The River of the West: The Adventures of Joe Meek; The Mountain Years

Joe Meek is one of the West's irresistible characters dashing, devil-may-care, cheeky, irreverent, more fun than a playful grizzly cub. Unlike so many of the West's other great characters, he comes down to us not as a myth, says the editor, but as "simply a right kind of fella." It is our good luck that Joe knew how to yarn his mountain experiences truly and colorfully and with only a mite of stretching, and that he happened to cross trails with Frances Fuller Victor, who had the sense to see the worth of his tale as Joe told it, in the raw. The first of two volumes of "The River of the West" deals with Joe's years as one of the legendary mountain men, the fur trappers of the Rocky Mountains. A facsimile of the original edition published in 1870, this reissue includes the original illustrations and offers a new introduction, map, notes, bibliography, and index.