Joseph walker mountain man biography examples

Who was Joseph Walker?

Jimmy Walker
Tullahoma, Tennessee

Joseph Rutherford Walker was one of America’s greatest Mountain Men, scouts and trailblazers. Artist Alfred Jacob Miller used Walker as a model for some of his Old West paintings.

Born in Tennessee on December 13, 1798, Walker first headed down the Santa Fe Trail to New Mexico Territory when he was 22, trapping the beaver streams of the Southwest.

In 1832, he accompanied Benjamin Bonneville into Wyoming. The next year, Walker led a winter expedition over the daunting Sierra Nevada range, becoming the first to accomplish that feat and the first white person to see what became Yosemite National Park.

Around 1836, he married a Shoshone girl, who would bear him several children. They spent the winter of 1837 trapping in central Arizona Territory along the Mogollon Rim.

During the 1840s, he and Kit Carson scouted on two of John C. Frémont’s historic expeditions to California.

In 1862-63, in

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Westering Man

The Journal of San Diego History
SAN DIEGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY QUARTERLY
Spring 1984, Volume 30, Number 2
Thomas L. Scharf, Managing Editor

Book Reviews

Raymond Starr, Book Reviews Editor

Westering Man: The Life of Joseph Walker. By Bil Gilbert. New York: Atheneum, 1983. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Maps. 339 pages. $17.95.

Reviewed by John E. Sunder, Professor of History at The University of Texas at Austin and author of several books on the Fur Trade.

Large, handsome Joseph Walker, a Scotch-Irishman of Appalachian pioneer stock, “wanted. . . to be a free-lance explorer” and realized that ambition before he died an elderly celebrity in California in 1876. Journalist Bil Gilbert tells us, rightly so, that Joe had “a remarkable knack for catching the mainstream westering current.” Walker participated vigorously in western life between 1820 and the late sixties when he retired to his ranch. During those five decades he trapped with the M

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1. John Colter

Stone with “John Colter” carved into it.

Virginia-born John Colter first answered the call of the West in 1804, when he took off on a journey to the Pacific Ocean and back as part of Lewis and Clark’s famed Corps of upptäckt. Two years in the wilderness was more than enough for most of the expedition’s members, but as they made their way home in 1806, Colter decided to shun civilization and strike out on a career as a fur trapper. He soon established himself as one of America’s original mountain dock, and may have been the first white man to lay eyes on Yellowstone National Park. A section of Wyoming’s Shoshone River even became known as “Colter’s Hell” for his descriptions of its geothermal activity.

Migrants Travel West on the Oregon Trail

Colter was once wounded while fighting alongside Crow and Flathead tribesmen, but the most legendary chapter in his career came in 1809, when he was captured by a band of Blackfeet while trapping nära Three Forks, Monta