Mountain Man

Mountain Man

Vardis Fisher

1965

For Joe

who was one of them

To the Reader

WHAT THE Author of this novel would like to say to the reader has been so well said by various writers that I am going to let them say it to you. George Frederick Ruxton was one of the sharpest and most sensitive observers of the Rocky Mountains area and its people in the time of this book, or a little before it; and his observations he left to us in his books, chiefly in Life in the Far West, published in London in 1849.

On the Indian woman’s relationship with whitemen he wrote:

"The Indian women who follow the fortunes of the white hunters are remarkable for their affection and fidelity to their husbands, the which virtues, it must be remarked, are all on their own side; for, with very few exceptions, the mountaineers seldom scruple to abandon their Indian wives, whenever the fancy takes them to change their harems; and on such occasions the squaws, thus cast aside, wild with jealousy and despair, have been not unfrequently known to take signal vengeance both on their faithless husbands and the successful beauties who have supplanted them in their affections. There are some honourable exceptions, however, to such cruelty, and many of the mountaineers stick to their red-ski

On the nature, of the mountain men a number of perspicacious writers have expressed their views. Just before the time of this novel W. A. Ferris wrote his Life in the Rocky Mountains, in which he said:

"Strange, that people can find so strong and fascinating a charm in this rude, nomadic, and hazardous mode of life, as to be estranged themselves from home, country, friends, and all the comforts, elegances, and privileges of civilization; but so it is, the toil, the danger, the loneliness, the deprivation of this condition of being, fraught with all its disadvantages, and replete with peril, is, they think, more than compensated by the lawless freedom, and the stirring excitement, incident to their situation and pursuits. The very danger has its attraction, and the courage and cu

"Scarcely, however, did I ever wish to change such hours of freedom for all the luxuries of civilised life; and, u

Wrote the late historian Bernard DeVoto:

". . . but the loveliest myth of all America was the far West . . . a lost impossible province . . . where men were not dwarfs and where adventure truly was. For a brief season, consider, the myth so generously begotten became fact. For a few years Odysseus Jed Smith and Siegfried Carson and the wing-shod Fitzpatrick actually drew breath in this province of fable. Then suddenly it was all myth again. Wagons were moving down the trails, and nowhere remained any trace of the demigods who had passed this way."

Of the mountain man: "But he was a man. He possessed the most formidable skill ever developed on this continent. He possessed, too, a valor hardly to be comprehended. He went forth into the uncharted peaks and made his way. The Indians slaughtered him in hundreds and he slaughtered them as casually and passed on .... This record of him [Bo

"There is, perhaps," wrote Washington Irving, "no class of men on the face of the earth, says Captain Bo

Justice William O. Douglas has approached the "wilderness" as a botanist and a poet: "What I had experienced was a symphony of the wilderness. Those who never learned to walk will never know its beauty. Only those who choose to get lost in it, cutting all ties with civilization, can know what I mean. Only those who return to the elemental world can know its beauty and grandeur-—and `man’s essential unity with it. "

Lawrence Gilman, the distinguished music critic, says in Nature in Music: ". . . M. Pierre Janet, who holds that those who, at different times in the history of the world’s civilization, have manifested a strong attraction toward the natural world, have always been persons of a dehnite and particular type: emotional, subject to exaltation of mood, impatient of hampering traditions, essentially anti-conventional. Mr. Havelock Ellis, in his study of the psychology of the love of wild Nature, characteristics all such persons as, in a greater or less degree, 'temperamentally exceptional} In the strongest and simplest manifestations of the type, these lovers of wild Nature have been persons who were instinctively repelled by their ordinary environment .... Chateaubriand, who had small use for mountains except as 'the sources of rivers, a barrier against the horrors of war,’ is balanced by Petrarch, who, climbing Mont Ventoux . . . observed that his soul 'rose to lofty contemplations on the summit.' . . . The strongest appeal of natural beauty has always, then, been chiefly to individuals of emotional habit, and especially to those of untrammelled imagination and non-conformist tendencies: in other words, to poetically minded radicals in all times and regions. It is probable that the curious and enlightened inquirer, bearing in mind these facts, would not be surprised to find, in studying the various expressions of this attraction as they are recorded in the arts, that the uniquely sensitive and eloquent art of music has long been the handmaid of the Nature-lover; and he would be prepared to End the Nature-lover himself appearing often in the guise of that inherently emotional and often heterodox being,. the musicmaker."