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D O N D. W A L K E R University of Utah The Mountain Man as Literary Hero I am a hunter, and not a person to analyze the feelings of poor human nature. James O. Pattie, Personal Narrative If we think of the West as a vast unsettled wilderness, a region, real or imaginary, “out there” in the mountains, forests, plains, and deserts, we can think of the mountain man as our first Western hero. The explorer in some instances may have got there earlier,1 may have penetrated the geographical unknowns well before the moun­ tain man loaded his traps and pushed up along the rivers; but the mountain man was the first to make the wilderness his own, or, better, to recognize that he belonged to the wilderness. Back home in the East, we followed with growing interest those who plunged into its “trackless wastes.” Even before the close of the 18th century, even before the man himself had ceased his wilderness wanderings, we had lifted Daniel Boone into heroic legend. He became the prototype of the mountain hunter, and from Filson to Bakeless we have written the record or the dream of his adventures. Whether as instrument of advancing civilization or as primitivistic son of uncorrupted nature,2 he has dramatized the venture of man alone in space. Even in an age when the old wild­ erness is gone, he and his literary sons and grandsons continue to explore the excitement, danger, and value of a wild and lonely life. 1The explorer and the trapper might of course be the same person, as in the instance of Jedediah Smith, but there remains, I think, an important distinction. Zebulon Pike was not a mountain man, and Bill Williams was only incidentally an explorer. 2For a discussion of the contrasting versions of Boone, see Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land, The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge: Harvard Uni­ versity Press, 1950), pp. 51-58. 16 Western American Literature For the mountain man’s often solitary venture into Western space, there is, I think, no 20th century equivalent. It is true that we have made heroes of the men who have pioneered into outer space, but there is no real similarity between a trapper and an astronaut. However dangerous his task may be, the spaceman is never alone, is never wholly dependent upon his courage and in­ genuity. Even if he is the sole occupant of a capsule orbitting two hundred miles out in space, his very heartbeat is pulsing visibly on earth; a whole array of electronic systems watches and guides him. He is backed up, as we say in the language of our time, by a vast technological organization of men and machines. The mountain man had no back up systems. If his reflexes failed, if he erred, he was dead and his hair was gone. And he found the final solitude of an unknown grave. If John Glenn had been attacked by the Blackfeet of outer space, the whole world would have known almost as the arrows were beginning to fall. But if John Colter had stumbled or run out of breath, no one would have known but the Blackfeet, and they kept no books. At best some historian of the fur trade could later have noted obscurely: John Colter, who had been with Lewis and Clark, went trapping in the Blackfoot country and was never heard of again. The mountain man is, then, a hero unmatched in physical courage, primitive ingenuity, and self-reliance. Removed hundreds of miles into the wilderness, he pitted himself not only against the small practical problems of nature, such as the freezing wetness of beaver streams and the heavy toughness of buffalo hides, but also against the killing forces of hunger, thirst, blizzards, bears, and attacking Indians. Naturally out of the raw stuff of his history came some great examples of heroic survival. The simplest recital of them held a listener’s interest; elaborated with an imagined stream of sensory detail, they made the reader feel the whole stark excitement of being there. One instance is that of Hugh Glass, the tough old mountain man who crawled two...

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