Liberty or Savagery?

With the explosive growth of the Rocky Mountain fur trade in the 1830s, mountain men, who lived in the wilderness trapping and selling animal pelts, captured the American imagination. To some they symbolized the rugged freedom of the frontier, to others, anarchy and degradation. In The Prairie (1827) James Fenimore Cooper's trapper hero, Leatherstocking, possessed natural virtue. Lewis H. Garrard, who traveled along the Sante Fe Trail in 1846 at the age of seventeen, admired the trapper's independence. His Wah-To-Yah and the Taos Trail (1850) celebrated the "grand sensation of liberty and a total absence of fear" he found in the trappers' camps. Other commentators, however, saw the mountain men as corrupt renegades. Timothy Flint's The Shoshonee Valley (1830), the first novel to feature mountain men as characters, suggested that they had "an instinctive fondness for the reckless savage life . . . interdicted...