The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, by
Washington Irving

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Title: The Adventures of Captain Bonneville
Digested From His Journal

Author: Washington Irving

Release Date: February 18, 2006 [EBook #1372]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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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 wo