There was nothing easy about frontier life. If you lived in the ’40s, you were a novelty. Those who survived were very good people and stories of their survival live on even today. We dug into the stories and found some of the toughest marginalized people living through it all. Keep in mind, for the most part, these are actually stories and are hard to verify. So take these with a grain of salt. If only half of their tests come true, “difficult” doesn’t begin to describe them.
James Beckworth (1798–1866)
Life on the frontier must have seemed like Club Med compared to slave life. This may help explain why this former slave became one of the West’s most famous mountain men. Born into slavery in Frederick County, Virginia, Jim Beckwourth’s mother was a slave and his father was an Englishman. About 20 years later, Beckworth gained freedom and joined General William Ashley’s organization, the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. Called “Ashley’s Hundred”, this group of trappers working in the Rocky Mountain West was one of the mountain people. Men like Jim Bridger, Hugh Glass and Jedediah Smith were among the 100, and there’s no doubt that Beckworth learned to survive on the range with the best of the best. Beckworth’s time on the border is captured in book The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckworth, Mountaineer, Scout and Pioneer, and Chief of the Crow Nation of Indians. Although some of the numbers in the book are embellished, the events described by Beckworth probably occurred. And they may have even happened to him.
Hugh Glass (1783–1833)
As Hugh Glass crawled, dragged and limped nearly 200 miles from Fort Kiowa after a wild animal mauled him and his “companions” left him for dead, I wondered whether the fuel for his survival came from revenge or the chance that he would help Leonardo DiCaprio win his first Oscar. Unless you’ve been living a mountain man existence for the last few years, you’ve probably heard of Hugh Glass and his famous crawl. Before their brutal encounter, Glass was forced to become a pirate alongside Jean Lafitte. He and a companion escaped near Galveston two years later. After his escape, he was captured by the Pawnee in Kansas. Glass watched as the Pawnee crucified his friend and burned him alive, and Glass gave the Chief a gift of cinnabar. This saved his life. he went to join Rocky Mountain Fur Company Where he met a young Jim Bridger and John Fitzgerald – two men who would leave him to die. Glass eventually reunited with both men, but did not kill either one.
John Wesley Powell (1834–1902)
Mountain Man? Perhaps. Canyon Man? Absolutely. After losing his right arm at the Battle of Shiloh in the Civil War, 35-year-old Major Powell tied a wooden chair to a wooden boat, joined nine men and made his way down the Grand Canyon, becoming the first man to race through the canyon by a group of white men and possibly anyone else. The journey began in May 1869 on the banks of Wyoming’s Green River. Before striking the mighty Colorado, the crew had lost only one man who was carried away, but most of their supplies were lost in the rapids. Over the next two months, the crew had to complete what they could and run what they could not. In Separation Canyon, three men had decided that they would rather venture out and brave the desert than surely die of starvation or drowning in the canyon. Two days later, the remaining group emerged from the valley. Those who came out were killed by the Shivwit Indians. Powell became head of the US Geological Society and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
Marie Dorian (1786–1850)
Difficulty is one thing. But throw some kids under the age of 10 into the mix, and you’ve got a very miserable time. But none of this stopped Mary Dorian. A member of the Iowa tribe, Dorion married Pierre Dorion as a teenager, and after being hired by John Jacob Astor’s fur-trading company to find easier passage, she traveled with him to the West. She had a five-year-old, a two-year-old and a child on the way. After leaving her Midwest home, Mary gave birth to her third child nine months later in Oregon, but lost it eight days later. In January 1814, she set out with the children and a horse in search of her husband’s camp in Idaho. Upon arriving, he found that he had been killed and only one man survived. He carried her on a horse, but she died soon after. Then, on reaching back to his home camp, he found that everyone there too had been slaughtered. She loaded her boys and some food and started west out of enemy territory. For three months they crossed the snow of the Blue Mountains and at last they had to eat the horse. After surviving the winter in the mountains and walking about 250 miles, he and his boys came to the Columbia River, where the Walla Walla tribe helped him recover. She remarried and had more children, whose ancestors settled in the Willamette Valley.
John Colter (1774–1813)
After enlisting in the Corps of Discovery in his early 30s, John Colter lived a life of serendipitous bachelorhood. While returning east after reaching the Oregon coast with Lewis and Clark, Colter received permission to leave the expedition and join two trappers for the lucrative beaver trade. Colter helped build a fort at the mouth of the Bighorn River in present-day Montana, and he made the first reports of hell (geysers and fumaroles) on Earth in and around Yellowstone. However, their biggest claim to fame is what is known as Colter Run. As a mountain man, it is already necessary for one to remain fit, lest one die. So when he was busted being trapped by some Blackfeet Indians near the three forks of the Madison, Jefferson and Gallatin rivers that make up the Missouri in Montana, he had to take the ultimate fitness test. His clothes were removed and he was told to run, which he did. The warriors gave chase and he managed to escape by dodging all but one (he killed that warrior). He then jumped into one of the rivers and clung to a log, with only his nose above the surface. His pursuers gave up and he headed 200 miles east, back to the trading fort he had helped build. After moving back east to Missouri and settling into family life, he died of jaundice when he was about 40.
Kit Carson (1809–1868)
When you’re the ninth of 14 children, you learn fast how to take care of yourself. And that’s exactly what Carson did. Having no formal schooling, Carson never learned to read, choosing to help on the family farm after his father died at the age of nine. At 15, she had a lot going on. He joined a wagon train from Missouri to Santa Fe. At the age of 19, he began traipsing in California and throughout the West. At first, it seemed that Carson had a genuine disdain for Indians and that he loved a good fight, of which he had plenty. As time passed, he married into the local tribes (yes, he married more than once) and this softened him a bit, but not much. While taking his daughter east, he met John C. Frémont on a Missouri River steamboat. Frémont then hired Carson to help him explore and map the Central Rockies and the Great Basin. Frémont also intended to market the West to prospective settlers. He used Carson’s personality and stories of frontier adventurism in his articles and reports, which elevated Carson to legendary status.
Jeremiah “Liver-Eating” Johnston (1824–1900)
Leo DiCaprio is to Hugh Glass as Robert Redford is to Jeremiah Johnson. As a boy, I watched the 1972 classic, “Jeremiah Johnson,” until the tape finally got stuck in the VCR. The film is loosely based on the life of John Garrison, whose life is one big bundle of lore, fantasy, and downright fairy tale. Either way, it’s fun to read about a person, real or fictional. We know that he was born in New Jersey to an abusive, alcoholic father who forced his six children to work hard. To escape this life, he works whaling on a schooner for over a decade. After joining the Navy, he tricked an officer and fled to the West as soon as he was discharged. Since he deserted, he changed his name to Johnston. And that’s when the stories come out. My favorite is how he swore revenge on the entire Crow nation for the murder of his Flathead wife and unborn child. He killed dozens of Crow warriors. When the Blackfeet captured him for a Crow bounty, he chewed off his rawhide handcuffs, beat up a guard, cut off the guard’s leg, and used it as trail mix on his long road to vengeance. He died in 1900 at the National Soldier’s Home in Santa Monica, California.
George Droliard (1775–1809)
If ever there was a “fixer” in history – like Harvey Keitel’s character in Pulp Fiction – it was Droliard. Employed by Lewis and Clark in 1803, they recruited crew members, interpreted, scouted, hunted, and tracked everything from elk to deserters. Droliard was chosen to deliver the first letters written by Lewis and Clark to President Jefferson. The son of a French Canadian father and Shawnee mother, Droliard signed up to Manuel Lisa’s fur trading party. This was the same organization that John Colter had joined. While Colter left the Three Forks area of present-day Montana after too many conflicts with the Blackfeet, the allure of beaver pelts was too much for Droliard. Near the headwaters of the Missouri where Colter made his famous run, Blackfeet and members of the Gros Ventre killed and mutilated him.
Stagecoach Mary Fields (1832–1914)
If there was ever a woman stronger than Mary Fields to walk the border in Montana, I’d like to know. A former slave from Tennessee who gained her freedom after the Civil War, Fields was a six-foot solid mass of pure power. She got this name because she always delivered the mail (on time) in and around Cascade City, regardless of weather or road conditions. She loved drinking with men in bars and if anyone ever got the wiser, she would immediately break their nose instead of apologizing. When a young Gary Cooper met Mary, he later recalled that meeting in a 1959 article for Ebony, “Mary lived to be one of the freest spirits to ever take a breath or a .38…”
Read next: He pretended to be dead while a 1,500-pound bear shook him like a rabbit
Jedediah Smith (1799–1831)
It seems as if there was a grizzly bear behind every lodgepole pine in the West. One nearly killed Hugh Glass and the other nearly ate Smith alive. Smith and about a dozen men were walking along the south bend of the Cheyenne River when a huge blizzard burst from the shadows. It broke ribs, cut Smith’s stomach and chest, and ultimately placed Smith’s entire head in his mouth. When the smoke cleared and the bears retreated thanks to Smith’s men, things looked hopeless. With the skull and one ear nearly cracked, Smith told his men to repair it as best they could. After ten days and several stitches, Smith decided it was time to break camp and move on. He and his men continued through the Mojave Desert and California. For the next seven years, Smith continued exploring and kept his hair long to cover his broken memento thanks to that bear. Ultimately, a group of Comanches murdered him, possibly near present-day Kansas.
