ABSTRACT
In the spring of 1835, a fur trapper named Osborne Russell found himself faced with his first solitary journey in the wilderness of the Rockies. There were no maps for this region, except in the heads of the mountain men who had been here before. Russell, still a newcomer, had accepted a dare, or rather a command, from the leader (bourgeois) of the band of trappers, a man he did not like, to set off alone and find his way to Fort Hall on the Snake River, somewhere southwestward from a campfire gathering; he was to bring back horses so that he and the other trappers might carry their stiff, stinking beaver skins to trade. In the midst of the cruelty in which he lived, a lot of it gratuitous to people and animals, Russell indulged a growing consciousness, a habit perhaps fostered by journal-keeping. Russell was in poor financial condition the rest of his life.
