The Lost Trappers

Since its first publication in 1847 alongside books by George Ruxton, Joel Palmer, and John T. Hughes, The Lost Trappers has presented historians with a fascinating riddle. Its author, a Presbyterian minister named David Holmes Coyner (1807-1892), billed the book as a true narrative of the wanderings of trapper Ezekiel Williams. According to Coyner, Williams led twenty trappers up the Missouri River to the Rocky Mountains in 1807. One year later, seventeen of the twenty had died, and the three survivors decided to separate. Two started for Santa Fe, getting lost in the Rockies until they met a Spanish caravan bound for California. Alone, Williams journeyed home by canoe on the Arkansas and Missouri rivers - his trip interrupted when Kansas Indians temporarily took him captive. Some scholars have dismissed The Lost Trappers as a complete fabrication, but David J. Weber has carefully sifted fiction from fact in this definitive edition, which includes a new afterword for this paperback edition. His introductory essay and annotations provide fresh evidence of a factual basis for many parts of a narrative that had long been considered a romanticized account of the fur trade.