On The Trail Of A Mountain Man
One of the best things about doing what we do here is the connections that are forged across time and geography. Kinda like what the internet was supposed to be.
A few days ago, I got a message from a podcast listener. Besides saying some nice things that reminded me that the work is worth doing, she put me on the trail of an ancestor.
My great-grandfather (X3), Warren Angus Ferris (WAF), was a fur trapper, cartographer, and diarist who joined the American Fur Trapping Co. at 17 years old and traveled from Missouri to the Rockies over a period of 5 years, from 1830 to 1835. He kept a diary throughout his travels which is now in public domain, entitled “Life In the Rocky Mountains.” He later settled in Texas and was the original surveyor of Dallas, although he never received credit for it. Historian Suzanne Starling wrote a book about his life entitled “Land Is the Cry.”
Ferris is somebody I need to know.
On Monday, a box arrived at the post office with the diary and a copy of Land Is The Cry.
My correspondent is pitching me on a podcast (undoubtedly a series) based on Ferris’s journal — and I am, by Crom, gonna do it. It’ll come after McNelly and the Bigfoot Wallace/Robert E. Howard episodes (which are shaping up to be multiples themselves). Realistically, that means late summer or early fall.
I’m looking forward to spending time in Ferris’ company. He was an educated man and a good writer. Here’s a sample:
On the fourteenth, hurrah, boys! we saw a buffalo; a solitary, stately old chap, who did not wait an invitation to dinner, but toddled off with his tail in the air. We saw on the sixteenth a small herd of ten or twelve, and had the luck to kill one of them. It was a patriarchal fellow, poor and tough, but what of that? we had a roast presently, and champed the gristle with a zest.
Hunger is said to be a capital sauce, and if so our meal was well seasoned, for we had been living for some days on boiled corn alone, and had the grace to thank heaven for meat of any quality. Our hunters killed also several antelopes, but they were equally poor, and on the whole we rather preferred the balance of the buffalo for supper. People soon learn to be dainty, when they have a choice of viands. Next day, oh, there they were, thousands and thousands of them! Far as the eye could reach the prairie was literally covered, and not only covered but crowded with them.
In very sooth it was a gallant show; a vast expanse of moving, plunging, rolling, rushing life – a literal sea of dark forms, with still pools, sweeping currents, and heaving billows, and all the grades of movement from calm repose to wild agitation. The air was filled with dust and bellowings, the prairie was alive with animation, – I never realized before the majesty and power of the mighty tides of life that heave and surge in all great gatherings of human or brute creation. The scene had here a wild sublimity of aspect, that charmed the eye with a spell of power, while the natural sympathy of life with life made the pulse bound and almost madden with excitement.
Jove but it was glorious! and the next day too, the dense masses pressed on in such vast numbers, that we were compelled to halt, and let them pass to avoid being overrun by them in a literal sense. On the following day also, the number seemed if possible more countless than before, surpassing even the prairie- blackening accounts of those who had been here before us, and whose strange tales it had been our wont to believe the natural extravagance of a mere travellers’ turn for romancing, but they must have been true, for such a scene as this our language wants words to describe, much less to exaggerate. On, on, still on, the black masses come and thicken – an [endless] deluge of life is moving and swelling around us!