In this first comprehensive account of the nineteenth-century exploration and survey of the northern Cascade Range, Fred Beckey presents a wide range of materials from dozens of archives across the United States and beyond: voyagers' logs, trappers' yarns, agency and government documents, official surveys, tall tales, climbers' journals, and sober histories. The voices, most of them from first-person narratives, range from wonder at the magnificence of the terrain, through frustration with the rigors of its harsh conditions, to the often humorous and sometimes tragic anecdotes of daily life in what was still mostly unexplored wilderness.
This study will be particularly appealing to those interested in American wilderness areas and the way people approached those areas during a time of dynamic change in the Northwest. At the same time, it will be a sourcebook for future histories of the northern Cascades.

Fred Beckey, a legend among mountain climbers, has gained an intimate knowledge of the Cascades through an in-depth study of published and archival sources and personal experience, including numerous first ascents