A Life Wild and Perilous: Mountain Men and the Paths to the Pacific

"[This] richly documented book is the definitive study of the decisive role mountain men played in the exploration and expansion of the Western frontier." —Jay P. Dolan, The New York Times Book Review

Early in the nineteenth century, the mountain men emerged as a small but distinctive group whose knowledge and experience of the trans-Mississippi West extended the national consciousness to continental dimensions. Though Lewis and Clark blazed a narrow corridor of geographical reality, the...