Free Down the Great Unknown by Edward Dolnick

among the best.
    Jim Beckwourth, who wrote about Ashley in a swashbuckling autobiography, lived a life with all the plot twists of a boy’s adventure book. The son of a slave mother and a plantation-owner father, Beckwourth was born in Virginia and raised in Missouri but became a celebrated hunter and explorer in the West. Along the way, he was adopted by the Crow Nation, took a Crow wife, and became a war chief. A man of extremes, he stood out even among his fellow mountain men, one historian notes, as “a tough hombre, a daredevil, a thug, and a liar.”
    Ashley placed his newspaper ad in 1822. By 1824, the mountain men had brought him the welcome news that the tributaries of the upper Green teemed with beaver. Determined to see for himself, Ashley headed West in 1825. He divided his men into four scouting parties and assigned three to explore particular valleys and streams. The fourth group, Ashley and seven mountain men, prepared to set out down the Green itself. Beckwourth was, at least sometimes, part of Ashley’s party.
    First Ashley’s crew had to make their boats. These fragile craft, called bullboats, were formed by draping buffalo skins across a framework made of willow branches. The first boat was sixteen feet long and seven wide, made from half a dozen buffalo hides. It bore a none-too-encouraging resemblance to an upside-down umbrella. Soon the men found it necessary to build a second, smaller boat as well. Awkward at the best of times, these bullboats grew even more unwieldy as they became waterlogged.
    Beckwourth claimed that the boats proved unreliable from the moment they were built. “One of our boats being finished and launched,” he wrote, “[Ashley] sprang into it to test its capacity.” Immediately the mooring line snapped, and Ashley was pulled from the river’s edge by what Beckwourth called the “Green River Suck.” The ominous name referred to a “fall [that] continued for six or eight miles” while descending “upward of two hundred and fifty feet.” Ashley made it to the far shore but capsized, and Beckwourth swam to his rescue. But both men found themselves caught in the Suck and “began slowly to recede from the shore toward inevitable death.” At the last possible moment, Beckwourth managed to catch a line flung from shore, and the other mountain men dragged their two half-drowned companions to safety.
    From that dismal beginning, the trip quickly grew even worse. The men had not brought enough food, and they could not get more because they had lost their guns in various capsizings. After six days without food, they had decided to draw lots to see who should be sacrificed to serve as dinner for his companions. Ashley prevailed on the men to hold out one more day. The next day, the canyon opened up and they found a party of trappers waiting with food.
    So Beckwourth told it, at any rate. It is worth emphasizing that, just as good cooks pride themselves on being able to conjure up a feast from a wedge of cheese, a tomato, and a few other bits and pieces, so the mountain men prided themselves on crafting an elaborate tale from a handful of half-truths. “To be a liar was as much a part of mountain honor,” one historian notes, “as hard drinking or straight shooting. Embroider your adventures, convert to use any handy odyssey, and spin it all out in the firelight. The only sin is the sin of being dull.”
    By this standard, Beckwourth was a man of unimpeachable honor. Remarkably, his account was taken as gospel for decades. Only in 1918, when Ashley’s journal was posthumously published, did the true story of the 1825 trip emerge. The danger had been real enough, even without exaggeration, and both men and boats had taken a beating. The portages were frequent and difficult, and sometimes the men had deemed it better to take a chance on capsizing in a rapid than to volunteer for the certain misery of portaging.