Distrustful of Leatherstocking and of the vast body of sentimental literature of the frontier, some of us have long suspected that the true conqueror of the land was a hero as brutal as its icy winters but, at times, as picturesque as the sunflowers along its sand trails…. Romanticists have tinted the stark fact of such men, and realists have dimmed their romance, until in our present attempts to relive the life of the West we encounter either the Rousseauesque natural man, ennobled beyond all probability, or the free trapper with his ax and rifle, keeping his bare journal, too sterile, too colorless to be the true mirror of the explorer's life. The extraordinary power of [Old Jules] appears to be in conveying truth of event and scene on the frontier in the medium of a style so vital and imaginative that instead of fiction or a trader's...