The Lost Trappers

The Shelf2life History of the American West Collection is a unique project that provides opportunities for researchers and new readers to easily access and explore works which have previously only been available on library shelves. The Collection brings to life pre-1923 titles focusing on a wide range of topics and experiences in US Western history. From the initial westward migration, to exploration and development of the American West to daily life in the West and intimate pictures of the people who inhabited it, this collection offers American West enthusiasts a new glimpse at some forgotten treasures of American culture. Encompassing genres such as poetry, fiction, nonfiction, tourist guides, biographies and drama, this collection provides a new window to the legend and realities of the American West. Since its first publication in 1847 alongside books by George Ruxton, Joel Palmer, and John T. Hughes, The Lost Trappers has presented historians with a fascinating riddle. Its author, a Presbyterian minister named David Holmes Coyner (1807-1892), billed the book as a true narrative of the wanderings of trapper Ezekiel Williams. According to Coyner, Williams led twenty trappers up the Missouri River to the Rocky Mountains in 1807. One year later, seventeen of the twenty had died, and the three survivors decided to separate. Two started for Santa Fe, getting lost in the Rockies until they met a Spanish caravan bound for California. Alone, Williams journeyed home by canoe on the Arkansas and Missouri rivers - his trip interrupted when Kansas Indians temporarily took him captive. Some scholars have dismissed The Lost Trappers as a complete fabrication, but David J. Weber has carefully sifted fiction from fact in this definitive edition, which includes a new afterword for this paperback edition. His introductory essay and annotations provide fresh evidence of a factual basis for many parts of a narrative that had long been considered a romanticized account of the fur trade. David Coyner was born in Virginia in 1807 and was not only an able preacher, and lecturer but was also a successful author and historian. During the four years from 1842 to 1847, which he spent on the frontier between New Mexico and high up on the Missouri river, he gathered material for a book many editions of which have been published and sold. A great many of the facts contained in this historical collection he got from men who had been with Lewis and Clark across the Rocky Mountains in 1805-6-7. This book on early western North American exploration is cited in numerous history books as a primary source of authority for this little documented period of history. The text tells the story of Ezekiel Williams, a fur trapper who led a party of men into the Rocky Mountains in 1807. A year later, 17 of the 20 men had died and the remaining three separated. An introductory critical essay examines the factual evidence for the book's narrative.