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HIS69-280 Trappin’ Man I
Trappin’ Man I
HIS69
HIS69-280
P. H. Bennett
(HIS69280)
$2.95
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Introduction
The course of American History was changed in 1803 by the purchase of the Louisiana Territories from the fledgling republic of France. As late as 1785, it appeared that the young American nation would be limited in its area to a narrow strip of land along the Atlantic Seaboard and extending Westward to the Ohio Valley. The Great Lakes region, and the vast Mississippi Valley rested firmly in the hands of France. The French Revolution in 1789 destroyed the hold which France had maintained on the central portion of the American continent. Unable to manage its affairs at home, let alone the broad expanse of its possessions in the New World, France surrendered title to its territories in North American for the payment of some six million dollars.
America was suddenly not just a strip of small states bordering the Atlantic. It was a vast, and largely unexplored region lying west of the Mississippi. The expeditionary force led by Lewis and Clark returned to St. Louis with tales of a vast land rich in natural resources. The westward push began.
The first men who went into the virgin areas of the Louisiana Territories were the fur trappers. We know little today of the life which these intrepid explorers of the nation’s new territories actually led.
We know they faced extreme hardships at times, encounters with sometimes hostile indian tribes. They survived fierce winters and blazing summers to bring their precious cargoes of beaver pelts to the fashion markets of the western world. However, these men were for the most part members of the Uneducated classes. Often times fleeing into the wilderness to escape punishment for criminal acts, or searching for fortunes not available to them in the populated centers of the new nation, they lacked the rudimentary educational skills we now take for granted.
How did these men live? Most of our knowledge about them is surmise, sifted from later tales of their exploits or from rumors repeated in the barrooms of the bustling towns along the Mississippi where they came to trade their furs.
The journal of Orion Josiah Me Allister is therefore a valuable document of life along this vast frontier. In its pages a young man of an aristocratic Boston family records his experiences among the savages of the American frontier and the trappers who were often times this countries first ambassadors to the tribes of Indians who populated it. The journals were discovered some years ago in the attic of a Boston home. They were kept secret for some time because of the highly controversial story they detail about life along the frontier.
They have been edited for publication here so that we can get a glimpse of the daily life of these intrepid trappers and their Indian companions. The language has been somewhat modernized and the inconsistent spellings have been eliminated, but other than that, this record is left as it comes to us from the pen of its author.
Orion Josiah McAllister left Boston a youth of seventeen. Unlike the other men of his times with whom he trapped and whom he loved, Orion’s reason for entering the vast Louisana Territory was not the pursuit of fortune. Instead, he fled himself, the society which had produced him. Born and reared in a strict Puritan home, he is led by his Cousin Harley into an exploration of his sensual and sexual nature that had been forbidden to him by the strict teachings of his father’s Puritan background. When he finds himself deeply ensnared in the web of sensuality to which Harley introduces him, he flees to the frontier because there he sees a chance to regain moral control of his life. On the frontier, he believes he will escape the temptation to which he is exposed by his cousin, the sexual gratification available between two men.
Instead of finding the refuge from his own homosexuality he expected to find on the frontier, Orion encountered a society in which women, except for an occasional Indian wife purchased from her tribe by a trapper, are unknown. Where convenience makes sexual encounters between men acceptable, where business partnerships are as often as not sexual partnerships as well.
As he learns to survive in the wilderness with the help of an Indian friend, Dakoawah, he learns gradually to accept his own nature. When he is approached by the handsome warrior, Lame Beaver, he begins his first long-term relationship with another man. The relationship with Lame Beaver, is, in Orion’s way of thinking, the lesser of two evils. It does not fulfill the moral imperative which his homosexuality violates, but it is better than the indiscrimate sexual encounters which life with his cousin involved. He manages to set aside the moral objections he has to his sexual activities and let himself be drawn into the satisfaction of an intense emotional involvement with another man.
Together with Dakoawah, Orion goes to the Jamboree that was founded at Bear Lake on what is now border of Idaho and Utah. This was a meeting of trappers from all over the vast Louisiana Territories and representatives of the fur trading houses of St. Louis. It is there he met the Scottish Cajun from New Orleans, Jean-Paul McGregor.
Their attraction to each other is so strong that Orion is unable to keep his promise to himself that he will be faithful to Lame Beaver.
When the Jamoree ends, Orion is torn between his desire to go with Jean-Paul into the virgin forests of the Yellowstone river and his commitment to return to the village of Lame Beaver. He returns to the village, unable to walk away from Lame Beaver with a clear conscience. Jean-Paul returns to his trap lines. Upon his return, however, he is greeted by disaster. Lame Beaver has been killed in a raid on the village of another tribe.
Orion’s life dissolves in a black depression over what he feels is his guilt in his lover’s death—Lame Beaver was killed trying to take a trophy for him. He resolves to leave Lame Beaver’s village and join Jean-Paul on the Yellowstone. He does not expect any permanent relationship with the Cajun trapper, but it gives his shattered life a point of direction which he needs. Volume One of his journal ends as he is preparing to leave for the rendevous with Jean-Paul.
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