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-skinned wives for better and for worse, often suffering them to gain the upper hand in the domestic economy of the lodges, and being ruled by their better halves in all things pertaining to family affairs; and it may be remarked, when once the lady dons the unmentionables, she becomes the veriest termagant that ever hen-pecked an unfortunate husband."
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 cunning, and skill, and watchfulness made necessary by the difficulties they have to overcome, the privations they are forced to contend with, and the perils against which they must guard, become at once their pride and boast. A strange, wild, terrible, romantic, hard, and exciting life they lead, with alternate plenty and starvation, activity and repose, safety and alarm, and all the other adjuncts that belong to so vagrant a condition, in a harsh, barren, untamed, and fearful region of desert, plain, and mountain. Yet so attached to it do they become, that few ever leave it, and they deem themselves, nay are, with all these bars against them, far happier than the in-dwellers of towns and cities, with all the gay and giddy whirl of fashion’s mad delusions in their train ....
"Scarcely, however, did I ever wish to change such hours of freedom for all the luxuries of civilised life; and, unnatural and extraordinary as it may appear, yet such is the fascination of the life of the mountain hunter, that I believe not one instance could be adduced of even the most polished and civilised of men, who had once tasted the sweets of its attendant liberty, and freedom from every worldly care, not regretting the moment when he exchanged it for the monotonous life of the settlements, nor sighing and sighing again once more to partake of its pleasures and allurements."
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 [Bonner’s Beckwourth] and of his casual hardships, murders, and inattentive violence is quite, quite true."
"There is, perhaps," wrote Washington Irving, "no class of men on the face of the earth, says Captain Bonneville, who lead a life of more continued exertion, peril, and excitement, and who are more enamored of their occupations, than the free trappers of the West. " "These," wrote Stanley Vestal, "were the mountain men, a breed of heroes .... These mountain men, far more than the soldiers and the statesmen, were the real means of seizing, holding, and settling our vast Far West. They were the men of destiny, whose skill and courage enabled those Americans who followed their trail to conquer a continent .... Those mountain men were only a few hundreds in number, hardly more than a thousand all told. Of these the free trappers were the cream, men whose careers, illustrated perfectly the principle of the survival of the fittest. To be rated one of the best of these is as proud a title to manhood as the history of these States affords.”
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."
Readers interested in exemplars of Mr. Gilman’s concluding statement can find them in the "forest" and "spring" symphonies of the eighteenth century; Handel’s attempts to capture in music winds, bird music, running water; Knecht’s "Musical Portrait of Nature" and Viva1di’s "The Four Seasons"; and in the tonal landscape-painting of more recent times, such as Debussy’s "Aprés-midi d’un faune," d'Indy’s "Jour d’eté at la montagne," MacDowe1l’s "Wandering Iceberg," and many others.