The Adventures of Captain Bonneville | Page 3

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The Adventures of Captain Bonneville digested from his journal by
Washington Irving
Originally published in 1837

Introductory Notice
WHILE ENGAGED in writing an account of the grand enterprise of
Astoria, it was my practice to seek all kinds of oral information
connected with the subject. Nowhere did I pick up more interesting

particulars than at the table of Mr. John Jacob Astor; who, being the
patriarch of the fur trade in the United States, was accustomed to have
at his board various persons of adventurous turn, some of whom had
been engaged in his own great undertaking; others, on their own
account, had made expeditions to the Rocky Mountains and the waters
of the Columbia.
Among these personages, one who peculiarly took my fancy was
Captain Bonneville, of the United States army; who, in a rambling kind
of enterprise, had strangely ingrafted the trapper and hunter upon the
soldier. As his expeditions and adventures will form the leading theme
of the following pages, a few biographical particulars concerning him
may not be unacceptable.
Captain Bonneville is of French parentage. His father was a worthy old
emigrant, who came to this country many years since, and took up his
abode in New York. He is represented as a man not much calculated for
the sordid struggle of a money-making world, but possessed of a happy
temperament, a festivity of imagination, and a simplicity of heart, that
made him proof against its rubs and trials. He was an excellent scholar;
well acquainted with Latin and Greek, and fond of the modern classics.
His book was his elysium; once immersed in the pages of Voltaire,
Corneille, or Racine, or of his favorite English author, Shakespeare, he
forgot the world and all its concerns. Often would he be seen in
summer weather, seated under one of the trees on the Battery, or the
portico of St. Paul's church in Broadway, his bald head uncovered, his
hat lying by his side, his eyes riveted to the page of his book, and his
whole soul so engaged, as to lose all consciousness of the passing
throng or the passing hour.
Captain Bonneville, it will be found, inherited something of his father's
bonhommie, and his excitable imagination; though the latter was
somewhat disciplined in early years, by mathematical studies. He was
educated at our national Military Academy at West Point, where he
acquitted himself very creditably; thence, he entered the army, in which
he has ever since continued.
The nature of our military service took him to the frontier, where, for a

number of years, he was stationed at various posts in the Far West.
Here he was brought into frequent intercourse with Indian traders,
mountain trappers, and other pioneers of the wilderness; and became so
excited by their tales of wild scenes and wild adventures, and their
accounts of vast and magnificent regions as yet unexplored, that an
expedition to the Rocky Mountains became the ardent desire of his
heart, and an enterprise to explore untrodden tracts, the leading object
of his ambition.
By degrees he shaped his vague day-dream into a practical reality.
Having made himself acquainted with all the requisites for a trading
enterprise beyond the mountains, he determined to undertake it. A
leave of absence, and a sanction of his expedition, was obtained from
the major general in chief, on his offering to combine public utility
with his private projects, and to collect statistical information for the
War Department concerning the wild countries and wild tribes he might
visit in the course of his journeyings.
Nothing now was wanting to the darling project of the captain, but the
ways and means. The expedition would require an outfit of many
thousand dollars; a staggering obstacle to a soldier, whose capital is
seldom any thing more than his sword. Full of that buoyant hope,
however, which belongs to the sanguine temperament, he repaired