Some Plausible Excuse

All people may feel it, but none more strongly than Americans.  It colors the fiber of our beings, ineradicable and indispensable, like the blue in a pair of jeans.  We inherited it from our cultural ancestors, who crossed the Atlantic to a land they knew little about, and it found expression in the westward push of the culture that those emigrants forged.  To the Appalachians, then over them; to the Mississippi, then the Rocky Mountains; to the Sierra Nevadas, then the Pacific.  Always onward.  In this country, “west” is not only a direction but a dream.  The urge to roam.  It is impossible, I think, for any red-blooded American to not at some point look across the hills to a broad unexplored horizon and think “damn, I’d like to go.”

 Western North Dakota.

I stood in western North Dakota, looking south over the gullied, snow-spotted prairie and watching the sun set when the impulse struck me, as it often does, to go.  I’ve been lucky to do more than my share of wandering, but still the urge doesn’t let me alone.  To drive off in a well-provisioned truck with no itinerary, as did John Steinbeck, or to “throw some tea and bread into an old sack and jump the back fence,” as did John Muir.  That’s the stuff of daydreams.  Or to catch your horse and ride into the snow-capped backbone of the continent.  That was the stuff of the Rocky Mountain trappers.

The trappers’ reasons weren’t unusual, fancy, or foreign to you and me.  They wanted to roam.  Would-be travelers from around the world poured into St. Louis in the 1830s, waiting for a westbound expedition that they could join.  Some were poor, others rich; some unlettered, some with college degrees; some experienced outdoorsmen, some who had never fired a rifle at game.  But all shared a common dream of covering wild country.  Which trapping company did they prefer?  It didn’t matter.  What part of the Rockies did they hope to visit?  Not important.  When would they return?  A detail to be worked out later.  Wanderlust is not a need that can wait for the morrow.

And so I am going to get back in the truck and drive.




Westward! Ho! It is the sixteenth of the second month A. D. 1830. and I have joined a trapping, trading, hunting expedition to the Rocky Mountains. Why, I scarcely know, for the motives that induced me to this step were of a mixed complexion, - something like the pepper and salt population of this city of St. Louis. Curiosity, a love of wild adventure, and perhaps also a hope of profit, - for times are hard, and my best coat has a sort of sheepish hang-dog hesitation to encounter fashionable folk - combined to make me look upon the project with an eye of favour. The party consists of some thirty men, mostly Canadians; but a few there are, like myself, from various parts of the Union. Each has some plausible excuse for joining, and the aggregate of disinterestedness would delight the most ghostly saint in the Roman calendar. Engage for money! no, not they; health, and the strong desire of seeing strange lands, of beholding nature in the savage grandeur of her primeval state, - these are the only arguments that could have persuaded such independent and high-minded young fellows to adventure with the American Fur Company in a trip to the mountain wilds of the great west. But they are active, vigorous, resolute, daring, and such are the kind of men the service requires. The Company have no reason to be dissatisfied, nor have they. Everything promises well. No doubt there will be two fortunes apiece for us. Westward! Ho!

                                                                      -Warren Ferris, St. Louis, 1830