This is a hard book to rate.

Parts of it were fascinating. In a fight with Blackfoot Indians, he was shot through the leg with an arrow and had all his belongings stolen. He and another trapper less seriously wounded had to make their way back to the fort, a journey of several days. On another occasion, a Grizzly Bear came charging out of the woods, knocked Russell's partner about 12 feet through the air (without injury) and kept on running without breaking stride.

But mostly, it contained dry details with random capitalization, now-you-see-it-now-you-don't punctuation and odd spellings that read like this: 23d We left the Village in company with Mr. Bridger and his party and travelled SE accross the plain about 6 Mls. to the foot of the hills and encamped at a spring. 24th Travelled about 18 mls SE over high rolling hills beautifully clothed with bunch grass — 25th Travelled in the same direction 12 Mls and encamped in a smooth valley about 80 Mls in circumference surrounded on the North & East by a high range of mountains at the NE extremity is a marshy lake about 12 Mls. in circumference from this flows the head stream of the Jefferson fork of the Missouri which curves to the SW thro. the valley and enters the low mountain on the west thro. a narrow cut still continuing the curve encircling a large portion of country previous to its arrival at the junction 26 Crossed the valley as a Mountaineer would say was full of Buffaloe when we entered it and large numbers of which were killed by our hunters we repeatedly saw sings of Blackfeet about us to waylay the Trappers.