Lewis Bloom Myers (1812-1893), mountain man, identified by Leroy Hafen as the model for the character “La Bonte” in George Ruxton’s 1849 fictionalized classic, Life in the Far West, writes to a neighbor whose ox has been causing troubles: “Sir that yellow ox of yours Branded OU on the Ribs is here and has Been for the last month along with a Band that keeps Breaking into [Perrotts?] field i have been Below for some time or i would have sent you word before i am keeping him here for you. now i want you to come over or send for him immidiately there is some cost on him now when i was over your way i told you that i saw him here and i thought you had got him untill the other day no one here knew who he belonged to but me so come and get him. yours with Respect, inquire for Lewis B. Myers or Lew Myers .” Myers left his home in Pennsylvania in 1830, reputedly after killing another boy in a duel, and soon made his way to the frontier, spending the next twenty years as a buffalo-hunter on the prairie and a fur trapper in the Rocky Mountains, also for a time as an interpreter among the Sioux Indians. In 1847, he became guide and hunter for a party of Mormon families who had emigrated by covered wagon through Missouri into Indian territory, meeting up with Brigham Young's larger pioneer company at Fort Laramie, and on to Utah's Salt Lake Valley. In the spring of 1849, when he heard news of the gold fever to the west, he became one of the first of the Forty-Niners to reach California, marrying, en route, a 17 year-old girl, 20 years his junior, eventually settling in El Dorado County in the gold country east of Sacramento. By 1860, when this letter was written, he was a prominent citizen in a mining community which had grown to almost 1,000. Letters from mountain men, of whom Myers is a genuine example, are quite rare – many were only semi-literate, a surprising number could not even write their names.