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Use code: book25 to receive 25% off this item. "The Bozeman Trail was for a kind of man who was new in wilderness Montana, the man who came out from the states to better his condition...he was a gambler. He gambled his life to better his condition..."
Excerpts from the Introduction by A. B. Guthrie Jr.
Shortly after my wife and I read Dorothy M. Johnson's The Bloody Bozeman, we had the occasion to drive from Montana to Sheridan, Wyoming. The trip took us to or close to the places and events that the author had written about.
The narrative was better than any guide book. We were carried back more than a hundred years...
John Bozeman and John Jacobs charted the Bozeman Trail in 1863. It cut off 400 hard miles from the older way that followed the Emigrant Road farther west. In 1866 the Army established the forts and in 1868 gave up, for the trail led through prime hunting grounds of the Sioux, led by the great Red Cloud, who contested every inch of the way. They came out winners. They won the war, but old Red Cloud was bitter about the peace that followed.
Properly Miss Johnson begins her narrative with the discoveries of gold in Montana some years before the trail was blazed, for without the gold there would have been no trail or reason for it.