Buffalo and Beaver

Young Jeff Barlow, who loved to draw and paint, was sixteen when he left his uncle’s Illinois farm and went with his father to spend the winter in the Rocky Mountain wilderness. Few white men in 1827 had ever been in this remote territory, but while game was abundant and the streams swarmed with beaver, life was far from easy. The deep snows and bitter cold lasted for months in the high valley where they camped. Grizzly bears, cougars, and timber wolves menaced the indispensable horses. And in the spring on their way to the trappers’ rendezvous with their furs, they were forced to fight hostile Indians.

Jeff thrived on these hardships and became a true mountain man. Equally important, his natural talent for art found expression in the paintings he made on deerskin canvases of the wilderness scenes. When he returned to St. Louis, the sale of his deerskin pictures helped ensure his future study as an artist.

Authentic and exciting, Buffalo And Beaver is another of Stephen Meader’s outstanding stories which gives the reader a sense of the superb natural beauties of this country and of history in the making.