Reviewed by: The Perilous West: Seven Amazing Explorers and the Founding of the Oregon Trail by Larry E. Morris Peter J. Blodgett The Perilous West: Seven Amazing Explorers and the Founding of the Oregon Trail. By Larry E. Morris. Lanham md: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013. xviii + 238 pp. Illustrations, photographs, maps, chronology, notes, references, index. $39.95 cloth. Larry Morris, author of The Fate of the Corps: What Became of the Lewis and Clark Explorers after the Expedition (2004), has returned to familiar territory with The Perilous West. Beginning with the voyages of aspiring fur traders Robert McClellan and Ramsey Crooks up the Missouri River in September 1806, Morris follows the exploits of traders, trappers, and entrepreneurs who spread out across the continent in the decade after the return of Lewis and Clark. He recounts Manuel Lisa’s 1807 and 1809 expeditions up the Missouri, the formation of enterprises such as the St. Louis Missouri Fur Company and the Pacific Fur Company, and the hazards faced by individuals such as John Colter, Archibald Pelton, John Hoback, and Pierre Dorion in their quest for riches in the lands beyond the Missouri. The author also captures the struggles of Wilson Hunt’s and Robert Stuart’s treks to and from John Jacob Astor’s short-l ived foothold on the Pacific Coast as played out against the backdrop of commercial and political empirebuilding that spanned half the continent. Morris, however, has aspirations of his own beyond merely summarizing the origins of the American fur trade and its most celebrated participant, the mountain man. Even as Morris is providing a competent survey of events on the northern Great Plains and the Rockies in the wake of Lewis and Clark, he also effectively demonstrates just how perilous this West could be for Euro-Americans. All too frequently adrift in territories completely foreign to them and confronted by some indigenous peoples intolerant of intruders, the ranks of the earliest Euro-American voyagers were drastically thinned by starvation, drowning, disease, and battle. As Morris describes such events, he redirects the reader’s attention to those relatively anonymous figures, such as John Hoback, Jacob Reznor, and Edward Robinson, who did the hard work of trading, trapping, exploring, and dying. Morris also sheds light on an intriguing family, the Dorions, who played their own significant role in the arrival of American exploration and enterprise in the Great Plains and the Rockies. By doing so, Morris reminds us, in his own way, of the importance of family and kinship, a topic so successfully addressed by Anne Hyde in her recent Empires, Nations, and Families. In this reader’s opinion, Morris has significantly less success in establishing these individuals as the “founders” of the Oregon Trail when we remember how many years would pass before missionaries and settlers bound for the Oregon Territory would pass through these landscapes and how much of the route would have to be rediscovered by later pioneers such as Jedediah Smith. Moreover, given how dependent Morris’s work is upon a clear understanding of the geography in question, it is disappointing that Rowman and Littlefield have not included a much more robust suite of maps in this volume. Nonetheless, those readers who wish to bolster their understanding of the American republic’s tentative first steps into the worlds around, above, and beyond the Missouri at the dawn of the nineteenth century would find much of value in this volume. [End Page 396] Peter J. Blodgett H. Russell Smith Foundation Curator of Western Historical Manuscripts Huntington Library, San Marino ca Copyright © 2014 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln