Across the Wide Missouri

Bernard DeVoto's history recovers the brief, vivid decade of the Rocky Mountain fur trade in the 1830s, when American and European trappers, competing fur companies, and Native peoples met each summer at open air rendezvous gatherings to trade pelts, whiskey, and news before scattering back into the mountains. DeVoto follows the mountain men, the Native nations whose land and cooperation the trade depended on, and the handful of artists and travelers, most notably the painter Alfred Jacob Miller, who documented a way of life that was already disappearing even as it was being lived, since the beaver population and the fashion for beaver hats that sustained the trade were both collapsing by the decade's end.

DeVoto writes the middle volume of a three part history of westward expansion, and the book carries the narrative drive and eye for concrete, sensory detail that made his long running Harper's column, The Easy Chair, famous among general readers rather than academic specialists alone. He blends firsthand accounts, fur company records, and Miller's paintings into a single vivid reconstruction of a world that left few written records of its own, since the mountain men themselves mostly could not, or did not, write their experience down. Reading it means watching a genuinely transient culture, adapted precisely to a fur trade that was already ending, captured just before it vanished for good. It suits a reader drawn to the physical, day to day texture of the far frontier rather than to policy or politics, told by a historian who treated the West as a place people actually lived rather than a symbol.