Search results for ""author aubrey l. haines""

"Reader, if you are in search of a Classical and Scientific tourist, please to lay this Volume down, and pass on, for this simply informs you what a Trapper has seen and experienced. But if you wish to peruse a Hunter's rambles among the wild regions of the Rocky Mountains, please to read this and forgive the authors foibles and imperfections, considering as you pass along that he has been chiefly educated in Nature's School under that rigid tutor experience. . . ." Born in a little Maine village in 1814, Osborne Russell ran away to sea at the age of sixteen, but he soon gave up seafaring to serve with a trading and trapping company in Wisconsin and Minnesota. In 1834 he signed up for Nathaniel Wyeth's expedition to the Rocky Mountains and the mouth of the Columbia. Subsequently he joined Jim Bridger's brigade of old Rocky Mountain Fur Company men, continuing with them after a merger that left the American Fur Company in control of the trade. When the fur trade declined, he became a free trapper operating out of Fort Hall, staying in the mountains until the great Westward migration began. Osborne Russell's journal covering the years 1834 to 1843 is, in the words of editor Aubrey L. Haines, "perhaps the best account of the fur trapper in the Rocky Mountains when the trade there was at its peak. It is a factual, unembellished narrative written by one who was not only a trapper but also a keen observer and an able writer." Edited from the original manuscript and originally printed in a limited edition of 750 copies, this classic piece of Western Americana is now available to the general public.

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With the ecological integrity of Yellowstone National Park in contention between developers and environmentalists, the events of its exploration and founding take on added interest. This Bison Books edition of Nathaniel P. Langford's journal brings back into print one of the principal sources of information on the exploration of the Yellowstone region and its establishment as America's first national park.The findings of the 1870 Washburn expedition, of which Langford was a member, gave credence to the findings of the Folsom party of 1869 and resulted in the sending of a government survey party into the area in 1871. The culminating effect of the three expeditions was the federal legislation creating our first and largest national park and marking the beginning of the national concern for the preservation of America's heritage of wilderness beauty.

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