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Podcast Transcript
Before cowboys became the symbol of the American West, there were the mountain men.
They crossed unmapped passes, trapped beavers in icy streams, lived among Native peoples, and helped open the way for the great 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 legends behind the rise of the mountain men on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
The mountain men were one of the most distinctive groups in the history of the American West. They were hunters, trappers, scouts, traders, guides, and explorers, living in the Rocky Mountains and surrounding regions during the first half of the 19th century.
Their heyday lasted only about a generation, roughly from the 1820s to the 1840s, but their influence on American expansion, western mythology, and the mapping of the continent was enormous.
They were not cowboys, although popular culture later often conflated the two. Cowboys were mostly associated with the post-Civil War cattle frontier. Mountain men came earlier. They were part of the fur-trade frontier, and their world was one of beaver pelts, Native alliances, brutal weather, and prolonged isolation.
Beaver pelts had long been a coveted North American commodity. The pelts produced iconic waterproof hats and were a fashion necessity for any aspiring gentleman on either side of the Atlantic.
During the 17th-century fur trade, operations centered around the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence and Hudson River Valleys, where the beaver lived in abundance.
The dynamics of early trade in beaver pelts relied heavily on the control that native people maintained over the supply chain. Europeans seldom did the actual trapping; instead, monopolies like the Hudson’s Bay Company controlled the trade.
From fortified forts in beaver-rich regions, company officials stayed at the forts and waited for native trappers to bring them pelts. The forts became centers of an elaborate barter system in which traders swapped pelts for technology, such as firearms, and other items, like blankets, beads, and glass.
The trade flourished until beavers were hunted to near extinction in the upper Midwest. The trade pitted tribe against tribe and European nations against one another. As I discussed in a previous episode on the beaver, the Beaver Wars were the harsh reality of the competition for the increasingly scarce pelts in the east.
This scarcity drove the beaver trade farther west. In the wake of the Louisiana Purchase, the beaver trade pushed across the Mississippi, over the Great Plains, and into the Rocky Mountains.
But this new era looked entirely different from its eastern predecessor. The new system broke the old native moopoly that had functioned as the center of the beaver pelt trade.
The days of forts had passed. The risks associated with these types of forts had simply become too great. Outside of the basic risk of simply overhunting an area and having a fort as an expensive relic of the trade, there was the challenge of fort security. Several tribes, most notably the Blackfeet, viewed encroachment as an act of hostility and responded with violence.
The new 19th-century wester trade in beaver pelts was conducted by a new type of trapper: the mountain man, and a new economic system drove the 19th-century fur trade: the rendezvous.
The rendezvous system was a highly efficient, mobile marketplace invented in 1825 that revolutionized the Rocky Mountain fur trade by replacing permanent frontier forts with an annual wilderness gathering.
Every summer, a massive overland supply train would travel from St. Louis to a prearranged mountain valley, bringing vital goods such as gunpowder, whiskey, and tobacco directly to the field.
Hundreds of mountain men, and thousands of Native American trappers would converge on the site to barter their spring harvest of beaver pelts for supplies. This system eliminated the steep financial overhead and severe security risks of maintaining forts in hostile territory, creating a temporary, multi-week trading zone.
The mountain men who gathered at this rendezvous often left the site in debt. The trapper would spend nearly the entire year gathering pelts in some of the most dangerous terrain in America, risking their lives fighting the elements and hostile natives to secure enough pelts to trade at the rendezvous.
They had no other options for their supplies; what they brought to the rendezvous would be traded for what they needed and for many things they didn’t.
After acquiring fresh powder, new traps, lead, dried meats, soap, and of course, a full cache of whiskey, the trapper left the rendezvous in debt. It was a vicious cycle: the only way to pay the debt was to trap for another year and hope the haul you brought to the rendezvous would cut into the debt.
Shockingly, there was no shortage of candidates for this lifestyle.
The history of the mountain man is filled with some of the most unique characters in American History. Many of their stories may be well-known to moviegoers, thanks to iconic films like The Mountain Man, The Revenant, and, of course, Robert Redford’s Jeremiah Johnson.
The films may not always be accurate. In fact, they seldom are, but they do manage to depict the period’s challenges of surviving such a life.
Jeremiah Johnson is perhaps the most famous of the mountain man archetypes. Defining who Johnson was is no easy task.
There are a few things we know for certain about him. First, if you were to address him as Jeremiah, he likely wouldn’t know you were talking to him. Author Vardis Fisher invented the name “Jeremiah” in the mid-20th century for his novel The Mountain Man, which served as the basis for Redford’s 1972 film Jeremiah Johnson.
Secondly, while Jeremiah Johnson is no doubt a classic of this film genre, and ranks as Robert Redford’s favorite movie he ever made, it is not an accurate portrayal of the mountain man it attempted to depict.
In the movie, Johnson is a veteran of the Mexican-American War who leaves that life behind in search of greater meaning in the wilderness. The movie actually has more Redford in it than the story of the original mountain man. In the movie, Johnson is portrayed as a kind and thoughtful, even introspective man, who begins life as a trapper as part of a spiritual journey.
Reality was significantly different from the movie. The true inspiration for the tale was a New Jersey native named John Garrison, who, after serving in the Navy, became a military fugitive for striking a superior officer. Abandoning his military past, he adopted the alias John Johnston and embarked on a new existence as a mountain trapper.
John Johnston is more of a mystery. Part of the movie was Jeremiah Johnson’s ongoing feud with the Crow people. Evidence suggests that John Johnston also had a feud with the Crow, one that originated after his wife, a member of the Flathead band, was killed while he was away on a trapping expedition.
Blaming the Crow, Johnston initiated a campaign of vengeance against the tribe. The film covered this, and historians generally consider it broadly accurate. But what the film didn’t cover was what made Johnston famous.
Another name for Johnston is “Liver-eating Johnston”. After his trapping days were over, Johnston joined the Hardwick Wild West Show in Montana. During the show, Johnston leaned into his reputation as an “Indian Fighter”; he even embraced his reputation as a scalper and the eater of their livers.
The reason for eating his enemy’s liver was to deny them access to the afterlife. While dark, the account is unlikely to be true, consider Johnston’s own words:
We had a three-hundred-yard run to the bushes…. [I] threw him down just at the edge of the brush…. Then I scalped him, and then I sang and danced some more. Then I ran my knife into him and killed him, and part of his liver came out with the knife. Just then, a sort of squeamish old fellow named Ross came running up. I waved the knife with the liver on it in the air, and I cried out, “Come on and have a piece! It’ll stay in your stomach ‘til dinner!…. And I kind of made believe to take a bite.”
It is the consensus of historians that Johnston did not engage in ritualistic cannibalism of his victims.
Johnston’s last days were spent in a veterans’ home in Santa Monica, California. When he died in 1900, authorities buried him in a local military cemetery near a busy freeway.
However, Johnston had told people he wanted to be buried near the mountains and the animals. A coalition was formed to insist on a reburial. After some difficulties over competing claims with the neighboring town of Red Lodge, Montana, the coalition secured a spot at Old Trail Town in Cody, Wyoming.
One of the pallbearers at his new final resting spot in 1974 was none other than Robert Redford.
An equally famous account of the life of a legendary mountain man was Leonardo DiCaprio’s 2015 film The Revenant, which tells the story of famous trapper Hugh Glass.
Glass was born in the 1780s and was part of the first wave of trappers drawn to the mountain west in search of solitude and fortune.
Glass’s claim to fame was his iron will to live. A grizzly bear attacked Glass in 1823 while on a trapping expedition, which caused horrific injuries. According to the History Channel:
Glass suffered extensive wounds, including a broken leg, punctured throat, and deep back lacerations exposing several ribs. His fellow frontiersmen felt certain he would die from his wounds by the morning, but he didn’t, so they carried him for two days on a litter made from tree boughs. Deep in hostile Indian territory, the group felt an urgency to keep moving. So the leader recruited two volunteers to stay with Glass until he died and give him a proper burial.
The two men did stay with Glass, but after five days, they abandoned Glass to die. Before leaving him, they took his survival tools and his prized possession: his rifle.
Glass, however, did not die. Near death, he crawled for more than 200 miles towards the Missouri River, living on berries and snakes. One thought drove him onward: to reclaim his gun and punish the men who had left him for dead.
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 had left him, a teenage trapper and explorer named Jim Bridger.
Bridger, who would go on to become famous for discovering the Great Salt Lake and many of the features of what is now Yellowstone National Park, explained that they thought his death was imminent and that they didn’t want his tools falling into Native hands.
Glass forgave Bridger but continued searching for the other man, John Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald had ultimately joined the army, knowing that vengeance against a soldier was impossible.
Glass had to settle for a legal remedy, suing the US Army to recover his beloved flintlock rifle. Glass got his gun back, along with a handsome $300 settlement for his troubles.
The mountain men occupied a brief but unforgettable chapter in the history of the American West. They were not settlers in the traditional sense, nor were they cowboys, but trappers, traders, guides, and wanderers who lived at the edge of the known world.
The era of the mountain men lasted only a few decades, but their image still shapes how we imagine the American West today.