My Sixty Years on the Plains: A Memoir of Trapping, Trading, and Indian Fighting

Frank: This is a great historical account of a real mountain man.

United States on Oct 26, 2023

Kerry Roy: good read

United States on Oct 24, 2023

bill carter: This was a great read! The author gave a very detailed account of his time trapping the West and his relations with the Indians of the West. Some were hostiles and others were friendly to the whites who were coming West into their homeland. Very interesting journal.

United States on Sep 08, 2023

Richard Linneman: Book was as described and got here fast. The book itself is wonderfully written. The story about the authors time was fantastic. The only downside was that it was to short. We only really get one or two adventures of all the time he spent on the frontier. It really leaves you wishing he would have wrote so much more.

United States on Aug 25, 2023

M: Gritty diary of day-to-day struggles in the wildest parts of the Wild West. Dispels the myth of peaceful Indians both against Whites and especially against each other. Detsils of survival in a hostile country where a small mistake in prepararion or dozing off for a minute meant probable death and possible scalping. He spent much time amongst the Indians and recounts many rituals and social structures first hand. Enthralling read. I wish the book had been twice the size because he didn't describe anything about his battles in the southern parts of the continent.

Canada on Jun 29, 2023

Amazon Customer: Was not a bad read. It lets you see what it was like for the people in the old days

Canada on May 23, 2023

Robert: What a tough life in those days.

Australia on Apr 25, 2023

Jack Self: Fascinating account of the culture of mountain men, fearless and resourceful! I highly recommend this book for those interested in the Wild West!

Canada on Feb 27, 2023

Wayne A. Smith: William Thomas Hamilton was a Mountain Man. This is a fascinating account of life lived as an independent trapper. Though the subtitle is Sixty Years on the Plains, the vast bulk of this thin book covers the 1840's in the area of Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Wyoming and Montana (perhaps also present day Colorado, though his place names from that time are not descriptive of place in the current sense).

The book is matter of fact and sequential. It is largely a tale of trapping among lands still largely controlled by Indians of various nations. The book is really driven by Indian encounters while trapping (or gold prospecting near the end) is noted matter of factly. The descriptions of the encounters fascinate.

Hamilton was a man of his times. He believed the land was open and that trappers and miners could go among the land and that Indians could accommodate (friendly Indians) or face armed response if they attacked (hostiles). Hamilton is at once sympathetic to tribes with whom he enjoyed close and excellent relations (for example, the Shoshones) and steely-minded toward those who met his expeditions with force (the Blackfeet were known to him only through...

United States on Sep 19, 2022

Mr. Peter Franklin: A fascinating story of frontier life. It's a bit disjointed and we don't get to know what eventually happens to Hamilton. So you must look at this as a series of adventures in his life rather than any sort of autobiography. Together, through these episodes in his life you do get the measure of the man though and it is certainly a tale that informs the reader of how things were in that period.

Rather than having a contemporary view that the Indians are savage and bad, so are treated as lesser mortals, or a revisionist view that the poor noble savages were hard done by, we see that some groups of natives are peaceful, wise and true, whereas others are warlike thieves. In other words, we get a view without prejudice.

So, to summarise, it's no novel, but as I started off by saying, it's fascinating.

United Kingdom on Oct 30, 2015