon in part, but still, it’s worth noting.

A Definite Journal Feel

Journal of a Trapper is exactly what it proports to be, Osborne Russel’s daily entries during his travels through the Western frontier in search of game. Russel was born in Maine in 1814, so this is likely a posthumous publication, yet one that demanded an audience.

It definitely reads like a journal, so there’s plenty of notes about distance traveled, the weather and scenery, and statistics of game secured. Yet Russell also fills his pages with anecdotes from the field that keep his story lively and engaging.

There’s one account, for example, called “Another Man Lost” (46-47), where a member of their party goes missing. They spend part of a day searching for him, but are forced to move on, figuring he’d fallen off a cliff and died or something. This scene reminded me so much of the Man in the Wilderness (which I believe is the basis for the story in The Revenant), only here we’re on the side of the survivors who leave the man to his fate. And he’s how such a survivor writes in his journal:

The river then ran a long distance through a tremendous cut in the mountain in the same direction and emerged into a large plain, the extent of which was beyond his geographical knowledge or conception. 30th—We stopped at this place and for my own part I almost wished I could spend the remainder of my days in a place like this, where happiness and contentment seemed to reign in wild, romantic splendor, surrounded by majestic battlements which seemed to support the heavens and shut out all hostile intruders. (46)

Descriptions and Philosophy

Russell also offers up a good dose of period-descriptions that are great fodder for the amateur historian. His descriptions of the trapper’s garb in Chapter 21 especially struck me. I could picture the scene entirely though the image he painted with words. Not every passage was as clear, but Russell definitely had his moments.

Occasionally, he’d also philosophize as many a trapper or cowboy would do while living of the land for months and years at a time. He writes this bit of wisdom about life and death:

But experience is the best teacher, hunger good sauce, and I really think to be acquainted with misery contributes to the enjoyment of happiness, and to know one’s self greatly facilitates the knowledge of mankind. One thing I often console myself with, and that is, the earth will lie as hard upon the monarch as it will upon the hunter, and I have no assurance that it will lie upon me at all. My bones may, in a few years, or perhaps days, be bleaching upon the plains in these regions, like many of my occupation, without a friend to turn even a turf upon them after a hungry wolf has finished his feast. (Chapter 18)

But Oh, the Hunting!

One thing that annoyed me—and it’s annoying my kids too, as we read The Swiss Family Robinson together—is how often and how wantonly they slaughtered animals. There was one set of paragraphs where the killing was so in just incessant:

“Killed a cow. Killed a bull. Killed a cow and got some bear meat. Killed two cows and collected only as much meat as we could reasonably carry.”

It’s not a direct quote, but close enough. There was only one event I can remember where they chose not to kill a cow, because two men didn’t need so much meat—so they chose to kill the calf instead. He commented that this decision was a bit of wisdom he’d always remember, but it sure as heck didn’t affect his behavior!

Having read American Buffalo by Steven Rinella (2009), I know how dastardly those early hunters were. And wasn’t it a book on Teddy Roosevelt that spoke of sniping buffalo on the plains from train car as it steamed West? But to read the personal accounts of a perpetrator himself is pretty intense.

Conclusion

Overall, this was an enjoyable albeit dated book to read and to add my growing collection of Frontier-era lore. If that’s you’re kind of book, give it a shot. It’s a true piece of early Americana that gives us a true sense of the trapper’s life. For a fictional version that’s a bit more exciting, though, check out Centennial by James Michener (1974) instead.

©2025 E.T.

Read More on Wilderness Exploration:

• The Scalp Hunters by Captain Thomas Mayne Reid (1860)
• Away in the Wilderness by R.M. Ballantyne (1863)
• Love of Life and Other Stories by Jack London (1907)
• Daniel Boone: Wilderness Scout by Stewart Edward White (1921)
• Journal of a Trapper by Osborne Russell (1921)
• Trails Plowed Under by Charles M. Russell (1927)
• The Man in the Wilderness by Jack DeWitt (1971)
• Centennial by James Michener (1974)
• Blood and Treasure by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin (2021)