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William Ashley Rendezvous System
by
O. Ned Eddins

Historical Novels: Mountains of Stone  The Winds of Change

Etienne Provost         Thomas Fitzpatrick       Jedediah Smith       Joseph Walker    

Mountain Men     Fur Trappers    Fur Trade Facts    Rendezvous     Rendezvous Sites     Fort Bonneville   Astorians    Wilson Price Hunt    Robert Stuart    David Thompson   Sir Alexander Mackenzie
 

Indian Horse    Indian Smallpox     Indian Trade Beads     Indian Trade Guns   Indian Alcohol   
 

This ad by the Ashley-Henry Fur Company appeared in the Missouri Gazette & Public Advertiser Feb. 13, 1822 and in the St. Louis Enquirer two weeks later.      

Eighteen twenty-two was a pivotal year in the Rocky Mountain fur trade:

1) William Henry Ashley advertised for young men to trap the Missouri River to its source.
2) John Jacob Astor established the western department of the American Fur Company in St. Louis.
3) Congress discontinued the Factory System.

The Ashley-Henry Fur Company is credited with the innovation of the Rendezvous System, and in terms of the Rocky Mountains, this is true. However, Ashley was not the first to use a rendezvous for the exchange of pelts and to re-supply the trappers. The North West Company had held an annually rendezvous at Grand Portage and later at Fort William since 1783.

Some of the best-known names in the annals of the Rocky Mountain fur trade responded to General Ashley's advertisement i.e. Jedediah Smith, Hugh Glass, Daniel T. Potts, and Jim Bridger. Three men often credited with being among the original Ashley men are Thomas Fitzpatrick, William Sublette, and Etienne Provost. Thomas Fitzpatrick and William Sublette did not go West with Ashley until 1823, and Etienne Provost was never one of Ashley's men.

The Ashley-Henry Company sent two keelboats up the Missouri River in the spring of 1822. One of the boats under the command of Daniel Moore sank with ten thousand dollars worth of provisions on it. Ashley equipped another boat and reached Andrew Henry at the junction of the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers where Henry and his men built Fort Henry. Ashley returned to St. Louis after more supplies for the next year.

                                                   Arikara Village - Google Images

Arikara Battle:

The following year, 1823, the William Ashley Expedition was attacked by the Arikara (Rees) Indians near the North and South Dakota border. Ashley lost fifteen men before withdrawing to the mouth of the Cheyenne River. Jedediah Smith had come downriver with a request from Henry for more horses, and Ashley sent him back upriver to get Henry and his men. Several of the William Ashley men had enough of the Indian fur trade, and on the way back to St. Louis, they carried word of the attack to Colonel Leavenworth at Ft. Atkinson.

                                                    Fort Atkinson Barracks 1819 - 1827

Colonel Henry Leavenworth responded with six companies of soldiers. Besides the military, there was Joshua Pilcher and some of his Missouri Fur Company men, and six hundred Sioux warriors. After several days of military indecisiveness, the Sioux left in disgust. While the fur traders stood helplessly by, Colonel Leavenworth negotiated a peace treaty with the Arikara. In a letter to the War Department, a angry Joshua Pilcher declared Leavenworth’s ineffectual action to teach the Indians a lesson destroyed commerce on the Missouri River for years to come.

You came to restore peace and tranquility to the country, & leave an impression which would insure its continuance, your operations have been such as to produce the contrary effect, and to impress the different Indian tribes with the greatest possible contempt for the American character. You came to use your own language to "open and make good this great road": instead of which you have by the imbecility of your conduct and operations, created and left impassable barriers.

After the Arikara battle, William Ashley dispatched Jedediah Smith, Thomas Fitzpatrick, William Sublette, James Clyman, Thomas Eddie, Edward Rose, Stone, Branch, and two other men whose names have been lost to history overland to the Rocky Mountains. Andrew Henry returned upriver and sent another company of trappers under John H. Weber to the same area. Jim Bridger and Johnson Gardner were with Weber.

Ashley’s plan of operation differed from the early fur traders on the Upper Missouri. Ashley did not depend on Indian trappers, and with the exchange of supplies and beaver pelts at a rendezvous, there was no need for trading posts. The fact several Congressional Trade and Intercourse Acts starting in 1790 made it illegal to trespass on Indian lands, sell alcohol to Indians, or the fact the 1825 and the 1826 rendezvous were held on Mexican soil did not bother General William H. Ashley, the Lieutenant Governor and future Missouri Congressman, one bit...one constant in history is politician change little with time.

In February of 1824, Jedediah Smith and his party crossed the Continental Divide through South Pass to reach the valley of the Sis-kee-dee (Prairie Hen River, Fat River)...Green River Valley of Wyoming.

                                                  Continental Divide South Pass

The re-discovery of South Pass was soon widely heralded as an easy wagon route to the mouth of the Columbia, whereas the Astorians discovery in 1812 was for the most part forgotten.

In the fall of 1824, Thomas Fitzpatrick, Stone, and Branch returned to Ft. Atkinson; the trappers crossed South Pass and then down the North Platte River. On hearing the mountain valleys were rich with beaver, William Ashley outfitted a supply train, and in November 1824, struck out overland from Ft. Atkinson. Ashley followed the Platte River and then the South Platte River to the Front Range in Colorado. Indians had told Ashley there was better feed for his pack animals along the South Platte than the North Platte River. Reaching the Front Range in Colorado, Ashley turned northwest and crossed the mountains into the Green River Valley.

William Ashley divided his men into four groups. Three of the parties were to trap, while he and several other men floated down Green River. Ashley told the men  he would make a cache of his good about one hundred miles downstream, and near there would be a general rendezvous on or about July 10. After leaving the Green River, Ashley met Etienne Provost with a party of trappers from Taos, New Mexico. Provost agreed to guide Ashley to the rendezvous site.

July 1, 1825, on Henry’s Fork of the Green River, Ashley wrote:

 On the 1st day of july, all the men in my employ or with whom I had any concern in the country, together with twenty-nine, who had recently withdrawn from the Hudson Bay company, making in all 120 men, were assembled in two camps near each other about 20 miles distant from the place appointed by me as a general rendezvous, when it appeared that we had been scattered over the territory west of the mountains in small detachments from the 38th to the 44th degree of latitude, and the only injury we had sustained by Indian depredations was the stealing of 17 horses by the Crows on the night of the 2nd april, as before mentioned, and the loss of one man killed on the headwaters of the Rio Colorado, by a party of Indians unknown.

Part of Ashley’s one hundred and twenty men were at least twelve to fifteen men with Etienne Provost from Taos and possibly other Indians besides those defecting from Peter Skene Ogden of the Hudson’s Bay Company with seven hundred pelts. Ashley paid three dollars a pelt to his trappers, but only two dollars and fifty cents for the pelts he acquired from Provost's men...this may suggest the quality of pelts taken from southern Utah were not as good as those taken from northern Utah.

Ashley and Jedediah Smith left the day after the gathering and took the furs over South Pass and down the Bighorn Canyon to near present Thermopolis, Wyoming. The furs were loaded into bullboats and floated down the Bighorn and Yellowstone rivers to the Missouri River where Ashley met the Atkinson-O'Fallon Expedition. General Henry Atkinson and Indian agent Benjamin O’Fallon had come up the Missouri in a paddle wheeler to negotiate treaties with the various Indian tribes along the Missouri River, and they hauled William Ashley’s furs to St. Louis. Ashley arrived in St. Louis with 8,892 beaver pelts--100 packs.

Jedediah Smith returned to St. Louis with Ashley. When Andrew Henry decided to leave the fur trade, Ashley made Smith his partner. Jedediah Smith and Robert Campbell left St. Louis in November with the supply train for the Willow Valley rendezvous. Smith was snowed in on the Republican Fork River and lost about a third of the pack mules. When Ashley learned of this, he left in March to re-supply the Smith caravan and take it on to Willow Valley (Cache Valley). Smith went on ahead to organize the rendezvous in Willow Valley (Cache Valley, Utah).

 
                                                     1826 - 1831 Cove, Utah
                                                    N41° 57' 26"  W111° 49' 37"

The site of the 1826 rendezvous in Cache Valley is disputed between Cove and Hyrum, Utah. The renowned historian Dale Morgan believes it was on Blacksmith Fork near Hyrum. Dr. Morgan based this assumption on the July entries of Jedediah Smith's Journals, but Smith's travel distances and time do not support this conclusion.

At the conclusion of the 1826 Willow Valley rendezvous, Ashley met with Jedediah Smith, David Jackson, and William Sublette on Bear River between Georgetown and Soda Springs, Idaho. Ashley sold his interest in the Ashley Smith Fur Trade Company to the new company of Smith Jackson and Sublette. Ashley had made enough money from the fur trade to quit and pursue his interests in politics. In the agreement, Ashley remained as the sole rendezvous supplier for the new firm of Smith Jackson and Sublette.

Ashley's hired forty-six men to take the 1827 supply caravan to the Sweet Lake (Bear Lake) rendezvous near Laketown, Utah. The trade goods sent out this year by Ashley was the first listing of alcohol (Rum) being sent, but there are reports of it at the two previous rendezvous. With the caravan was a small cannon mounted on two wheels. This two-wheeled cart made the first wheeled tracks over South Pass.

                                              1827-28 rendezvous - Sweet  Lake

On the way back to St. Louis with the furs one of Ashley's leaders, Hiram Scott, become ill and was abandoned. Scott's body was found three years later near Scott's Bluff, Nebraska.

                                                               Scott's Bluff

William Ashley was not a mountain man. Ashley bought a supply train to the mountain man rendezvous in 1825 and 1826. After the 1826 rendezvous, Ashley sold out to Jedediah Smith, David Jackson and William Sublette and never returned to the Rocky Mountains.

Ashley’s rendezvous scheme enabled him to retire from the mountains after two years, but he held a contract to supply Smith Jackson and Sublette. The rendezvous supplies were marked up, sometimes a thousand percent; it was the lucrative part of the fur trade. Even though Ashley had the supply contract, he hired people to take the supplies to the rendezvous. Ashley held the supply contract until Smith Jackson and Sublette sold out to Thomas Fitzpatrick, James Bridger, Milton Sublette, Henry Fraeb, and Jean Gervias. The new firm was the Rocky Mountain Fur Trade Company. William Sublette remained the St. Louis the rendezvous supplier for the new firm.  Ashley's only interest in the fur trade was to make enough money to pursue a political career.