Name: Rendezvous Reader
ISBN: 9780874805390

Synopsis

The early plans for Mount Rushmore called for blasting heroic likenesses of mountain men--Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, and John Colter-—into the solid mountain granite of South Dakota. Readers of this colorful volume will see the heroics and the brutally rugged individualism that made these fur trappers candidates for legend and infamy.

The accounts of the mountain men are spun from the experiences of a nation moving westward: a trapper returns from the dead; hunters feast on buffalo intestines served on a dirty blanket; a missionary woman is astounded by the violence and vulgarity of the trappers’ rendezvous. These are just a few of the narratives, tall tales, and just plain lies that make up A Rendezvous Reader.

The writers represented in this book include a dyed-in-the wool trappers, adventuring European nobles, upward-gazing eastern missionaries, and just plain hacks who never unsheathed a Green River knife or traveled farther west that the Ohio River. What these writers have in common is that all of them, whether they dealt mostly in fact of entirely in fantasy, helped to create a uniquely American icon: the mountain man.

Though A Rendezvous Reader will certainly be of interest to the historian and the historically curious, the true purpose of this anthology is to bring together in one volume the liveliest most readable accounts by and about the mountain men. Whether you sample or devour this anthology of mountain horrors and delights, it is a book guaranteed to entertain as well as inform.

Recommendations

Big Sky, Fair Land: The Environmental Essays of A. B. Guthrie, Jr.

by Alfred Bertram, Jr. Guthrie

Guthrie captures the same raw, unglamorous frontier life that Maguire's anthology celebrates, following a young man's journey into the fur trade with the gritty realism of someone who actually researched the era. Where Maguire gives you the tall tales and contradictions of how the mountain men were remembered, Guthrie gives you the day-to-day brutality and moral ambiguity of how they actually lived—the violence, the relationships with Native peoples, the slow erosion of the wilderness they exploited.

View book

Lonesome Dove A Novel

by Larry McMurtry

McMurtry does for the cattle drive era what Maguire's anthology does for the rendezvous period—he assembles a cast of unforgettable characters (some heroic, some pathetic, most both) and lets their contradictions speak louder than any mythology. The novel has that same appetite for colorful anecdotes and brutal honesty about frontier life, but woven into a narrative that feels like listening to old-timers swap stories around a campfire.

View book

The Worst Journey in the World

by Apsley Cherry-Garrard

Here's your surprise pick: this Antarctic expedition memoir has the same DNA as your Rendezvous Reader—it's a firsthand account of extreme hardship written by someone actually there, surrounded by competing narratives and mythmaking about heroism. Cherry-Garrard, like the trappers and missionaries in Maguire's anthology, grapples with the gap between the romantic legend of exploration and the messy, often ridiculous reality of survival. The writing crackles with the same dark humor and unflinching detail.

View book

Blood Meridian, Or, The Evening Redness in the West

by Cormac McCarthy

McCarthy takes the violence and brutality that Maguire's sources describe—sometimes exaggerating, sometimes understating—and makes it the centerpiece of a novel about a scalp-hunting expedition in the 1850s Southwest. It's unflinching in ways that even the most sensational accounts in your anthology weren't, and it refuses to let you romanticize the frontier or its inhabitants. The prose itself reads like something between a historical document and a fever dream.

View book