Journal of a Trapper: Nine Years in the Rocky Mountains, 1834-1843
Osborne Russellwas born in a little Maine village in 1814. He ran away to sea at sixteen, but he soon gave up seafaring to serve with a trading and trapping company in Wisconsin and Minnesota. In 1834, he signed up for Nathaniel Wyeth’s expedition to the Rocky Mountains and the mouth of the Columbia. Subsequently he joined Jim Bridger’s brigade of old Rocky Mountain Fur Company men, continuing after a merger that left the American Fur Company in control of the trade. When the fur trade declined, he became a free trapper operating out of Fort Hall, staying in the mountains until the great Westward migration began. A mountain man and politician who helped form the government of the state of Oregon, Russell died in 1892.