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(More customer reviews)Lewis H. Garrard was an exuberant 17 year old tourist in the Old West of 1846-1847. He traveled down the Santa Fe Trail with a wagon train and stopped off at Bent's Fort on the Arkansas River of Colorado and spent a couple of months with the Cheyenne Indians and the traders and mountain men who lived around the fort. When Governor Charles Bent of New Mexico and twenty others were killed in Taos in an Mexican/Indian uprising he joined an informal expedition of mountain men to take revenge. His group arrived after the U.S. army had recaptured Taos, but Garrard was in Taos for the trial and hanging of nine of the revolutionary trouble-makers, even loaning the hangman several lariats when he ran short. "Wah-to-yah" is said to be the only account of the trial and hanging of the Taos revolutionaries.
Garrard was a lot more tolerant than most travelers, obviously enjoying the company of the Cheyennes and his extravagant and untutored White companions. He feels the need to express himself occasionally about moral issues and the lack of civilized values of the Indians, Mexicans, and other prairie dwellers - but his condemnations are rote rather than persuasive. Garrard, we imagine, probably shared buffalo robes with comely young Cheyenne women and thoroughly enjoyed the experience, as he did buffalo hunting, dog-meat feasts, and tall tale sessions with the mountain men. He also demonstrates a moral core, condemning the U.S war against Mexico and the wholesale hanging of the revolutionaries in Taos -- sentiments which were not popular in the West at the time.
"Wah-to-yah" -- the Indian name for the Spanish Peaks of southern Colorado -- is perhaps the best account you will find of a young man's adventures in the Old West of mountain men and unconquered Indians. It is similar to Francis Parkman's "The Oregon Trail." The two young men were in the West during the same year but Garrard's book is "the fresher, the more revealing, the more engaging, the less labored" in the words of A. B. Guthrie's introduction to "Wah-to-yah." Garrard is a likeable person; Parkman is not. Both were keen observers and good writers.
"Wah-to-yah" is on the short list of essential books about the Old West. It's easy and engaging reading. We need an annotated edition, however, which will tell us more about the many characters - some of them famous, such as Kit Carson -- Garrard meets and the places he visits and put the book in its historical context of its times.
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Wah-to-yah & the Taos trail: Prairie travel and scalp dances, with a look at los rancheros from muleback and the Rocky mountain campfireIn the bright morning of his youth Lewis H. Garrard traveled into the wild and free Rocky Mountain West and left us this fresh and vigorous account, which, says A. B. Guthrie, Jr., contains in its pages "the genuine article-the Indian, the trader, the mountain man, their dress, and behavior and speech and the country and climate they lived in."
On September 1, 1846, Garrard, then only seventeen years old, left Westport Landing (now Kansas City) with a caravan, under command of the famous trader Céran St. Vrain, bound for Bent's Fort (Fort William) in the southeastern part of present-day Colorado. After a lengthy visit at the fort and in a camp of the Cheyenne Indians, early in 1847 he joined the little band of volunteers recruited by William Bent to avenge the death of his brother, Governor Charles Bent of Taos, killed in a bloody but brief Mexican and Indian uprising in that New Mexican pueblo. In fact, Garrard's is the only eyewitness account we have of the trial and hanging of the "revolutionaries" at Taos.
Many notable figures of the plains and mountains dot his pages: traders St. Vrain and the Bents; mountain men John L. Hatcher, Jim Beckwourth, Lucien B. Maxwell, Kit Carson, and others; various soldiery traveling to and from the outposts of the Mexican War; and explorer and writer George F. Ruxton.
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