The Beaver Era

THIS RECKLESS BREED OF MEN (361 pp.) --Robert Glass Cleland--Knopf ($4).

"TO ENTERPRISING YOUNG MEN," Said the notice in the Missouri Republican--"The subscriber wishes to engage one hundred young men to ascend the Missouri River to its source, there to be employed for one, two, or three years ..."

The notice, signed by William H. Ashley, militia general and Missouri businessman, was just about as vague as most other help-wanted ads, but it brought results. Applicants fresh from "the grogshops and other sinks of iniquity in the rough frontier river town of St. Louis" helped fill the quota, and on April 3, 1823, a year after the ad appeared, Ashley's "enterprising young men" hit the trail. The duties of the new hands: to push their wav to the mouth of the Yellowstone River, erect a fortified trading post there and trap beaver in the surrounding country.

Get to California. Shrewd General Ashley, "the John Jacob Astor of St. Louis," thought he knew a good man when he saw one; but even he did not realize that he had assembled "the most significant group of continental explorers ever brought together." The man who became the group's most outstanding graduate was a 24-year-old New Yorker named Jedediah Strong Smith, an ex-clerk on a Great Lakes freighter who had come to town in time to spot Ashley's ad. Three years later, when beaver-rich General Ashley retired from the field and sold his interests to Trapper Smith and two other lieutenants, they lost no time in organizing an 18-man party and plunging into the unexplored land south of the Great Salt Lake in a search for new trapping grounds. Although Mexican-held California was one of their objectives, they "literally went, out into a new country not knowing whither they went," traveling by rivers, and ancient Indian trails.

Several hungry, hazardous months later, on Nov. 27, 1826, they got to Mission San Gabriel, near the "pueblo of Los Angeles." Nobody took any note of it at the time, but "Smith's appearance in California marked the completion of the Anglo-American's long march across the continent, the fulfillment of his age-old search for a highway to the western sea. . ."

Scalp the Savages. Historian (California's Huntington Library) Cleland's story of the hundreds of other daredevil trappers who opened up the Southwest for U.S. expansion is a tribute to some of history's forgotten men. Equipped with half a dozen five-pound beaver traps, a rifle and a tomahawk, such buckskin-clothed trappers as Antoine Robidoux (who built the first trading post west of the Rockies' main range), Joseph Reddeford Walker (discoverer of Yosemite Valley) and Old Bill Williams stared down danger and brought a fortune in furs out of virgin streams. For most of them, the yearly rendezvous, a "combined festival and fair" in the wilderness, was their only contact with civilization. There they sold their furs, bought their supplies and spent their hard-earned profits in "roaring, riotous debauch, devoted in about equal measure to lethal whisky, reckless gambling . . .and an orgy of sexual abandon with the complacent Indian girls and squaws." The sun-blackened trappers modeled them selves after their No. 1 foe, the Indian.

Almost all of them married Indian girls, prized buffalo as their favorite meat, and took the scalps of the savages they killed.

In 1840 the 20-year-long era of the beaver trade came to a close (largely be cause U.S. hatmakers began using silk in stead of beaver in men's toppers), and "it closed forever," writes Author Cleland.

"The mountain man, unlike the prospector, cattleman, or frontier settler, left no successor . . . But in his few allotted years the trapper set his impress forever upon the map of North America and the fate of the United States." On his first hand retracing of the cold trails of long-dead trappers, Author Cleland packs along:

a valuable baggage of anecdote, legend, old documents, and excerpts from fron tier diaries. A generous sprinkling of old prints and photographs helps to make This Reckless Breed of Men an impor tant discovery for any armchair explorer of western Americana.

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