Meditations on the Amazing McCormick-Deering Riding Cultivator

摘要

After two long and harrowing years of trekking for thousands of miles through the uncharted west most every man in Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery looked forward with unbridled anticipation to their imminent return to civilization. However, JohnColter, an intrepid young huntsman from Kentucky, had not yet had his fill of wilderness. When the expedition encountered two trappers on the lower reaches of the Missouri in the spring of 1806 they were a mere six weeks out from St. Louis and near the end of their epic journey to the Pacific Ocean and back. Private Colter requested and received an early and honorable discharge from the Corps so that he could join ranks with the trappers. It would be another four years of hair-raising adventure among Indians and mountain men, lonely vigils through rocky mountain nights at -50 degrees, and sojourns into strange lands of boiling mud pits and geysers, before Colter (who nearly lost his scalp on several occasions to his longtime nemesis the warriors of the Blackfoot nation) finally made his way back to St. Louis.