Talk:Mountain man
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Bourgeious (isn't it bourgeois?) or does bourgeious refer to something else completely?
--72.56.124.151 13:50, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
Good Day Fellahs,
Mountain men existed on every continent and in practically every tradition.
"The Man from Snowy River" depicts an example from the Australian tradition of the genuine Australian mountain men.
If I had the time to research this all the world's greatest mountain ranges would reveal a host of mountain men, including the Sierra Nevada in Spain, the Himalayas, the Altai and *everywhere* mountainous on the planet.
If this is a global project provision will need to be made to either generalise this entry or somehow make provision for other entries that do not relate to the Rockies.
This is not to lessen the folk that roamed the Rockies, but rather to remind everyone that they had kindred spirits elsewhere on this planet.
Just thought I'd make an entry to this effect.
Pete Brown www.mountainman.com.au 04-APR-2005
[edit] Non-American mountain men
As Mr. Brown of Oz comments, it's not as if the US was the only country to have mountain men, and there's quite the list of Canadian (British Columbian, most likely) bush gentlemen to be added to this roster, most famously Kootenay Brown but I could come up with a few others if I thought about it. In my own area (the Bridge River-Lillooet) there were a bunch of old coots (for lack of a more polite term) whose regular place in the Gold Bridge Hotel bar were marked by carved wooden signs bearing their names: Limey John, Nosebag Jones, King of Norway, Grizzly Frank, Fish Lake Eddy, Woodchopper Eddy. There is a cultural distinction from American mountain men, perhaps; the fur trade here was always native-operated and HBC-bought-up, so the 19th Century was not as full of the particular kind of shaggy bushman you'd find in Idaho or the like; ours are more 20th Century in character; and they're still out there, depending on which smalltown bar you check out, or whose cabin you stumble across while hiking around in the back bush. Most of the modern guys prize their anonymity, though, of course....
This is another of those articles/topics where the American term/context has been written up without regard to other countries' experiences; another article like this is Indian Wars (see notes at bottom of Talk:Indian Wars; other articles with US-biased content (some fixed since I found them) are Alaska boundary dispute and Oregon boundary dispute. Not that I've got anything against American history; it's just that the American perspective on history isn't the only one, and the American meanings and context of terms are only part of the whole picture, not the whole picture themselves.Skookum1 20:54, 19 May 2006 (UTC)
