Zenas Leonard - Narrative of the Adventures of Zenas Leonard

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The Lakeside Classics

Narrative of the Adventures of Zenas Leonard

Written by Himself

EDITED BY

MILO MILTON QUAIFE

SECRETARY AND EDITOR OF THE BURTON HISTORICAL COLLECTION

Contents

Table of Contents

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER

WE present as the content of this years volume of The Lakeside Classics another story of the American fur trade. Zenas Leonard, the author of this years volume, unlike Larpenteur, was not an agent of a fur company living at an established trading post, but was a trapper, living entirely cut off from contact with civilization, in the Rocky Mountains amid unfriendly Indians and sustaining himself entirely by his rifle and traps. Veteran frontiersmen and young men from the settled parts of the United States seeking high adventure, gradually drifted over the plains into the mountains beyond and became known as mountaineers. They were courageous, self-reliant and resourceful, and from them graduated the guides and scouts of later days. Among these mountaineers and as one of them Leonard lived for five and one-half years during the thirties of the last century. Returning to his fathers farm in Pennsylvania, he wrote his story for a local newspaper. It was later published in 1839 in book form by a printer in Clearfield, Pennsylvania, a copy of which is extremely rare and of great value. A reprint, edited by Dr. W. F. Wagner, was published by The Burrows Brothers Company of Cleveland, Ohio, in 1904, but being a limited edition of only five hundred and twenty-five copies, the book is little known except to bibliophiles and collectors of Americana. The Burrows Brothers Company have generously consented to the reprinting of it in this series, and The Publishers feel that it will be an important addition to the list of The Lakeside Classics.

THE PUBLISHERS

Christmas, 1934

THE Narrative of the adventures of Zenas Leonard, to which the present volume in the Lakeside Classics series is devoted, returns our readers to a familiar field. A year ago Charles Larpenteurs Forty Years a Fur Trader on the Upper Missouri , was published, dealing in large part with the scenes, and to some extent with the identical time, of Leonards recital. Earlier volumes in the seriesnotably James Ohio Patties Personal Narrative (published in 1930), and General John Bid wells Echoes of the Past About California (published in 1928)cover in large part the scene of Leonards California adventures.

Larpenteur has described, in his opening pages, the thrill which moved him upon seeing at St. Louis in the autumn of 1832 a party of mountain men, newly returned to civilization with a veritable fortune in beaver skins borne upon the backs of their hard-worked mules. Despite the hardships and dangers of such a life, the youth promptly determined that he, too, would become a mountain man, and in the spring of 1833 he embarked upon the tumultuous scenes of his forty-years adventure. Two years earlier another young man, Zenas Leonard, had embarked from St. Louis upon a similar adventure. After four years of wandering, which took him to the then strange land of Spanish California, he returned to his parental home in Clearfield, Pennsylvania, in the autumn of 1835, where he was greeted by his relatives as one returned from the dead. So great was the interest aroused in the recital of the wonders he had experienced that he finally became tired of repeating his story to succeeding groups of auditors, and to save himself the trouble of doing so, he wrote it out for publication in the local paper. For some reason it was published only in part at the time, but two or three years later the enterprising editor of the Clearfield Republican procured the manuscript, and in addition to printing it in his paper, issued it in book form in 1839.

The printing was crudely done (apparently the type used in the newspaper was utilized also for the book), but the narrative thus preserved is one of great human interest and of decided historical value. It was long unknown to historians of the West and copies of the original edition have become so rare as to command a price, in the auction market, of many hundreds of dollars. In 1904 a reprint edition of 520 copies was brought out at Cleveland, under the editorship of Dr. W. F. Wagner, thereby enabling many individuals and institutions to become possessors of the book. The present issue constitutes the third printing (aside from the contemporary newspaper publication) of Leonards narrative, ensuring for it the wider distribution which its character richly merits.

The activities which form the subject of Leonards narrative are such as to make it one of the fundamental sources for the exploration of the American West. In our introduction to Larpenteurs narrative, a year ago, we presented a sketch of the development of the fur trade in the upper Missouri region during the first four decades of the nineteenth century. To this we refer those readers of the present volume who may care to understand the broader background of Leonards narrative. His fur-trading years belonged to a period of intense activity in the exploitation of the trade of the Far West. Fortunately these very years found an able contemporary historian in the person of Washington Irving, whose book, The Rocky Mountains, or Scenes, Incidents, and Adventures in the Far West ...was published at Philadelphia in 1837. The remainder of the title indicates that the work was digested from the journal of Captain B. L. E. Bonneville, and illustrated from other sources. Subsequently the title was changed to The Adventures of Captain Bonneville ..., thereby advertising more prominently the principal source of Irvings information. In recent years the old title has been forgotten, and the book is commonly known by the newer one as the Adventures of Captain Bonneville .

Until the summer of 1833 Leonard was a free trapper. He then entered the employ of Captain Bonneville, and continued therein until the end of his narrative at St. Louis in the summer of 1835. It follows that Irvings history, chiefly digested from Captain Bonnevilles journal, is the history of the larger enterprise with which the experiences of Leonards last two years in the fur-trade were identified. It might be presumed from this circumstance that Leonards recital would agree, in the main, with Irvings presentation. In fact, however, the divergence between the two is very material. Leonard was attached to Captain Walkers party, which Irving would have us believe Bonneville dispatched to explore Great Salt Lake. Apparently the great lake loomed large in Bonnevilles mind, for on Irvings maps (the material for which must have been derived from Captain Bonneville) it appears as Lake Bonneville. Instead of exploring it, Captain Walker departed via Humboldt River for California, consuming in this journey a large portion of the years 1833-34. Although one would suppose, from reading Leonards narrative, that the relations between Bonneville and Walker were entirely amicable to the end, one gains a very different impression from Irving. In his recital, digested, of course, from Bonnevilles journal, Walker is presented as disloyal, incompetent, and senselessly cruel.