Discover Isaac Slover's Legacy

Explore the life of a legendary mountain man in his first complete biography.

Rated 5 stars by readers

★★★★★

"He is both witness to and denizen of multiple frontiers. Just following his trail and trying to make sense of his excursions is an exploration of the American West, its ethnic and racial turmoil, its craziness, its revelation of humanity's capacity for courage and endurance and savagery.

If Isaac's life sparks a few new reflections on our national identity, then his tale is worth the telling."

Who was Isaac Slover?

Frontiersman

Born at Fort Pitt, He grew up in Western Pennsylvania during the Revolutionary War, then farmed, hunted, and raised a family in frontier Kentucky, Indiana, and the war-torn Arkansas Territory.

Trailblazer

Master Trapper

Daring Rover

California Sojourner

Tragic Hunter

At the age of 44, HE joined the historic 1821-1822 Glenn-Fowler Expedition, the first foreign party sanctioned to trap beavers in Mexican territory.

After settling in Taos in 1823, he became a Mexican citizen, married, and led one of the first successful trapping expeditions into the Colorado River basin.

HE joined the disastrous Pattie Expedition down the Gila and Colorado Rivers, before facing near-death in the Baja desert, then imprisonment in San Diego in 1828.

At the age of 77, he was killed by a grizzly bear in the San Gabriel Mountains.

He traveled along the Old Spanish Trail with the 1831-2 Wolfskill expedition and led families in an 1837-8 trek to L.A., ultimately settling near San Bernardino to form a defensive buffer zone for valley rancheros.

Synopsis

The Edge Rover chronicles the expansive life of Isaac Slover, a fur trapper who was born in Pennsylvania during the Revolutionary War and who ranged throughout the early American West. The variety and extensiveness of Slover’s encounters among Indigenous peoples and the Hispanic Southwest distinguish his experience from that of other “mountain men” of his time.

A lifespan from 1777 to 1854 meant that Isaac Slover saw a transformed America, and he endured through frequently shifting borders, particularly in what became the young country’s southwest region. Among his numerous adventures are a youth consumed by the Revolutionary War in Western Pennsylvania, then later farming in Kentucky, trapping and trading in New Mexico, and finally making his way to Southern California. Throughout, Slover sifted between cultures, jumped across borders, navigated conflict, and hid along the margins of history.

Sparse evidence documents Slover’s adventures, but what remains is meticulously compiled here for the first time by Timothy E. Green, who grew up with fireside tales of the mountain man’s exploits. At any given stage of his life, Isaac Slover can be situated at a critical juncture in the history of the West, roving beyond the edges and back again. The Edge Rover is therefore a welcome addition to early American West biographies, showing that boundaries, borders, and identities during this early period could be as fluid and wild as the land itself.

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