MILES GOODYEAR

About the Book

Historian Francis Parkman said of the western fur trappers and mountain men, “I defy the annals of chivalry to furnish the record of a life more wild and perilous than that of a Rocky Mountain Trapper.” Surprisingly, there was a mountain man named Miles Goodyear who was born and raised in Connecticut. He died in his early thirties but made his mark in that wild and perilous life as a trapper but also as a founder of two cities in the west, a horse trader and gold seeker. Miles Goodyear’s life story is full of intrigue, wild adventures and involvement with people of consequence in the west from the time he went west in 1836 until his death in 1849. No dime novel or prize winning book contains his story and he never wrote a journal. He is the subject of only one little known hard cover biography, an article in the Utah Historical Quarterly and a newspaper article in a Connecticut newspaper and there is only one historical marker that includes his name. Yet Miles Goodyear, who was described in a journal as “a restless native of Yankee land,” left a significant footprint on the development of the far west. It is hard to imagine how he could compress so many adventures and so much living in the short span of thirty-two years. He did make his mark in the Rocky Mountains and plains of the far west. This is his story.

About the Author

Stephen Darley was raised in a small farming community in northern Utah and attended undergraduate studies at Utah State University and then attended law school at George Washington University. He served for two years in the army one of which was in Vietnam and afterwards he moved to New Haven, Connecticut where he operated a real estate and development company which specialized in affordable housing. Although he was raised in the west and has written three articles about the west, this is his first book about the mountain men who were in the west in the first half of the nineteenth century. He has previously written four books on the American Revolutionary War and Benedict Arnold as well as a number of published and unpublished articles on that topic. Mr. Darley is a member of the North Haven Historical Society, the Connecticut Society of Genealogists, Utah Historical Society, the Museum of the Mountain Man and the New Haven Museum and Historical Society. He lives in North Haven, Connecticut with his wife Peggy. His web site is www.darleybooks.com.