The Lost Trappers

Originally published in 1847, The Lost Trappers relates trapper Ezekiel Williams's account of an expedition gone very wrong. Williams, according to his chronicler, David Coyner, had traveled with a group of twenty trappers up the Missouri River into the Rocky Mountains, where all but three died of sickness, hunger, and Indian attacks. The survivors made their way to the Spanish outpost of Santa Fe and eventually to California. Historians have long dismissed Coyner's book as a romanticized fabrication, noting that many geographical details are inaccurate. In this edition, David J. Weber, a distinguished historian at Southern Methodist University, concludes that the basic account is genuine, if layered with inaccurate embellishments. Students of the American West and the fur trade will find his evidence, and Coyner's story, intriguing.