Steven Rinella (The MeatEater Podcast) brings to life the legendary wilderness exploits of men such as Jim Bridger, Jedidiah Smith, and Hugh Glass, who headed out to the Rocky Mountains to trap beavers in the decades following the Louisiana Purchase. Living off the land and dodging grizzly bears, these colorful characters carved out an existence defined by their relationships with Native people, their capacity to endure the most trying conditions, and their intimate knowledge of the western landscape. This small fraternity of backwoodsmen—numbering only a few hundred at any point in time, and perhaps 3,000 total over the course of the era—not only lived in dramatic fashion, they died the same way: one in ten would suffer some sort of violent death in the wilds of the Rockies.
Their extraordinary feats—some heroic, others horrifying—helped define an era when the West represented not just unmapped territory, but untapped opportunity. And when a combination of economic and ecological factors caused their world to collapse, the mountain men left behind more than just tracks in the wilderness; they established an enduring archetype of independence, resilience, and an untamed spirit that still resonates through American culture today.
