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| William H. Ashley. Legends of America. |
Signed by William H. Ashley, the job posting marked the first public presence of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company (RMFC).
At the time, independent American trappers and small fur companies were focused on exploiting the Missouri River watershed, east of the Continental Divide. Ashley and his partner, Andrew Henry, had more ambitious plans.
Pennsylvanian Andrew Henry first entered the fur trade in 1808, when he was about thirty-three years old. He led an attempt to establish a Missouri Fur Company (MFC) post at Three Forks, in Montana. When Indian attacks ended that venture disastrously, he moved to Idaho and built Fort Henry, four to five miles southwest of today's St. Anthony.
A hard winter soon crippled that effort. The MFC struggled along for a number of years, but the War of 1812 drew Henry's interest for the duration. After his military service, until he joined up with Ashley, Henry focused on mining activities around St. Louis.
William Ashley had moved to St. Louis from Virginia in 1808, when he was about thirty years old. Prior to 1822, he engaged in real estate development, banking, and mining. He too served in the Missouri militia, rising from a captaincy during the War of 1812 to the rank of General in 1822. Along with all that, Ashley engaged in politics, being elected in 1820 as the first Lieutenant-Governor of the new state of Missouri.
Although the Ashley-Henry announcement drew enough men to their new company, the RMFC got off to a shaky start: The Arikara Indians of South Dakota inflicted heavy losses on their Missouri River expedition. After that, the company avoided that area and dispatched trains of pack horses to the Rocky Mountains on a more direct overland route.
RMFC trappers crossed the Continental Divide into the Green River area via South Pass in 1824. Two parties continued into Idaho – one, led by legendary Mountain Man Jedediah Smith, camped on the Portneuf River in the fall. In October, along the Salmon River, Smith's group met the "Snake Brigade," the large fur-trapping operation of the British-Canadian Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) [blog, Oct 6].
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| Mountain Man. Frederic Remington drawing. |
The RMFC overcame its inauspicious start and the 1823 and 1824 seasons yielded substantial returns. However, after perhaps too many years in the wilderness and too many close calls, Andrew Henry chose to retire from the fur trade. He returned to his mining interests and died just eight years later.
Assessing the fur business, Ashley decided that the vast beaver resources west of the Continental Divide promised much better returns than the highly competitive Missouri River watershed. However, the region was too sparsely populated to support fixed trading posts. Traders in Canada had used temporary trading stations for some time, but those were small and largely ad hoc. Ashley adapted the idea to initiate what became a defining feature of the Mountain Man era, the annual rendezvous, a huge trading fair … and drunken celebration.
Gatherings in 1825 and 1826 made Ashley a wealthy man. Thus, late in the 1826 affair, he essentially sold the Rocky Mountain Fur Company to three experienced traders. He never returned west. Later, he served several terms as a U. S. Congressman from Missouri, before his death in 1838.
The RMFC would vigorously compete with the HBC, and with other American rivals, for the next decade. In the process, the Company would introduce a long line of famous Mountain Men into the trade: the Sublette brothers, David Jackson, Thomas "Broken Hand" Fitzpatrick, freed slave Jim Beckwourth, Jim Bridger, and many others.
| References: [B&W] |
| H. M. Chittenden, The American Fur Trade of the Far West, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln (1986). |