The Mountain Men: The Story of the Rocky Mountain Fur Trade
Once Lewis and Clark had blazed the trail to the West, writes Gerald Rawling, traders and trappers began to follow in their footsteps, as they did so opening up vast new tracts of the “Great American Desert.”
In September 1806, a sun-blackened, wind-burned, travel-stained party of men returned to St. Louis after an absence of two years. The Lewis and Clark expedition was back from a journey that was to have far-reaching consequences.
Upriver to the headwaters of the Missouri, across the Continental Divide, down the Clearwater, the Snake and the Columbia to the Pacific, the Captains had taken their men, blazing a clear and unmistake-able trail through the vast, dimly understood region described on such maps as existed as the “Great American Desert.”
The immediate result was logical and inevitable. America’s needle had been pointing westward ever since the first Pilgrim Father scrambled ashore at Plymouth Rock: now, with the expansionist Jefferson in the White House and the United States doubled in size by the Louisiana Purchase, the further exploration and development of the West was assured.
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