American Exploration and Travel Series

In this classic of western Americana, George Frederick Ruxton, who died in St. Louis in 1848 at the youthful age of twenty-seven, brilliantly brings to life the whole heroic age of the Mountain Men. The author, from his intimate acquaintance with the trappers and traders of the American Far West, vividly recounts the story of two of the most adventurous of these hardy pioneers - Killbuck and La Bonte, whose daring, bravery, and hair-breadth escapes from their numerous Indian and ""Spaniard"" enemies were legend among their fellow-frontiersmen.

With Ruxton, we follow Killbuck and La Bonte and their mountain companions - Old Bill Williams, ""Black"" Harris, William Sublette, Joseph Walker, and others - across the prairies and forests, west from picturesque old Bent's Fort, into the dangerous Arapaho country near the headwaters of the Platte. We share with them the culinary delights of their campfires - buffalo ""boudins"" and beaver tails - and hear from their own lips, in the incomparable mountaineer dialect, hair-raising stories of frontier life and humorous tales of trading camp and frontier post.

Life in the Far West, then, is adventure extraordinary - the true chronicle of the rugged Mountain Men whose unflinching courage and total disregard for personal safety or comfort opened the Far West to the flood of settlers who were to follow. The breath-taking water colors and sketches, which depict with great detail many of the familiar scenes of the early West, were done by one of Ruxton's contemporaries and fellow-explorers, Alfred Jacob Miller.

Ruxton of the Rockies

by George Frederick Ruxton

Published 15 July 1979

More than a travel book, more than an autobiography, Ruxon of the Rockies is a rare and vivid account of a man who lived during a heroic age: George Frederick Ruxton lived among and wrote about the traders and trappers of the American West.

Ruxton crammed a dozen lifetimes of adventure into his brief twenty-seven years. Leaving his native England in 1838, at the age of seventeen, he set out on endless journeys - fighting in the Carlist Wars in Spain, stationed with the British army in Ireland, hunting with Indians in Upper Canada, attempting to penetrate to the interior of Africa, and carrying out a mission for his government in Mexico and the American West.

In all his travels, nothing won his heart so completely as the Rocky Mountains. With the awareness of a poet and down-to-earth nature of an explorer, Ruxton wrote of their awesome grandeur, bountiful wildlife, hardy mountain men, and their inexorable annihilation of the weakling. While on his way for a second, more extended visit to his beloved Rockies, Ruxton died in St. Louis.

A rewarding literary experience, this volume is essentially Ruxton's autobiography. Sections on Africa and the one on Mexico and the Rocky Mountains appeared during Ruxton's lifetime, but earlier portions have never been published before.

Ruxton of the Rockies is illustrated with sketches from his notebooks and reproductions of the incomparable watercolors of Alfred Jacob Miller, a great Western artist of Ruxton's time.