When all had come in, the General opened his goods, “consisting of flour, sugar, coffee, blankets, tobacco, whisky, and all other articles necessary for that region.” Whereupon, so Beckwourth assures us, the jubilee began. Some of these men had left St. Louis with Henry in the spring of 1822 and had been in the wilderness ever since. Many had not tasted sugar or coffee for many months, having lived entirely on the game of the country, and tobacco and whisky were luxuries not to be despised. These articles were purchased at enormous prices, and many a trapper not only swallowed in a day of ease what he had earned in a year of constant danger and hardship, but when the rendezvous broke up found himself indebted to his employer for his next year’s outfit. Storytelling, gambling, drinking, feasting, horse-racing, wrestling, boxing and target-shooting were the order of the day, “all of which were indulged in with a heartiness that would astonish more civilized societies,” says Beckwourth.

The free trappers, who were not paid by the year as were the hired trappers, but, being their own masters, trapped where they pleased and sold their furs at the annual rendezvous, were the “cocks of the walk.” These boasted freely with naivete of children—or Homeric heroes. As Joseph Meek tells us: “They prided themselves on their hardihood and courage; even on their recklessness and profligacy. Each claimed to own the best horses; to have had the wildest adventures; to have made the most narrow escapes; to have killed the greatest number of bears and Indians; to be the greatest favorite with the Indian belles; to be the greatest consumer of alcohol; and to have the most money to spend—that is, the largest credit on the books of the company. If his hearers did not believe him, he was ready to run a race with them, to beat them at ‘cold sledge,’ or to fight, if fighting were preferred—ready to prove what he affirmed in any way the company pleased.”

While this orgy proceeds, the year’s business is transacted.

The classic or golden age of the mountain man lasted for about a generation: from 1810, when Americans began to get themselves organized to take advantage of the natural resources the Louisiana Purchase had made available—particularly the abundant and portable beaver pelt—until about 1840. By then the beaver boom had pretty much ended, and that same year saw the last great Rendezvous up on the Green River in what is now Wyoming.

These days the memory of those lives and times is kept alive by the many Mountain Man re-enactors who yearly rendezvous out west. Like the trappers and traders of olden days, they meet-up to buy and sell, to gossip and tell tall tales, to engage in tests of strength and skill, and to party. Their aim is to live, if just for a few days, the lives of those by-gone American—I don’t think I exaggerate—heroes. There is something almost mystical in their total immersion in the dress, and tools and guns—in short, the way of the Mountain Man. And I fancy they hear—when the noise and bustle of camp has quieted and the fire has burned low—whispers, of that other time.

“And now suddenly there was nothing but a world of cloud, and we three were there alone in the middle of a great white plain with snowy hills and mountains staring at us; and it was very still; but there were whispers.”

—“Black Elk,” Black Elk Speaks, by John G. Neihardt