Bookin' It
The perfect literary companion for your Old West vacations.
Categories: Featured Travel Stories
By: TW Editors 03/01/2008
James and I were both great readers and we had been all winter [1860] without so much as an almanac to look at. We were famished for something to read when some Indians coming from the Bitter Root told us that a white man had come up from below, with a trunk full of books, and was camped with all that wealth, in Bitter Root valley.
On receipt of these glad tidings, we saddled our horses and putting our blankets, and some dried meat for food, on a pack horse, we started for those books, a hundred and fifty miles away, without a house, or anybody on the route, and with three big dangerous rivers to cross, the Big Blackfoot, the Hell Gate, and the Bitter Root. As the spring rise had not yet begun, by careful searching we found fords on these rivers, but they were dangerous, and at times we were almost swept away.
Arriving in the Bitter Root valley we learned that the man who brought the books had gone back to the lower country, but he had left the precious trunk in charge of a man named Henry Brooks, whom we finally found living in a teepee, at a point on Sweathouse Creek, near where the town of Victor now stands. We gradually and diplomatically approached the subject of books, and “our hearts were on the ground” when Brooks told us that Neil McArthur, a Hudson’s Bay Company trader, who left the books in his care, told him to keep them until he returned. He gave him no authority to sell any of them.
We told him how long we had been without anything to read, and how we had ridden for days, seeking that trunk, and that we would take all the blame and would make good with McArthur when he returned. At last we won him over, and he agreed to let us have five books, for five dollars each, and if McArthur was not satisfied we were to pay him more.
“How we feasted our eyes on those books. We could hardly make up our minds which ones to choose, but we finally settled upon Shakespeare and Byron, both fine illustrated editions, Headley’s Napoleon and His Marshals, a Bible in French, and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. After paying for them we had just twenty-five dollars left, but then we had the blessed books, which we packed carefully in our blankets, and joyfully started on our return of a hundred and fifty miles.
Many were the happy hours we spent reading those books, and I have them yet, all except the Wealth of Nations, which being loose in the binding, has gradually disappeared, until only a few fragments remain. McArthur never returned to the Bitter Root valley, and I do not know what became of the rest of the books, but I hope they gave as much pleasure to some others, as did the five to Brother James and myself.
—Forty Years on the Frontier as seen in the Journals and Reminiscences of Granville Stuart, edited by Paul C. Phillips, Arthur H. Clark Company
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