Rendezvous Reader

by Donald A. Barclay, James H. Maguire, Peter Wild

The early plans for Mount Rushmore called for blasting heroic likenesses of mountain men--Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, and John Colter-—into the solid mountain granite of South Dakota. Readers of this colorful volume will see the heroics and the brutally rugged individualism that made these fur trappers candidates for legend and infamy.

The accounts of the mountain men are spun from the experiences of a nation moving westward: a trapper returns from the dead; hunters feast on buffalo intestines served on a dirty blanket; a missionary woman is astounded by the violence and vulgarity of the trappers’ rendezvous. These are just a few of the narratives, tall tales, and just plain lies that make up A Rendezvous Reader .

The writers represented in this book include a dyed-in-the wool trappers, adventuring European nobles, upward-gazing eastern missionaries, and just plain hacks who never unsheathed a Green River knife or traveled farther west that the Ohio River. What these writers have in common is that all of them, whether they dealt mostly in fact of entirely in fantasy, helped to create a uniquely American icon: the mountain man.

Though A Rendezvous Reader will certainly be of interest to the historian and the historically curious, the true purpose of this anthology is to bring together in one volume the liveliest most readable accounts by and about the mountain men. Whether you sample or devour this anthology of mountain horrors and delights, it is a book guaranteed to entertain as well as inform.

Genres: History

392 pages, Paperback

First published June 18, 1997

About the author

Donald A. Barclay has been an academic librarian since 1990, holding library positions at New Mexico State University, the University of Houston, the Houston Academy of Medicine-Texas Medical Center, and the University of California, Merced. His interests in librarianship include the history of print and digital information, the role of information in the Digital Age, and the evaluation of information. At UC Merced he was instrumental in planning the library for the first (and, to date, only) new U.S. research university of the twenty-first century.

During his career Donald has published numerous books and articles on such topics as fake news, library construction and maintenance, library management, and the literature of the American West. His books include:

--Fake News, Propaganda, and Plain Old Lies: How to Find Trustworthy Information in the Digital Age

--Serving Online Customers: Lessons for Libraries from the Business World

--The Library Renovation, Maintenance, and Construction Handbook

--Into the Wilderness Dream: Exploration Narratives of the American West, 1500-1805

--A Rendezvous Reader: Tall, Tangles, and True Tales of the Mountain Men, 1805-1850

Besides working as a librarian, Donald has taught college English and worked as a fire fighter on a U.S. Forest Service hotshot crew.

Reviews

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was interesting, but a bit difficult to read. It consists of numerous excerpts from period pieces by and about mountain men. Each piece has a short introduction by the editors, but the passages themselves are presented unedited. While this definitely adds to the authenticity of the accounts, it does make reading very difficult for many of the passages. Misspellings, grammatical errors, and more are rampant throughout many of the passages due to the low literacy level of many of the authors. And even those that were written by literate authors were often written in a cadence unlike modern texts.

That said, I did find the book enjoyable in small chunks (thus why it took over 6 months to finish). I read a few dozen passages at a time in between other novels and that was a nice way to tackle this. A few stories did stand out as exceptionally interesting, but many of them were accounts of the daily life of trappers and traders. If you're interested in this period of history and the roughness of first hand accounts this is a good read, but if you aren't then this will be very difficult to get through.