Book Description

Carrying orders to collect information on the geography, geology, and topography “of the Country within the limits of the Territories belonging to the United States, between our frontier and the Pacific,” Captain James Bonneville set out for points west in 1832. He was gone nearly five years and was thought to be dead. But Bonneville had befriended a mountain man named Joseph Rutherford Walker, and the two made extensive journeys through the West, becoming the first white men to see Yosemite. Returning by a southern route across the Sierras, they discovered the Walker Pass and Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats.

Captain Bonneville enjoyed half a decade of amazing escapades and discoveries. Upon his return to civilization, he met Washington Irving, by then already an internationally recognized writer. Irving was fascinated by Bonneville’s tales and details of life among the mountains, trappers, and Native Americans. Drawing from Bonneville’s personal journals, Irving created this celebrated volume of stories in 1837. With a new introduction by series editor Anthony Brandt and a National Geographic map of Bonneville’s journey, Irving’s masterful storytelling emerges as a fresh and immediate account of a long-lost era of American history. The Adventures of Captain Bonneville is a valuable portrait of the wonders of the West and the remarkable men who first explored it.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Captain Benjamin L. E. Bonneville left the east for California in May of 1832. No one heard from him, and many people assumed he was dead (or AWOL). Three years later he returned. Washington Irving (Sleepy Hollow, Rip Van Winkle) met Bonneville, bought the rights to his journal, and after editing it and recasting it in the third person, published it. It is probably the most literate, readable description of the fur trapper era.