A mountain man is an explorer who lives in the wilderness and makes his living from hunting and trapping. Mountain men were most common in the North American Rocky Mountains from about 1810 through to the 1880s. They were instrumental in opening up the various emigrant trails allowing Americans in the east to settle the new territories of the far west by organized wagon trains traveling over roads explored and in many cases, physically improved by the mountain men and the big fur companies, originally to serve the mule train-based inland fur trade.
Jim Bridger, one of the most famous mountain men
Fur trading at Fort Nez Percé in 1841
The Trapper's Bride shows a trapper, Francois, paying $600 in trade goods for an Indian woman to be his wife, ca. 1837, by Alfred Jacob Miller.
Seth Kinman, a notable 19th century mountain man who claimed to have hunted down around 800 grizzly bears
The Rocky Mountains, also known as the Rockies, are a major mountain range and the largest mountain system in North America. The Rocky Mountains stretch 3,000 miles in straight-line distance from the northernmost part of western Canada, to New Mexico in the southwestern United States. Depending on differing definitions between Canada and the U.S., its northern terminus is located either in northern British Columbia's Terminal Range south of the Liard River and east of the Trench, or in the northeastern foothills of the Brooks Range/British Mountains that face the Beaufort Sea coasts between the Canning River and the Firth River across the Alaska-Yukon border. Its southernmost point is near the Albuquerque area adjacent to the Rio Grande rift and north of the Sandia–Manzano Mountain Range. Being the easternmost portion of the North American Cordillera, the Rockies are distinct from the tectonically younger Cascade Range and Sierra Nevada, which both lie farther to its west.
Moraine Lake and the Valley of the Ten Peaks, Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada
The Santa Fe Mountains at the southern end of the Rockies as seen from the Sandia Crest in New Mexico
The summits of the Teton Range in Wyoming
Mount Robson in British Columbia