Excerpt from Adventures of Zenas Leonard Fur Trader

Edited by John C. Ewers

Published in 1959

More than anything else, the growing fur trade attracted white men across the Mississippi River into the interior of North America. Fur traders, also called mountain men, had traveled over the Appalachian Mountains, around the Great Lakes, over the Rocky Mountains, and into the southwestern deserts in search of beaver pelts long before white settlers started to carve farms out of the wilderness. In the early 1800s, with the fur supply between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River depleted and settlements filling up the wilderness land, European fur trappers looked to the land beyond the Mississippi River. The Spanish, French, and British dominated the fur trade in this region when the United States...