Winter Down — Robert M. Johnson

The first half of the nineteenth century in the American West was marked by an intense spirit of national pride and frontier determination. The politicians were the ones who stoked the flames of national pride that would eventually bring the territory of California into the American union. From the year 1803 when the Louisiana Purchase brought the entire Rocky Mountain territory under the control of the American government, men called free trappers were moving about throughout the territory and in their own way claiming it for the new owners. Their activities, and their aggression toward the Native Americans who inhabited the region, where source of conflict and violence. Where the Lewis and Clark expedition had gone through the entire Western territory all the way to the Pacific Ocean and back without engaging in open conflict with the natives, things were gradually changing in that regard. Tribes which it always thought with one another were now considering the white settlers as invaders of their territories and the danger to their ancient traditions. The men who took part in this process of expansion, and invasion, took it for granted that their Native American counterparts could not be trusted for the most part. The story is Samuel Ogden Leonard, the Mountain Man, began in eighteen twenty when he was just sixteen years old. In the summer of that year he met a consummate mountain man, Clyde Patterson, who had been a companion of one of the first, is not the first mountain man, John Coulter. After Coulter's death in the war of eighteen twelve, Patterson continued his life as a mountain man, mostly alone as a free trapper. He saw in Young Sam Ogden, not just the makings of a mountain man but the makings of a great mountain man he was fascinated with the experience that Young Sam had already had in the short time that he had spent in the Rocky mountain region. He wanted to pass on to his protégé, the skills that would make him one of the greatest mountain men to ever live. In order to do that, young Samuel had to learn the secrets that are revealed in this volume, Winter Down.