'Reader, if you are in search of a Classical and Scientific tourist, please to lay this 'volume' down, and pass on, for this simply informs you what a Trapper has seen and experienced. But if you wish to peruse a Hunter's rambles among the wild regions of the Rocky Mountains, please to read this and forgive the authors foibles and imperfections, considering as you pass along that he has been chiefly educated in Nature's School under that rigid tutor experience...' Born in a little Maine village in 1814, Osborne Russell ran away to sea at the age of sixteen, but he soon gave up seafaring to serve with a trading and trapping company in Wisconsin and Minnesota. In 1834 he signed up for Nathaniel Wyeth's expedition to the Rocky Mountains and the mouth of the Columbia. Subsequently he joined Jim Bridger's brigade of old Rocky Mountain Fur Company men, continuing with them after a merger that left the American Fur Company in control of the trade.When the fur trade declined, he became a free trapper operating out of Fort Hall, staying in the mountains until the great Westward migration began. Osborne Russell's journal covering the years 1834 to 1843 is, in the words of editor Aubrey L.Haines, 'perhaps the best account of the fur trapper in the Rocky Mountains when the trade there was at its peak. It is a factual, unembellished narrative written by one who was not only a trapper but also a keen observer and an able writer'. Edited from the original manuscript and originally printed in a limited edition of 750 copies, this classic piece of Western Americana is now available to the general public.

aEUROoeThe spirit of the pioneering mountaineer emanates from Mountain Fever, a superb account of the 19th century conquests of the highest and most imposing of Pacific Northwest mountains, Mt. Rainier. [This] is the history of organized mountaineering in the Northwest as well as of Mt. Rainier and those who accepted its challenge. It carries those stories to the turn of the century when Mt. Rainier achieved the status of a national park.aEURO - Portland Oregonian aEUROoeHainesaEURO(t) story begins with the day Capt. George Vancouver sighted the snowy mountain in 1792. The author sifted accounts of the first climbers, Dr. William F. Tolmie who went to the ridge above the forks of the Mowich River in 1833, the Bailey-Edgar-Ford party, which may have reached the summit in 1851, the unknown climbers guided by a Yakima Indian, Saluskin, in 1855 and the 1857 attempt of Lieut. August V. Kautz. These were the men who penetrated the wilderness without blazing a trail.aEURO - Seattle Times aEUROoeThis book - a collectoraEURO(t)s item - will be cherished by all who have set foot on the peak and who have been inspired by its distant views.aEURO - William O. Douglas Aubrey Haines is a retired historian for the National Park Service.

With the ecological integrity of Yellowstone National Park in contention between developers and environmentalists, the events of its exploration and founding take on added interest. This Bison Books edition of Nathaniel P. Langford's journal brings back into print one of the principal sources of information on the exploration of the Yellowstone region and its establishment as America's first national park.

The findings of the 1870 Washburn expedition, of which Langford was a member, gave credence to the findings of the Folsom party of 1869 and resulted in the sending of a government survey party into the area in 1871. The culminating effect of the three expeditions was the federal legislation creating our first and largest national park and marking the beginning of the national concern for the preservation of America's heritage of wilderness beauty.

Overview of Big Hole National Battlefield and details of the Nez Perce War of 1877