v. 1 : The Mountain Years: Joe Meek is one of the West's irresistible characters -- dashing, devil-may-care, cheeky, irreverent, frolicsome as a grizzly cub. Unlike so many of the West's other great characters, he comes down to us not as myth, says the editor, but as "simply a right kind of fella." It is our good luck that Joe knew how to yarn his mountain experiences truly and colorfully and with only a mite of stretching, and that he happened to cross trails with a professional writer who had the sense to see the worth of his tale as Joe told it, in the raw. The result of the collaboration of Joe and Frances Fuller Victor is The River of the West, first published in 1870 and now brought back into print after being mostly unavailable for a century. This first of two volumes of The River of the West deals with Joe's years as one of the legendary mountain men, the fur trappers of the Rocky Mountains. - Jacket flap.

v. 2: The Oregon Years: Here Joe Meek continues his collaboration with Frances Fuller Victor, telling the story of his own colorful life and the tale of his times in The River of the West, a memoir that proved immediately and enduringly popular upon its publication more than a century ago. In the first half of their book, published as Volume One of this new edition, Meek and Mrs. Victor presented the young Joe in his role as a dashing and gallant trapper. In this volume they show him as a pioneer, sheriff, U.S. Marshall, even legislator -- Citizen Joe. Through Meek's pungent recollections, his engaging memoir also becomes an important history of Oregon's turbulent formative years -- the struggles of the missionaries, the other early settlers, the Hudson's Bay Company, and the Indians that shaped a territory and finally a state. - Jacket flap.