Montana, Native American, Fiction, Adventure 

American Trails 

"The Bozeman Trail was the road to the gold in Montana. It led only to Montana, up from the great transcontinental Emigrant Trail, and it was blazed only after gold was known surely to be there for the taking... The Bozeman Trail was for a kind of man who was new in wilderness Montana, the man who came hopefully out from the States to better his condition... This new man was not a born adventurer, but in his stubborn, sometimes cautious way he was a gambler. He knew or soon learned that hostile Indians barred the trail through the Powder River country of present Wyoming. He gambled his life to better his condition, but he didn't really believe that his hair might make fringes for a Sioux or a Cheyenne war shirt or that his mutilated body might be clawed out of a shallow grave by wolves."

And so Dorothy Johnson begins her book. "The Bozeman Trail: The Perilous Trail to Montana's Gold." The latest volume in the well-established American Trails Series, this is a great saga of the Old West, an account filled with the struggles against nature, of the battles between red man and white, of victories and defeats, of the discovery of gold, of the hangings of road agents by Vigilantes. By making use of many old journals, diaries, letters and pioneers' reminiscences, Miss Johnson has recreated the story of this Trail, marked in 1863 by John Bozeman and John Jacobs, which went right through the Indians' last remaining great hunting country. And it was the Sioux Indians, under the great chief Red Cloud won his war, and the Great Father in Washington promised by solemn treaty to keep his white children out of the Powder River Country.

Here, too, is the story of the mysterious death of General Thomas Francis Meagher, and the heroic ride f Portuguese Phillip. From start to finish this is a spellbinding account which more than proves the remark made by one of Montana's first newspaper editors: "Middling people do not live in these regions."