For a 100-year period, from the 1880s to 1980s, if you asked an American which profession was the purest expression of the nation's spirit, they wouldn't answer with soldier, baseball player, or astronaut. Rather, they would answer with "mountain man." That's because American history taught that the nation's identity developed from the friction between civilization and the frontier. And nobody did more to conquer the frontier then mountain men, a group of trappers who went out into th American wilderness after the Lewis and Clark expedition, but before it was settled by pioneers in the 1830s. In this episode we look at the background of these mountain men and why they play such an outsized role in American History.