On a slope in the San Gabriel mountains, seventy-seven-year-old Isaac Slover lay dying. His buckskin was ripped, his flesh shredded, scalp torn off, legs shattered, one arm broken, body splattered in blood. Alongside him sprawled a lifeless grizzly. A few minutes before, Isaac, trailed by a hunting companion, had wounded the animal and approached the underbrush to finish the job. His friend cautioned him. Before either could react, the large, enraged California grizzly lunged out of the dense foliage. The bear mauled Isaac with tooth and claw while his friend watched, helpless, unwilling to risk shooting into the fury. Finally, the bear slumped and fell, succumbing to his wound. When the friend was sure the bear was dead, he dragged Slover’s mutilated body away from the massive carcass and tried to tend to the grotesque injuries. The old hunter lasted two long, painful days.
Dying with Isaac Slover was a continent-long stream of memories. They ranged from his youth in Revolutionary War Western Pennsylvania to his final days now in Southern California in 1854, with stops along his westering way in Kentucky, the Arkansas Territory, and the Taos Valley. He had traveled longer in years and farther in miles and more often into humanity’s messes than almost any frontiersman of his time. His drift was always toward the edge. And almost every trek featured a gauntlet of privations and predators—on the one hand, thirst, hunger, cold, storms, and heat; on the other hand, rattlesnakes, wolves, grizzlies. More than anything, he knew beaver, how to find them, trap them, and prepare their fur for sale. At times, he made small fortunes off the pelts. At other times, he lost everything—and more than once almost his life.
In every land he roved, Indigenous societies held sway. Curious or generous or apprehensive or angry, these Shawnee, Osage, Cherokee, Comanche, Apache, Navajo, Ute, Mojave, and other Indigenous people crossed his trail. Sometimes, he breached cultural divides, fighting alongside Cahuilla Indians, marrying a Ute, becoming a citizen of Mexico, switching from Protestant to Catholic. Often, he made dubious choices. He carried five of his children into hostile lands; then, he left them and headed west. After a controversial marriage in Taos to a young Genízaro (Hispanicized Indian) woman, he went on forays that took him away from her for months. His survival was often in doubt. He and his fellow trappers helped to break open the West and expose its possibilities while being complicit in its exploitation and a catalyst for ravenous Euro-American settlement. From the Plains to the Pacific, he committed all the signature sins we now attribute to a feverish expansionist spirit, ravaging buffalo and beaver and grizzlies and Native peoples to the point of extinction and disrupting ecosystems. He befriended other westering men—William Wolfskill, Ewing Young, Nathaniel Miguel Pryor, and William Pope—with whom he trudged through countless mountains, waterways, and deserts. Defying the pejorative stereotypes, these young compatriots were not aimless misfits but industrious, ambitious trappers who would later become shrewd businessmen and influential civic leaders from Southern California to Oregon.
Ultimately, Slover never swerved from danger and violence. In California, he signed on as a quasi-mercenary and was provided land on the condition that he defend elite ranchers from horse-stealing, cattle-killing, and vandalism. When the US-Mexico War erupted, he took up arms, was captured by Mexican forces, and then exchanged during the Siege of Los Angeles. Circumstantial evidence points to his serving among the volunteers in the Kearny-Stockton forces who retook Los Angeles and concluded the war in California. In 1848, with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, he reverted to being an American citizen. Then, in 1854, at the age of seventy-seven, he succumbed one October day in the San Gabriel Mountains to the mightiest of North American beasts, the California grizzly.
Slover’s edge-roving includes an impressive resume of firsts and near-firsts. He was among the first handful of White men to cross the Indian-controlled plains and to trap the Southwest with Mexican permission, beginning with the Rio Grande and its San Luis Valley tributaries. Within a few years, he had meandered through all the southern Rocky Mountain waterways and the Colorado River basin as well as the Gila River basin of Arizona in quest of beaver and other fur-bearing animals. At Taos, he was, it seems, the first US citizen in New Mexico (Nuevo Mexico) to become a Mexican citizen and then to marry a local New Mexican. He was one of a trio who completed the first highly successful commercial trapping expedition out of Taos. Then he accompanied what was probably the first American party to reach California via the southern Gila River route. Clearly, Isaac Slover was present at the vanguard of Southwestern fur trapping, an occasionally lucrative but always daunting and dangerous enterprise, and stayed at it until its virtual demise in the late 1830s.
His groundbreaking jaunts were not all jubilant. Two years after Jedediah Smith first broached—despite the resistance of Mexican authorities—the potential of American overland penetration into California, Slover and the eight-member Pattie Expedition posed the prospect again, as much by accident as purpose. They came to the edge of death in the fiery sands of a Baja desert. Slover survived only to be arrested, along with his fellow trekkers, by Mexican officials in San Diego and lose a fortune in furs. However unsuccessful the two expeditions, when tidings of the Smith Expedition and the Pattie Expedition wafted back east by word of mouth and, eventually, by memoirs and reports, the overland accessibility and the economic potential of the West Coast were made apparent enough to entice more Americans to the far west.
Perhaps, in this brief catalog of deeds and disasters, I seem to be exaggerating and glorifying Isaac Slover’s adventures and his stature. To be clear, he exists, at best, as a marginal figure in the frontier histories of Kentucky, the Arkansas Territory, the Southwestern fur trade, and the San Bernardino Valley. He slinks around at the back of things, an obscure subordinate, present but not prominent, buried in the ancillary clauses and footnotes of the annals. In trying to bring Isaac more to the forefront without exaggerating his role, I have relied on context, circumstance, and association to buttress the narrative. I have extrapolated from extant records and reports, never speculating without framing the approach clearly as such. I have tracked the elementary information of his life, as best I could, through the usual official sources (census data; military records; birth, marriage, and death records). And here I must pay tribute to the late Slover family genealogist, Mabel Hadler, who first unearthed key sources about this man and the entire Slover legacy. With these facts and the recollections of his contemporaries, augmented by the groundwork of local historians and the overarching work of superlative scholars, I have sought to give the life of Isaac Slover its deserved heft, flavor, and humanity.
He might have given us more to work with, but he was illiterate, and, sadly, no contemporary scribe had the foresight to ask him to recite his experiences and then transcribe the gamut of his perspectives and adventures for posterity. His death, ironically, remains the most reported event of his life. Yet he leaves a fascinating, if elusive, trail across a continent when unengineered nature and Indigenous societies still ruled. Following this trail, we may get not only an inkling of the grit and gumption of one persistent rover but also a glimpse of the complex and often transgressive cultural, political, and violent interludes in our nation’s westward transit.
Indeed, if he deserves another degree or two of fame in the chronicles for his endeavors, I should note his rather unique position in the complicated cultural milieu of the Southwest. But, first, to realize the scope and uniqueness of the man’s life, we must consider his origins and upbringing in Pennsylvania. In one sense, he was born into uncertainty by virtue of having a father who had been captured and lived among Indians for twelve formative years of his youth before returning to White society. Thus, Isaac’s father experienced both a heavy dose of cultural dissonance and an abrupt reversal of allegiance in the middle of a highly contested Northwest territory. After several years as a budding warrior with the Shawnees, he was suddenly their enemy—a private in the Continental Army, then, a few years later, a scout for a Revolutionary War militia on a vengeful campaign against his former Indigenous brethren. The very people who had nurtured him into adulthood captured him again, brutally beat him, condemned him to death as a traitor, and prepared him for immolation. Isaac walked in the shadow of a traumatized father with a hybrid identity. How this affected young Isaac can only be imagined.
These complexities intimate what Isaac Slover was to face at every stage of his life—the confusions and anxieties of fluid, enigmatic cultural frontiers. In his westerly, continental journey, he was witness, perpetrator, and victim in the often violent vertigo of White-Indian and White-Mexican relations. From Western Pennsylvania to Kentucky to the Arkansas Territory to Taos to the San Bernardino Valley, he was, like all those in the first wave, an interloper, a transgressor, on Indigenous soil, constantly trespassing on the traditional homelands and hunting grounds, complicit in what would amount to a prolonged ethnic cleansing.
When Isaac settled in Taos, among Mexicans and Pueblos, he bridged the cultural gulf as best he could, but he, like other foreign newcomers, suffered the skeptical gaze of the established locals. As if to ameliorate or sometimes disguise his outsider identity, he converted to Catholicism, quickly sought naturalization, and married a local, a Hispanicized Ute woman. Still, the wariness of Hispanic residents manifested most vividly in the reactions of Church and government authorities. The validity of his marriage was contested. Then, he tried to cope with the anti-foreigner rules of commercial trapping and trading in Mexico. The cultural friction Isaac faced in Taos and Southern California was another version of the cross-cultural tensions he had experienced since childhood. He roved the edges, the borders and cultural intersections created by a persistently westering people as they overlapped and ultimately overwhelmed the native inhabitants.
Isaac found in marriage, it seems, an anchorage that gave vital respite to his risky itinerant urges. His two wives—Peggy, to whom he was married from 1800 to 1816, and Maria Barbara, to whom he was married from 1823 to 1854—each served as a refuge, a still point where he put in abeyance his fierce compulsion to rove. However much a hunter at heart, Isaac was, in his twenties and thirties, also a farmer and family man. Peggy’s sudden death after childbirth in 1816 led, as we will see, to a major pivot in his life. Soon thereafter, he flung himself down the Ohio and Mississippi and up the Arkansas and Grand rivers to the treacherous Arkansas Territory with five children in tow. It seems like his bold effort to pursue a passion for the hunt, the rover in him, while still fulfilling a duty as a parent. The incompatibility of passion and duty materialized when he found his family in the middle of the intensifying war between Osage and Cherokee Indians, a war instigated and aggravated by the pressures of persistent Anglo westward migration. He relocated his children to a safer haven to the east, then turned solo, launching a new career, as it were, as a “mountain man,” a free trapper in the Southwest. But even there, in Taos in another country, he soon found new anchorage with a wife with whom he stayed married for the rest of his life, though his inveterate wanderings were surely, at times, a severe test of her loyalty.
Another prominent theme in Isaac Slover’s progress westward is the range of challenges he and his ilk faced living amid largely ineffective or absent civil structures. Even in the state of Pennsylvania, the Slovers and their neighbors endured a tenuous legal and enforcement apparatus in addition to inept military operations by untrained, disorganized militias. In the new state of Kentucky (1792), the Slovers often lived hunkered down amid a slew of river pirates, roaming outlaws, and aggrieved Indians. Isaac’s father led—and Isaac played an auxiliary role in—efforts to form and implement a justice system, to survey and establish land ownership, and to develop a system of roads. In the Arkansas Territory (now Eastern Oklahoma) where Isaac moved, he and his children were far removed from social and legal structures and protected from violence only by themselves and an incipient military force at Fort Smith many miles and several days away. In Taos, Isaac dealt with a weak and inconsistent local government and undermanned military that remained suspicious of outsiders, even those who had naturalized, converted to the national religion, and married local residents, as Isaac had. Later, in California, he encountered a violent environment brought about by cultural collisions, the hasty, inhumane secularization of the missions as well as a minimally effective justice and law enforcement system. Of course, truth be told, Isaac was wary of populous areas and the taxes and regulations that came with them, as his friend, Judge Benjamin Hayes, noted.5 Regardless of his social preferences, Isaac often faced—and faced willingly, or at least with resignation—the chaotic and often violent consequences of living at or beyond the edge of a justice system.
Although he valued a haven—namely a wife and a hearth, a safe space insulated as much as possible from social encumbrances—Isaac’s deepest craving was undoubtedly the open space of the hinterlands. He leaned always toward the feral edges where the extremes of wonder and danger lurk and where, in time, beasts will smite you down.
