Encountering North America: Profiles of Frontiersmen

How European settlers learned of the vast North American continent was often through the accounts of men who individually or in groups trekked into the wilderness. Their chief motivation was ascertaining or obtaining natural resources for commerce, such as beaver pelts and other hides, which took them from the eastern forests, across the Great Plains, into the Rocky Mountains, or to the Pacific Ocean—years before the celebrated Lewis and Clark Expedition. Their information about Indigenous ...