My Sixty Years on the Plains

In these days, when the experience of living right up against nature are fast becoming a thing of the past, the story is of special interest. The mountaineers as a class were unique. Life itself had little value in their estimation. They were adventurous and fearless men, who pushed the boundaries of what it meant to be alive and thought nothing of laying down their lives in the service of a friend. Theirs was a brotherhood in which one man's life was entirely at the service of any of its members, regardless of friendship or even of acquaintanceship. Often equipped with nothing but their skill and endurance, a horse, a gun or two, and enough provisions to see them until tomorrow, they set out to make their way through a vast wilderness that held all the terrors of the unknown.
William "Bill" Hamilton recounts his life as a free trapper and mountain man in the last days of their remarkable time. Hamilton's writing is simple and straightforward, a mirror image of the man himself. If you want an excellent autobiography of a hard man who trapped the creeks and streams of the Far West, lived with and fought against Indians, helped settlers come West to make a new life, this is the book for you. Drop that paperback Western and pickup the real story—history with the bark still on it.