Henry Carter Hull

"Unexpectedly delightful reading -- there is much to learn from the buck-toothed rodents of yore." -- National Post Beavers, those icons of industriousness, have been gnawing down trees, building dams, shaping the land, and creating critical habitat in North America for at least a million years. Once one of the continent's most ubiquitous mammals, they ranged from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Rio Grande to the edge of the northern tundra....

In the spring of 1831 a young Pennsylvanian, Zenas Leonard, embarked from St. Louis in a company of seventy men who had formed an expedition for the purpose of trapping furs and trading with the Indians in the Rocky Mountains. After four years of wandering which took him to the then strange land of Spanish California, he returned to his parental home in Clearfield, Pennsylvania, in the autumn of 1835, where he was greeted by his relatives as one returned...

This classic, scholarly history of the fur trappers and traders of the early nineteenth century focuses on the devices that enabled the opening of the untracked American west. Sprinkled with interesting facts and old western lore, this guide to traps and tools is also a lively history. The era of the mountain man is distinct in American history, and Russell's exhaustive coverage on the guns, traps, knives, axes, and other iron tools of this era, along...