Articles liés à Life in the Far West

Life in the Far West - Couverture souple

Ruxton, George Frederick

 
9780806115344: Life in the Far West

Synopsis

In this classic of western Americana, George Frederick Ruxton, who died in St. Louis in 1848 at the youthful age of twenty-seven, brilliantly brings to life the whole heroic age of the Mountain Men. The author, from his intimate acquaintance with the trappers and traders of the American Far West, vividly recounts the story of two of the most adventurous of these hardy pioneers - Killbuck and La Bonté, whose daring, bravery, and hair-breadth escapes from their numerous Indian and Spaniard enemies were legend among their fellow-frontiersmen.

With Ruxton, we follow Killbuck and La Bonté and their mountain companions - Old Bill Williams, Black Harris, William Sublette, Joseph Walker, and others - across the prairies and forests, west from picturesque old Bent's Fort, into the dangerous Arapaho country near the headwaters of the Platte. We share with them the culinary delights of their campfires - buffalo boudins and beaver tails - and hear from their own lips, in the incomparable mountaineer dialect, hair-raising stories of frontier life and humorous tales of trading camp and frontier post.

Life in the Far West, then, is adventure extraordinary - the true chronicle of the rugged Mountain Men whose unflinching courage and total disregard for personal safety or comfort opened the Far West to the flood of settlers who were to follow. The breath-taking water colors and sketches, which depict with great detail many of the familiar scenes of the early West, were done by one of Ruxton's contemporaries and fellow-explorers, Alfred Jacob Miller.

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Présentation de l'éditeur

This book was originally published prior to 1923, and represents a reproduction of an important historical work, maintaining the same format as the original work. While some publishers have opted to apply OCR (optical character recognition) technology to the process, we believe this leads to sub-optimal results (frequent typographical errors, strange characters and confusing formatting) and does not adequately preserve the historical character of the original artifact. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as blurred or missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work or the scanning process itself. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy seeing the book in a format as close as possible to that intended by the original publisher.

Présentation de l'éditeur

The camp had all the appearance of permanency; for not only did it comprise one or two unusually comfortable shanties, but the numerous stages on which huge stripes of buffalo meat were hanging in process of cure, showed that the party had settled themselves here in order to lay in a store of provisions, or, as it is termed in the language of the mountains, “to make meat.” Round the camp fed twelve or fifteen mules and horses, their fore-legs confined by hobbles of raw hide; and, guarding these animals, two men paced backwards and forwards, driving in the stragglers, ascending ever and anon the bluffs which overhung the river, and leaning on their long rifles, whilst they swept with their eyes the surrounding prairie. Three or four fires burned in the encampment, at some of which Indian women carefully tended sundry steaming pots; whilst round one, which was in the centre of it, four or five stalwart hunters, clad in buckskin, sat cross-legged, pipe in mouth.

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