The "Lone Trapper" vs. Reality

[Leifer]

"...What the trappers did between rendezvous differed from the popular understanding. They did not wander in lonely solitude through the mountains trapping beaver. That would have been suicidal, an invitation to watching Blackfeet. Instead, they traveled in brigades of forty to sixty men, including camp tenders and meat hunters. From brigade base camps, they fanned out, usually in pairs, to set their traps. Then they were most vulnerable, and then Indian ambushes took their heaviest toll.

Nor did the mountaineers hunt constantly. (They called a trapping expedition a hunt, a term also applied to seeking game for food.) There was a spring hunt and a fall hunt. The spring hunt garnered the winter fur and thus the best pelts, the fall hunt pelts of lesser quality. Summer of course was rendezvous. Winter was simply winter camp, waiting for the spring hunt..."
-- Robert M. Utley, "After Lewis and Clark" (formerly "A Life Wild and Perilous")

[Chuck Burrows]

That was common for company trappers but not necessarily for the often times much smaller groups of on their own hook free trappers. While he latter were maybe 10-15% of the overall number of mountaineers they can't be left out of the history and in fact became more prominent in the waning days of the RMFT, especially in the SW and Colorado. Now I'll agree that the lone or single trapper was close to non-existent, but there are some examples such as Old Bill Williams,, who at times did hookup with others, but was also known to go out on his own, or leave the others to their own devices when trouble was brewing.
On the other hand even the company brigades did not always include 40-60 men - example Jed Smith's brigades when he went to California only had 20-25 men at most and again here in the Southwest, the sometimes almost forgotten step-child of the RMFT, the brigades were generally no more than 30 men even when traveling through hostile Apache country.
As always it depends who, when, and where.

BTW - while Utley's book is generally good, I remember the last time I read it(5 years ago) that he tended to repeat a few/some of the myth-conceptions about the RMFT that have sort of become fact due to repetition - don't remember exactly which ones, but they did tend to jump out at me when reading it.

I do agree about the not always trapping info. albeit rendezvous only lasted a couple of weeks at most and not all trappers attended every year. The other part of the summer was used for traveling to and from the trapping grounds the brigades and others intended to hunt.