Pueblo, Hardscrabble, and Greenhorn were among the very first white settlements in Colorado. In their time they were the most westerly settlements in American territory, and they attracted a lively and varied population of mavericks from more civilized parts of the world-from what became New Mexico to the south and from as far east as England.

The inhabitants of these little walled towns thrived on the rigor and freedom of frontier life. Many were ex-trappers full already of frontier expertise. Others were enthusiastic neophytes happy to escape problems back home. They sought Mexican wives in Taos or Santa Fe or allied themselves with the native Indian tribes, or both. The fur trade and the illegal liquor trade with the Indians were at first the mainstays of their economy. As time went on they extended their activities to farming illegally on the land owned by the Indians and trading their crops and other trade articles. They enjoyed themselves hunting, gambling, trading, and with their women, freely mixing Spanish, Indian, and Anglo-American cultures in a community without laws or bigotry.

This idyll was brought to a close by the Mexican War and the lure of the California Gold Rush of 1849. The expectation of a railroad on the Arkansas brought many of the settlers back, only to be scared away again by the massacre of Pueblo by the Utes in 1854 of which Mrs. Lecompte has reconstructed a very complete record. When the gold seekers rushed to Pikes Peak in 1858 and stayed to establish farms and towns, some of the pioneers of the early days returned with them, and shared their skills and knowledge to make possible the permanent settlements that resulted.

Mrs. Lecompte has documented the history of the region from diaries, letters, and the reports of such distinguished passers-by as J. C. Fremont and Francis Parkman. The result is a complete and compelling account of a neglected part of American frontier life. It is illustrated with more than fifty photographs and contemporary drawings.

"Frenchmen were far ahead of Englishmen in the early Far West, not only prior in time but greater in numbers and in historical importance," writes Janet Lecompte in her introduction to "French Fur Traders and Voyageurs in the American West." They were the first to navigate the Mississippi and its tributaries, and they founded St. Louis and New Orleans. Though France lost her North American possessions in 1763, thousands of her natives remained on the continent. Many of them were voyageurs for Hudson's Bay Company, whose descendants would join American fur trade companies plying the trans-Mississippi West. This volume documents the fact that in the nineteenth century Frenchmen dominated the fur trade in the United States. Twenty-two biographies, collected from LeRoy R. Hafen's classic ten-volume The "Mountain Men and the Fur Trade of the Far West," represent a variety of origins and social classes, types of work, and trading areas. Here are trappers who joined John Jacob Astor's ill-fated fur venture on the Pacific, St. Louis traders who hauled goods to Spanish New Mexico along the Santa Fe Trail, and those who traded with Indians in the western plains and mountains.

"Oh how I do wish I could have a little help in maintaining my home. I shall dread the cold winter so much. I don't have very good success getting employment," wrote Emily French in her diary in 1890. Emily was recently divorced but received no alimony or child support. She worked as a laundress, cleaning woman, and nurse, first in the farming community of Elbert, Colorado, then in the growing city of Denver, the mining town of Dake, and back into Denver.

Emily's diary discloses an example of the desperate lives lived by many. Having enough money and food is a source of constant anxiety, but her deepest fears center on the loss of family and of home. She becomes discouraged but never gives up, recognizes others less fortunate than herself, and always believes things will change. This is a moving work that provides an unusual look into the life of the working poor in the late-nineteenth-century West.