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One winter in the early 1830s, a cold and hungry mountain man named Joe Meek stumbled into a landscape unlike anything he had ever seen. It was the Yellowstone Plateau, and Meek was one of the first white men to see it. Born in Washington County, Virginia, Meek -- like hundreds of other young men eager for adventure -- had run off to the West. He would spend 11 years in the mountains, trapping and trading for furs -- traveling relentlessly, pushing into corners of the West his country did not yet own, in search of easy money.
Indians had been exchanging animal pelts for European trade goods for more than two centuries. Now companies representing Russia, England, Mexico and the United States were locked in fierce competition for the western fur trade, and hired the mountain men to do the work. There were black trappers as well as white; men from Scotland, England and Mexico; even native Hawaiians. In Oregon, a third of the trappers were Iroquois and Delaware Indians from the East. French trappers outnumbered Joe Meek and his fellow Americans four-to-one. They could make thousands of dollars, but they usually squandered it all at the yearly rendezvous, where they gambled, drank, and traded stories about their exploits in the mountains.
During more than a decade in the mountains, Joe Meek struggled alongside his fellow trappers to survive . He narrowly escaped death at the hands of the Blackfeet, had touched one grizzly with his bare hand on a dare and been mauled by another. But in the end, he had no money to show for it. And suddenly, his livelihood disappeared, too.
The era of the mountain men had ended, almost as quickly as it had begun. Some guided American explorers fanning out across the West. Others led the growing stream of wagon trains that now rolled over the trails the mountain men had helped to chart. But Joe Meek had had enough of wandering. He took his Nez Percé wife and their children, and went all the way West, to Oregon. There, Meek went into politics, and began to talk with other American settlers about making the Pacific Northwest, still claimed by England, part of the United States. |
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