and established the routes of travel which are now, and always will be, the avenues of commerce in that region. They were the 'pathfinders' of the West, and not those later official explorers whom posterity so recognizes. No feature of western geography was ever discovered by Government explorers after 1840. Everything was already known, and had been for fully a decade. It is true that many features, like the Yellowstone wonderland, with which these restless rovers were familiar, were afterward forgotten and were re-discovered in later years; but there has never been a time until very recently when the geography of the West was so thoroughly understood as it was by the trader and trapper from 1830 to 1840.
"This minute knowledge was of practical use in many ways. When Brigham Young selected the valley of Great Salt Lake as the future home of his people, he did so largely upon information derived from the traders. When the War with Mexico came, the military forces of the United States invaded New Mexico under the guidance of men who knew every trail and mountain pass better than the most thorough reconnaissance could have taught them. When the national troops appeared before the gates of Santa Fé they were met by a people who had already been virtually won to the American cause through long intercourse with the traders. When the rush of emigration to California and Oregon followed, the emigrants found a highway across the continent already established. When the Government entered in earnest upon the work of exploration, it was the veteran mountaineer who was always sought to do service as guide."
It is most unfortunate that there exists in American literature no intimate and vivid account of the western hunters and trappers by one who had shared their camps and accompanied them on trail and warpath. We have many stories of their exploits, written in narrative form, with scarce any dialogue or characterization. The men themselves figure in such stories as little more than lay figures in a historical museum. It is one thing to describe events; it is another thing to make the actors in those events live and speak in the reader's presence. Generally the contemporary annals of the fur trade are as dry as a ship's log-book. The participants in those stirring scenes could not write, and the men of their time who could write lacked the experience.
What American authors failed to do was accomplished by a young English sportsman and explorer who lived among the trappers as one of themselves and acquired their point of view. Although not a professional writer, he was blest with a knack of putting his experiences, and those of his companions, so clearly before his readers that one can visualize both men and deeds without conscious effort. This man was George Frederick Ruxton, formerly a lieutenant in her Majesty's 89th Regiment.
In Blackwood's Magazine of 1848 there appeared a serial by Ruxton entitled "Life in the Far West." This story excited so much interest that it was reprinted in book form, and went through two editions. These are out of print, and so the work is practically unknown to our reading public.
"Life in the Far West" * is written in the form of a thinly veiled romance; but the actors were real, the incidents were real, and they were strung together in a connected plot simply because that was the most effective way to show character in action. The story is not history, of course, but neither is it fable. Nearly every page gives convincing evidence of the author's intimate personal knowledge of the scenes and characters portrayed. He had scoured the continent from Canada to Mexico, from the Mississippi to the Pacific coast. He had associated with many redoubtable characters of the old West—with men like Kit Carson, Bill Williams, the Bents, the Sublettes, Joe Meek, St. Vrain, Fitzpatrick, Killbuck, and La Bonté. Pie was equally at home among Americans, Canadians, Creoles, Mexicans, Spanish Californians, and Indians. Each of these picturesque types he has shown to the life. No narrative or formal history of that time has described the pioneers of the Far West with such actual truth and fidelity.
* Here published as "In the Old West."
The wildness of the adventures related by Ruxton led many readers to suspect that they were mere romance. The author replied, in a letter to his publishers:—
"I think it would be well to correct a misapprehension as to the truth or fiction of the paper. It is no fiction. There is no incident in it which has not actually occurred, nor one character who is not well known in the Rocky Mountains, with the exception of two whose names are changed." Fully half of the names of Americans mentioned in his book can be identified today with the men who bore them. Again he wrote:—
"I have brought out a few more softening traits in the characters of the mountaineers—but not at the sacrifice of truth—for some of them have their good points; which, as they are rarely allowed to rise to the surface, must be laid hold of at once before they sink again. Killbuck—that 'old hoss' par exemple, was really pretty much of a gentleman, as was La Bonté. Bill Williams, another 'hard case,' and Rube Herring, were 'some' too.
"The scene where La Bonté joins the Chase family is so far true, that he did make a sudden appearance; but, in reality, a day before the Indian attack. The Chases (and I wish I had not given the proper name *) did start for the Platte alone, and were stampeded upon the waters of the Platte.
"The Mexican fandango is true to the letter. It does seem difficult to understand how they contrived to keep their knives out of the hump-ribs of the mountaineers; but how can you account for the fact, that, the other day, 4000 Mexicans, with 13 pieces of artillery, behind strong intrenchments and two lines of parapets, were routed by 900 raw Missourians; 300 killed, as many more wounded, all their artillery captured, as well as several hundred prisoners; and that not one American was killed in the affair? This is positive fact.
"I myself, with three trappers, cleared a fandango at Taos, armed only with bowie-knives—some score Mexicans, at least, being in the room.
* In accordance with this suggestion, the name was changed
to Brand. The mountaineers, it seems, are more sensitive to
type than to tomahawks; and poor Ruxton, who always
contemplated another expedition among them, would sometimes
jestingly speculate upon his reception, should they learn
that he had shown them up in print.
"With regard to the incidents of Indian attacks, starvation, cannibalism, &c., I have invented not one out of my own head. They are all matters of history in the mountains; but I have no doubt jumbled the dramatis persono one with another, and may have committed anachronisms." Scholars may detect some inaccuracies here and there, such as scarcely could be avoided by one who wrote, as we may say, in the saddle; but these detract nothing from the essential verity of the book. Ruxton's purpose was not to write a chronicle, but to exhibit vividly the mountain men and the natives in relation to their environment. If he wrought disconnected incidents into a continuous story, and staged men together who may have been a thousand miles apart at the time, it was only because, to this extent, "fiction is the most convincing way of telling the truth."
As the author of this book was himself a true knight of the wilderness whose brief life was filled with thrilling adventures, we append the following memoir by one of his friends:—
"The London newspapers of October, 1848, contained the mournful tidings of the death, at St. Louis on the Mississippi, and at the early age of twenty-eight, of Lieutenant George Frederick Ruxton, formerly of her Majesty's 89th Regiment, the author of the following sketches:
"Many men, even in the most enterprising periods of our history, have been made the subjects of elaborate biography with far less title to the honor than this lamented young officer. Time was not granted him to embody in a permanent shape a tithe of his personal experiences and strange adventures in three quarters of the globe. Considering, indeed, the amount of physical labor he underwent, and the extent of the fields over which his wanderings spread, it is almost surprising he found leisure
