“Half Froze for Mountain Doins”: The Influence and Significance of George F. Ruxton’s Life in the Far West

Abstract

Brigham Young University R I C H A R D H. C R A C R O F T “Half Froze for Mountain Doins”: The Influence and Significance of George F. Ruxton’s Life in the Far West Among the few critics who have assessed George Frederick Ruxton’s most notable Life in the Far West (1848), there is general agreement that the youthful Englishman’s early compendium of mountain doings in the 1840’s is, as LeRoy R. Hafen claims, “the most likely, flavorful, and complete picture of the Mountain Man and his time that has ever been written,”1 and that Ruxton was, as Vardis Fisher insists in his introduction to Mountain Man, “one of the sharpest and most sensitive observers of the Rocky Mountain area and its people.”2Bruce Sutherland, in the best single article on Ruxton, similarly praises the “life and spirit and enduring quality” of the book,3 and Edward W. Gaston, Jr., justly claims that the book “has become a model for historians and novelists” dealing with the fur trade.4 Despite these unanimous assertions, how­ ever, there has been virtually no discussion of specific influences of Ruxton’s work on later novels about the Mountain Man, nor of the introduction to Ruxton, Life in the Far West, ed. LeRoy R. Hafen (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1951), p. xvii. Hereafter abbreviated as Life. -Fisher, Mountain Man: A Novel of Male and Female in the Early American West (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1965), p. vii. Hereafter: MM. 3“George Frederick Ruxton in North America,” Southwest Review, XXX (Autumn, 1944), 86. See also Frederic E. Voelker, “Ruxton of the Rocky Mountains,” Missouri Historical Society Bulletin, V (January, 1949), 79-90. 4The Early Novels of the Southwest (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1961 ), p. 37. 30 Western American Literature nature and importance of these influences in relationship to the modern Mountain Man novel.5 Even the most cursory reading of Mountain Man novels, ranging from Captain Mayne Reid’s bizarre The Scalp Hunters (1851), to Vardis Fisher’s almost equally bizarre Mountain Man (1965), affirms the influence of Ruxton’s Life in the Far West. Other books have been influential: Irving’s western trlogy; Garrard’s Wah-to-yah and the Taos Trail; the journals of Lewis and Clark, Henry Marie Brackenridge, John Bradbury, Nathaniel Wyeth and Jim Clyman, to list a few; accounts by Joe Meek, Charles Larpenteur, Warren Ferris, Jim Beckwourth, and others — all of these have been influential in shaping the literary image of the Mountain Man. In fact, the novelist of the fur trade has been strongly, perhaps too strongly, subjected to the yoke of history in depicting mountain doings in the first half of the nineteenth century. However, in the case of Ruxton’s Life in the Far West, it has been a yoke sought after and encouraged. An examination of Ruxton’s influence in shaping the events, customs and characters, as well as the language of subsequent Mountain Man novels, reveals not only how thoroughly Ruxton’s trappers have been accepted as bonafide, but also how far Ruxton moved toward achieving a successful imaginative rendering of the Mountain Man. The dependence of novelists upon historical sources is no secret. Frederick Manfred’s Lord Grizzly (1954) is an imaginative retelling of the Hugh Glass story, just as Vardis Fisher’s Mountain Man (1965) is a fictional recounting of Raymond W. Thorp’s and Robert Bunker’s Crow Killer, the Saga of Liver-Eating Johnson. A. B. Guthrie, Jr.’s The Big Sky (1947) is, as I have shown elsewhere, based heavily on Guthrie’s extensive readings in Western Americana;0 as is Steward Edward White’s The Long Rifle (1930). Even Mayne Reid’s early Scalp Hunters owes a debt to Ruxton’s Adventures in Mexico and the Rocky Mountains (1848), and Harvey Fergusson’s Wolf Song (1927), the most imaginative of the Mountain Man novels, owes much to read­ ings about early Taos — especially those found in Ruxton. Each of these novels, grounded in some kind of historical moorings, soars, with r'Don D. Walker, in his yet to be published “Literary History of the Fur Trade...