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podcast transcript
Before cowboys became the symbol of the American West, there were mountain men.
They crossed unmapped passes, trapped beavers in icy rivers, lived among native peoples, and helped pave the way for mass migrations across the continent.
Their world was dangerous, lonely, and short-lived, but their impact on American history and legend was enormous.
Learn more about the history, reality, and legend behind the rise of the Mountaineer in this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Mountain people were one of the most unique groups in the history of the American West. They were hunters, hunters, scouts, traders, guides, and explorers who lived in the Rocky Mountains and surrounding areas during the first half of the 19th century.
Although their heyday lasted only a generation, from roughly the 1820s to the 1840s, their influence on American expansion, Western mythology, and maps of the continent was enormous.
They were not cowboys, although later popular culture often confused the two. Cowboys were primarily associated with the cattle frontier after the Civil War. The mountaineers came earlier. They were part of the fur trade frontier, and their world was filled with beaver pelts, native allies, harsh weather, and long periods of isolation.
Beaver pelts have long been a coveted commodity in North America. Felt produced the iconic waterproof hat and was a fashion staple for every aspiring gentleman on both sides of the Atlantic.
During the fur trade period of the 17th century, the fur trade centered on the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence and Hudson river valleys, where beavers were abundant.
The early trade dynamics of beaver pelts depended heavily on the control indigenous people maintained over the supply chain. Europeans rarely actually set traps. Instead, monopolies like the Hudson’s Bay Company controlled trade.
At a fortified fort in an area rich in beaver, company officials stayed in the fort and waited for native hunters to bring back their pelts. The fort became the center of an elaborate bartering system where merchants traded hides for firearms, blankets, beads, glass, and other craftsmanship.
This trade flourished until beavers were hunted to near extinction in the upper Midwest. Trade pitted tribe against tribe and European nations against each other. As discussed in a previous episode about beavers, beaver warfare was a harsh reality of competition for increasingly scarce pelts in the East.
This shortage led the beaver trade to expand further west. After the Louisiana Purchase, the beaver trade spread across the Mississippi River, through the Great Plains, and into the Rocky Mountains.
But this new era was completely different from its predecessor in the East. The new system broke up the old Native monopoly that had served as the center of the beaver pelt trade.
Gone are the days of forts. The risks associated with these types of fortifications have become too great. Beyond the basic risks of simply over-hunting the area and having the fort as a valuable relic of trade, there were challenges to fort security. Some tribes, especially the Blackfeet, viewed the encroachment as an act of hostility and responded with violence.
The new 19th-century western trade in beaver pelts was conducted by a new type of hunter, the mountaineer, and a new economic system drove the 19th-century fur trade, the Rendezvous.
The Rendezvous System was a highly efficient, mobile market invented in 1825 that revolutionized the Rocky Mountain fur trade by replacing permanent border forts with annual wild gatherings.
Each summer, large overland supply trains traveled from St. Louis to pre-designated mountain valleys, transporting essential supplies such as gunpowder, whiskey, and tobacco directly to the field.
Hundreds of mountaineers and thousands of Native American hunters gathered at the site to barter for supplies with beaver pelts harvested in the spring. This system eliminated the enormous financial overhead and serious security risks of maintaining a fort in a hostile area, creating a temporary trading zone for several weeks.
The mountaineers who gathered for this meeting often left the site in debt. Hunters would gather pelts almost year-round in some of the most treacherous terrain in the United States, risking their lives fighting the elements and hostile natives to secure enough pelts to trade at staging areas.
They had no other options for supplies. What they bring to the meeting will be exchanged for many things they need and many others they do not need.
After obtaining all the fresh powder, bird traps, lead, dried meat, soap, and a barrel of whiskey, the hunter left the rendezvous in debt. It was a vicious cycle. The only way to repay the debt was to be locked up for another year and hope that the goods brought to the rendezvous point would reduce the debt.
Surprisingly, there was no shortage of candidates pursuing this lifestyle.
Mountain Man history is filled with some of the most unique figures in American history. Many of their stories are well known to moviegoers thanks to iconic films such as The Mountain Man, The Revenant, and Robert Redford’s Jeremiah Johnson.
Movies may not always be accurate. Although this was rarely the case in reality, it does a good job of depicting the difficulties of the era to survive such a life.
Jeremiah Johnson is perhaps the most famous of the mountaineer archetype. Defining who Johnson is is no easy task.
There are a few things we know for sure about him. First, if you call him Jeremiah, he won’t know you’re talking to him. Author Vardis Fisher invented the name “Jeremiah” in the mid-20th century in his novel The Mountain Man, which became the basis for Redford’s 1972 film Jeremiah Johnson.
Second, while Jeremiah Johnson is undoubtedly a classic of the film genre and ranks as Robert Redford’s favorite of the films he has made, it is not an accurate portrayal of the mountain man it was intended to portray.
In the film, Johnson is a veteran of the Mexican-American War who left that life behind to find greater meaning in the wilderness. The movie actually includes more of Redford than the original mountaineer’s story. In the film, Johnson is portrayed as a kind, thoughtful, and even introverted person who begins life as a hunter as part of a spiritual journey.
Reality was very different from the movie. The real inspiration for the story was a New Jersey native named John Garrison, who served in the Navy and then became a military fugitive for attacking a superior officer. He abandoned his military career, adopted the pseudonym John Johnstone, and began a new life as a mountain hunter.
John Johnston is something of a mystery. Part of the film was Jeremiah Johnson’s ongoing feud with the Crow people. Evidence suggests that John Johnston had a feud with the Crow that began after his wife, a member of the Flathead band, was murdered while out on a trapping expedition.
Blaming the Crows, Johnston began a campaign of revenge against the tribe. The movie covered this, and historians generally think it was largely accurate. But what the movie didn’t address was what made Johnston famous.
Another name for johnston is “liver-eating johnston.” After his trapping days were over, Johnston competed in the Hardwick Wild West Show in Montana. During the show’s run, Johnston gained a reputation as the “Indian Fighter.” He even accepted his reputation as a scalper and eater of their livers.
The reason for eating the liver of one’s enemies was to prevent them from accessing the afterlife. When it’s dark, that explanation doesn’t seem to be true. Consider Johnston’s own words:
We ran 300 yards to the bush… (I) threw him at the edge of the bushes… Then I scratched his scalp and then sang and danced some more. Then I put a knife in him and killed him, and part of his liver came out with the knife. Just then an annoying old man named Ross came running in. I waved the knife with the liver attached in the air and shouted, “Here, eat a piece! It will stay in your stomach until dinner!… And I made you believe that I should take a bite.”
The consensus among historians is that Johnston did not engage in ritual cannibalism of his victims.
Johnston’s final days were spent at a veterans home in Santa Monica, California. When he died in 1900, authorities buried him in a local military cemetery near a busy highway.
But Johnston told people he wanted to be buried near the mountains and animals. A coalition was formed to claim compensation. After some difficulty due to competing claims from the nearby town of Red Lodge, Montana, Union forces secured a position at Old Trail Town, Cody, Wyoming.
One of the irrigators at his new final resting place in 1974 was none other than Robert Redford.
An equally famous account of the legendary mountaineer’s life is Leonardo DiCaprio’s 2015 film The Revenant, which tells the story of famed hunter Hugh Glass.
Glass was born in the 1780s and was part of the first band of hunters taken to the western mountains in search of solitude and fortune.
Glass’s claim to fame was his iron will to live. During a trapping expedition in 1823, a grizzly bear attacked Glass, leaving him with horrific injuries. According to the History Channel:
Glass suffered extensive injuries, including a broken leg, a punctured neck and deep back lacerations that left several ribs exposed. His fellow pioneers were sure he would die from his wounds by morning, but he did not, so they carried him around in a palanquin made of sticks for two days. Deep into hostile Indian territory, the group felt an urgency to keep moving. So the leader recruited two volunteers to stay with Glass until his death and give him a proper burial.
The two stayed with Glass, but five days later he abandoned him and died. Before leaving him, they took his survival gear and his prized possession, a rifle.
But Yuri did not die. Near death, he crawled more than 200 miles toward the Missouri River, eating berries and snakes. One thought drove him forward. The idea was to get the gun back and punish the people who left him to die.
With the help of the Lakota people, Glass obtained a canoe and reconnected with his former group at Fort Kiowa in South Dakota. He also met one of the men who left him, a teenage hunter and explorer named Jim Bridger.
Bridger, who later became famous for discovering the Great Salt Lake and many of the features of what is now Yellowstone National Park, explained that he thought his death was imminent and did not want his tools to fall into Native hands.
Glass forgave Bridger, but continued his search for another man: John Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald eventually joined the army, knowing that revenge on the soldiers was impossible.
Glass had to seek legal relief, including suing the U.S. military, to retrieve his beloved flintlock rifle. Glass got his gun back along with a $300 settlement for his trouble.
Mountain men occupied a brief but unforgettable chapter in the history of the American West. They were neither settlers nor cowboys in the traditional sense, but hunters, traders, guides, and wanderers who lived on the edges of the known world.
The era of the mountain men lasted only a few decades, but their images still shape the way we imagine the American West today.
