My Sixty Years on the Plains: Trapping, Trading, and Indian Fighting

Before the railroads carved through the wilderness, before the frontier was tamed and mapped and settled into memory, there were men who lived entirely by their wits, their rifles, and their deep knowledge of a land that answered to no one. William T. Hamilton was one of those men. Arriving on the vast American plains as a young adventurer in the 1840s, he would spend the next six decades trapping beaver in frozen mountain streams, trading with tribes whose customs and languages he learned ...