Many Rivers to Cross: Of Good Running Water, Native Trout, and the Remains Of Wilderness Review

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(More customer reviews)The valuable insights, gentle humor and wistful beauties it contains should not be reserved just for the fishing fraternity. M R Montgomery describes, with wit and sensitivity, his search for the last remaining bastions of the native trout of the mountain west, the cutthroat. He describes the people who help him on his quest with humor and with empathy. In those remote places, his interest and his eyes wander to show us paticularities of landscape and peculiarities of the flora and fauna that cohabit there with the trout. Beneath the surface Montgomery is addressing concepts like "wilderness", "preservation" and "stewardship" without referring to them directly. He begins his story near the Little Big Horn Battlefield, but the last stand that he wants us to contemplate is not Custer's.

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Across the High Lonesome Review

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(More customer reviews)Molly Mendoza has just graduated from Cal Poly with her teaching certificate, ready for marriage to finance Scott Campbell and a life in the yuppie mainstream. That is, until she walks in on Scott with her best friend Shelly. Young and heartbroken, Molly has never really thought about any life outside the one she had planned.
During a job fair, Molly had casually filled out an application for Granite Creek Pack Station. Now, after a call from part-owner Don Davidson, Molly is surprised to find herself heading up the Owens valley for summer employment as a cook for Granite Creek, a far cry from settling in with a classroom filled with third-graders.
Don is one-third owner along with the curmudgeonly Ike Steel and his veterinarian daughter Joyce. Molly has no time to think about her decision as she is swept off the very next day on a weeklong packing trip along the Golden Trout Trail. And so her adventuresome summer begins.
'Across The High Lonesome' covers one summer with the Granite Creek Pack Station, and is full of adventure, laughs, tears, romance, scuffles, disputes, and ornery mules. Although this book is outside my normal genre of reading, I enjoyed this book every bit as much as I did 'Lonesome Dove' by Larry McMurty. Like 'Lonesome Dove', 'Across The High Lonesome' is a story about people and their capacity for growth, along with their eccentricities.
The activities of this closely knit group of folks, Molly, Don, Ike, Joyce, Dwight, Jake, Pete, Tad, Trina, Kate and Bill, Burt, Nancy, Joe, and the entire rest of the gang will keep you reading long into the night, wondering what they have in store for you next. There is almost a soap opera quality here, as there is within any small company that is not held by the restraints of the civilized world. The all-too-human crew blends in with the wild background and make for a lovely picture, and an intriguing tale.
Brumfield pulls no punches, this is life at its grittiest, wildest, and most serene. The characters are all too human, fully fleshed and irascible, down to the individual personalities of the animals. The reader can tell, though this is a work of fiction, that the author knows this wilderness and these trails quite well, the injection of realism is too poignant to miss.
Do yourself a favor and google images from some of the places mentioned in this book, such as Mono Creek, Summit Lake, Pioneer Basin, and Shepherd's Pass. Brumfield's descriptions of the surrounding landscapes only cement his ability to make the wilderness landscapes bloom through his written words. It's magnificent country!
Though there are some early instances of repetitiveness in Brumfield's prose, these are rapidly overlooked by the richness of the tale being told. I really cannot recommend this book highly enough, I wound out being so absorbed by it that I almost wanted to mount a mule and go riding myself. Definitely a 'buy'. Enjoy!


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Across the High Lonesome is a modern western odyssey that invites the reader to hitch a ride through the glacial carved vales and over the high lonesome passes of California's -Range of Light.+A journey of love, pain and adventure, brimming with unforgettable characters, salty humor, and recalcitrant mules.Brumfield has taken a lifetime of experience packing dudes into the mountains and distilled it into a delightful work of fiction.

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Old Bill Williams, Mountain Man (Civilization of the American Indian Series) Review

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(More customer reviews)The greatest tribute paid to a book of history is to reprint it several times; to honor its scholarship, judgment, and lasting contribution. Few books merit that tribute more than this one. Updated information may conflict with some of the author's details and certain of his generalizations, yet this work stands virtually unchallenged as the only true and complete biography of William Sherely Williams. Favour, an amateur historian, died in 1939, three years after the publication of Old Bill Williams, the only book he ever wrote. Favour can be proud of his achievement which ranks with the best of the fur trade books.
Williams was born in North Carolina in 1787, moved to the Missouri frontier, and began trapping while in his teens. He served in the War of 1812, was in Indian trader, an itinerant preacher, scout, explorer, and mountain man.Williams, as Favour points out, was the most noteworthy of the hundreds of mountain men in the Missouri River Country. Equally important is the revealing portrait of the mountain men and their lives. In Bill Williams, the author found those unique traits possessed by this singular group of men who led a young nation through uncharted lands to a rendezvous with the Pacific.
Bill Williams' image was unlike that of the typical hero. He was a study in contrasts. Williams was tall and redheaded, dirty and disheveled, had a knowledge of Greek, Latin, and comparative religion, and ate primitive frontier food including raw calf legs. Physical strength, ability to endure thirst, scanty rations, and fatigue counted for little unless a mountain man also had determination, courage, and fortitude. Williams and a few others possessed all of these traits yet the majority of mountain men, including Williams, died of disease, hunger, Indians, or exposure.
Williams emulated Indians in dress, deportment, speech, and conduct. If being taken for an Indian was the highest compliment a trapper could receive, it wasn't such for Old Bill Williams. Whether it was lifting a scalp, hunting buffalo, or stalking an enemy, Williams did it better than any Indian and was pround of his sobriquet - Master Trapper. Williams stood out from his contemporaries regardless of the method of comparison: bringing in the most fur, outfighting and outdrinking anyone, or simply living past his 61st birthday.
Williams' six decades of life spanned the fur trade era and through his eyes the author presents that adventurous time with clarity and understanding. Williams traversed the West, battled the Ute, Apache, and Blackfeet, wandered the great mountains and parks of Arizona and Colorado, and blazed new trails. His horse stealing excursions were a legitimate enterprise by fur trappers' standards. He excelled in this field and stole hundreds of horses from California to Mexico, including horses owned by unfriendly Indians.
As a guide to Fremont's fourth expedition, which sought a railroad route through the Southern Rockies. Williams' place in history is circumscribed. After this expedition, Fremont castigated Williams, blaming him for the failure to cross the Rockies in midwinter. Williams had warned Fremont that a crossing in winter was dangerous yet went with him anyway. Eleven men froze to death. Favour tends to whitewash Williams in this incident but any blame is needless as nature wouldn't permit a crossing by anyone that winter.
After that disaster, Williams continued to guide parties across the frontier. In March 1849, Williams and Benjamin Kern were murdered by Utes evidently seeking revenge for a previous attack on their village by a contingent of the U. S. Army. When the Utes discovered they had killed Old Bill, they gave him a chief's burial.
Old Bill's death was denied by many Indians. For years they told tales of a majestic mountain Elk, with a slash of red across its crown, serenely grazing in Colorado's South Park, stopping from time to time to gaze intently toward the Southwest - toward its namesake Arizona's Bill Williams Peak which stands alone on the skyline along the western boundary of a frontier long past.

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