Publisher's Synopsis
George Frederick Ruxton (24 July 1821 - 29 August 1848) was a British explorer and travel writer. He was a Lieutenant in the British Army, received a medal for gallantry from Queen Isabella II of Spain, was a hunter and explorer and published papers and books about his travels to Africa, Canada, Mexico and the United States. He observed the westward expansion of the United States in the 1840s during the period when the country's government was pursuing its policy of manifest destiny. He was the first author to write "extensively" of the mountain men of the Rocky Mountains. In this classic of western Americana, George Frederick Ruxton, who died in St. Louis in 1848 at the youthful age of twenty-seven, brilliantly brings to life the whole heroic age of the Mountain Men. The author, from his intimate acquaintance with the trappers and traders of the American Far West, vividly recounts the story of two of the most adventurous of these hardy pioneers - Killbuck and La Bonté, whose daring, bravery, and hair-breadth escapes from their numerous Indian and "Spaniard" enemies were legend among their fellow-frontiersmen. With Ruxton, we follow Killbuck and La Bonté and their mountain companions - Old Bill Williams, "Black" Harris, William Sublette, Joseph Walker, and others - across the prairies and forests, west from picturesque old Bent's Fort, into the dangerous Arapaho country near the headwaters of the Platte. We share with them the culinary delights of their campfires - buffalo "boudins" and beaver tails - and hear from their own lips, in the incomparable mountaineer dialect, hair-raising stories of frontier life and humorous tales of trading camp and frontier post. Life in the Far West, then, is adventure extraordinary - the true chronicle of the rugged Mountain Men whose unflinching courage and total disregard for personal safety or comfort opened the Far West to the flood of settlers who were to follow. The breath-taking water colors and sketches, which depict with great detail many of the familiar scenes of the early West, were done by one of Ruxton's contemporaries and fellow-explorers, Alfred Jacob Miller.
