Across the Wide Missouri

The Rocky Mountain fur trade was the final act in a world drama that began with Champlain, with Columbus, perhaps with the Phoenicians who first broke through the through the Pillars of Hercules. European man had at last reached the Pacific, and conquered all that lay between. In the last violent years of discovery, with which this book deals, the mountain men were sometimes the heroes, sometimes the villains, but they were always the first.

Three quarters of a million square miles were at stake. By the eighteen-thirties (the period of this history), the French and Spanish empires were dead and the fight had narrowed down to Great Britain and the United States. In "Across the Wide Missouri," Bernard DeVoto shows the decisive actions — from Astoria, through the Hudson's Bay Company advance, to the coming of the missionaries — by which the United States won the empire of the West.

The actors are few, considering the immensity of the stakes. Most of them come under the heading "mountain man," the highest embodiment of the American wilderness hero, the lone hunter, the man in buckskins. A lover of solitude and unspoiled country, he paradoxically destroyed what he loved, making certain that solitude and the virgin earth should be lost forever. After him the covered wagon, the ax, the saw and the plow.

This is the story of the mountain men in the climactic years 1833-38, with special focus on the expedition by a Scottish sportsman, William Drummond Stewart, who had the foresight to take with him a talented young artists, Alfred Jacob Miller — and who thereby brought back a unique pictorial history of the early West. The framework is continental; the detail is the detail of intimate knowledge: the wind and the thirst and the hunger of the trail; the fierce losing battle of the Indians (doomed as they faced the machine age); the brass knuckle encounters between members of the great rival fur companies and the incredible beauty of the country for which they fought; the horror of the small pox, "The Conqueror"; the ecstasy of the buffalo hunt; the long winter encampment; the spring trapping of beaver in their prime; the Saturnalia of the summer rendezvous. Close up it is grand but meaningless. Seen in perspective through a historian's eyes, the pattern emerges like the pattern of a valley when one ascends a nearby peak. For this is the process by which America became a continental nation, recognizing at last that we are and must be one.