Books: The Irrepressible Force

THE FINAL CHALLENGE by Dale Van Every. 378 pages. Morrow. $6.

By the 1790s the Western movement had reached the Mississippi, and the frontiersmen saw nothing in the way of a final push to the Pacific except Blackfoot Indians, grizzly bears and federal bureaucrats. Though President James Monroe in 1825 had forever prohibited any U.S. settlement beyond the upper Mississippi and the present states of Missouri and Arkansas, the frontiersmen paid no attention. By the time Monroe’s proclamation reached the frontier, it had been pushed as far west as Spanish Texas and Santa Fe. The grizzlies were similarly surmountable. Pathfinder Jedediah Smith jerked his mangled head from the jaws of one and went on to discover the South Pass gateway through the Rockies and the last missing link in the Oregon Trail. The Plains Indians, who were some of history’s toughest cavalrymen, also found their match in Smith and his “mountainmen.” One of them kept on trapping for three years with a 3 -in. arrowhead embedded in his back.

The secret was fighting firewater with firewater. The frontiersmen became indistinguishable from the Indians in their drinking habits, their beaded buckskins, and war paint. If anything, says Dale Van Every in the fourth and final volume of his Frontier People of America, the paleface invaders were “morally more savage than their Indian victims.” On one occasion, a trapper found rivals following him to learn the most lucrative beaver streams. His solution was to lead them through the country of the Blackfeet, who ambushed and dismembered the rivals’ leader.

The author concludes that it was all for the best. If the mountainmen had been a less irrepressible force, the U.S. might never have amounted to anything more than “another Holland or Portugal.”