Across the Wide Missouri (American Heritage Library) [Paperback]

The best historical writing combines the quality of scholarship with that of literature, and that's what we have here. First published in 1947, this book is a deserved classic. It's the story of the Rocky Mountain fur trade in the latter half of the 1830s, a time of outrageous characters and extraordinary deeds, set against the finest landscape. DeVoto resolutely refuses to judge people of the 1830s by the standards of a later century. This is what infuriates the "politically correct". But DeVoto is surely right - any other approach might tell you something about the historian's own time but would shed little light on the period under study. Instead DeVoto's honesty brings his characters vividly to life. That doesn't only mean the fur trappers. He has a detailed and discerning knowledge of the Plains Indians, and appreciates the cultural, linguistic and indeed political diversity of the various nations. The Native Americans emerge as striking individuals in their own right. The book has been called romantic. Well, DeVoto is certainly keenly aware of the romantic quality of his epic tale, but he doesn't romanticize things. He's much too good a historian to make unprovable assertions. Always he has the evidence to hand, and if he repeats a tall tale, it's only for the pleasure of the telling and he's careful to point out when the source can't be trusted. His depth of research combined with a keen eye for the relevant detail make for a highly readable result. What all this adds up to is an elegy for two lost ways of life - that of the fur trappers and that of the Plains Indians, who managed to be friends and enemies at the same time. But both were swept away by outside forces that were huge and irresistable - Manifest Destiny as it was called, and its expression in the great migration to the West starting in the 1840s. Reading this book is like listening to an old friend telling great tales by the campfire on a warm evening. Fine work indeed.

Across the Wide Missouri

Mr. DeVoto has a passion for this subject and a passion for the characters that live in it.

Here are some excerpts from the book:

"There were few delicate feeders in the mountains...The river tribes liked the green, putrid flesh of buffalo drowned while crossing the ice and hauled ashore weeks later, `so ripe, so tender, that very little boiling is required.' They ate the kidneys raw... the white man would eat the liver raw as soon as it was taken; he seasoned it with the gall or sometimes with gunpowder...he had no more tableware than his belt knife - gravy, juices and blood running down his face, forearms and shirt. He wolfed the meat and never reached repletion. Eight pounds a day was standard ration for Hudson Bay employees [but often eat twice that amount]...melted fat was gulped by the pint. Kidney fat could be drunk without limit...Hump and boss boil in a kettle, cracked marrow bones sizzle by the fire...Camp is pitched by a small creek or a rushing mountain river...Here is the winesap air of the high places, the clear, green sky of evening fading to a dark that brings the stars within arm's length, the cottonwoods along the creek rustling in the wind. The smell of meat has brought wolves and coyotes almost to the circle of firelight. They skulk just beyond it; sometimes a spurt of flame will turn will turn their eyes to gold...Horses and mules crop the bunch grass at the end of their lariats or browse on leaves along the creek. The firelight flares and fades in the wind's rhythm on the faces of men in whose minds are the vistas and the annuls of the entire West."

If you are yearning for a dry narrative of the fur trade, this is not your book. This book gives you a feel for the land and a feel for the kinds of men involved in the fur trade. It gives you a feel for the hardships that they faced, the cutthroat business practices of the trade and how instrumental these men were to opening up the west for settlement. He does not sanitize history or historical figures. He presents the good and the bad of both the individual fur traders and the various Indian tribes that were most closely linked to the fur trade.

As it turns out, this is not a simple story to tell or to organize into a linear narrative. There were many different characters and crosscurrents cutting through the entire period. He weaves this story together with the sinew provided by the movements of a few of the most important mountain men: Jim Bridger, Tom Fitzpatrick, Joe Meek, Bill and Milton Sublette and Kit Carson.

He runs another colorful thread through the story made of missionaries. These are clearly the most foolish, most spiteful and most disagreeable people in the narrative. Some of them are also the most well-intentioned and tragic characters in the grand story. Of the missionaries' desire to convert the Nez Perce and Flathead Indians to Christianity, he says, "[Nez Perce] were superior Indians, they made no trouble, they liked and admired white men...Their desire for instruction in the mysteries was genuine and paramount, as clean as the desire of these Christians to give them what they wanted. Both desires were simple and altogether hopeless...The Indians receiving instruction were men of the age of polished stone...They tried, both Indians and whites. There they stood, the seekers and the bearers of truth...the sincerity of these Indians' desire for religious instruction could not be doubted." And yet this first wave of missionaries met with frustration, failure and murder.

But the primary and repeated organizational thread that runs through this story is a fascinating and completely unlikely man named William Drummond Stewart. This man won the respect and deep friendship of all the great mountain men. He was kind, generous and good humored. Captain William Drummond Stewart of the British Army "was in his thirty-seventh year. He was the brother of Sir John Archibald Stewart, eighteenth of Grandtully and sixth baronet, and was next in succession to him...He went through the Hundred days with his regiment and fought at Waterloo." He traveled the prairies and the mountains in comfort, elegance and style. He was as tough, as adventurous and as skillful as any of the mountain men. Yet there was not even a hint of royal superiority about him.

Mr. DeVoto is a magnificent writer. If you are looking for an outstanding overview of the fur trade, this is your book. He also provides fascinating notes in the appendix and an extensive bibliography for those who are interested in further reading.

Bernard Devoto wrote before the mavens of political correctness had the power to harm honest research and writing, so it is to be expected that some contemporary readers would be hurt and confused by his frank and realistic depiction of the west of the fur trappers. Devoto spent years researching this classic, then presented his findings in polished prose that evoked the period and the wild life of his subjects. This, like all of his historical works, is worth reading more than once.