So he sold some to independent trappers, and continued west with the rest. He left 12 men there to build and run the post, and continued on to the mouth of the Columbia. There, even more bad news waited. The ship had been struck by lightning, and had been forced in to Valparaiso, on the coast of Chile, for three months of repairs. That was about it for Nathaniel Wyeth. Soon the end came to the Rocky Mountain beaver trade, too. Beaver were nearly wiped out and silk was the fashion, now.
Hard to believe that such a rich, big business had been built on so unpredictable a thing as what people like to wear. There were no more rendezvous after The trappers found other ways to make a living — hunting buffalo for example — or guiding wagon trains.
Fur trade enthusiasts will want to visit the fur-trade rendezvous sites. The museum first opened in and continues to develop new exhibits.
The museum is open May 1 through November 1. Museum of the Fur Trade , Chadron, Nebraska, is within easy driving distance of most of eastern and central Wyoming.
Open May 1 through October Extensive exhibits of goods used in the fur trade , including textiles, beads and silver and a remarkable collection of more than Northwest guns, standard in the trade. Skip to main content. Home Encyclopedia. Tom Rea. Also along was a pair of scientists, Thomas Nuttall, specializing in identifying plants, and John Kirk Townsend, specializing in identifying birds. Wyeth wrote many letters, a trapper traveling with Wyeth named Osborne Russell kept a journal, the missionary Jason Lee kept a journal, and Townsend, the young ornithologist bird specialist who got sick at rendezvous, kept a journal too.
Russell, Osborne. Journal of a Trapper. Aubrey L. Haines, editor. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, Townsend, John Kirk. Across the Rockies to the Columbia. Introduction by Donald Jackson. Wyeth, Nathaniel J. The Correspondence of Captain Nathaniel J. Wyeth , New York: Arno Press, Reprint of edition. The celebration is part re-enactment and part living history. Highway You may also be interested in the Rocky Mountain National Rendezvous re-enactment website.
Frontier Types. The Great Fur Trade Companies. Incidents of the Fur Trade. Primary Menu Skip to content. The selected sites were in a lush valley big enough for up to five hundred mountain men, several thousand Indians, and grazing and water for thousands of horses.
Another consideration was the site be readily accessible to the supply trains from St. The rendezvous campsites were grouped around the various suppliers. When my brother Bert Eddins and I took the pictures of the rendezvous sites, we took these factors into account. The longitudes and latitudes given represent the probable center of the rendezvous. It may well be supposed that the arrival of such a vast amount of luxuries from the East did not pass off without a general celebration.
Mirth, song, dancing, shooting, trading, running, jumping, singing, racing, target-shooting, yarns, frolic, with all sort of extravagances that white men or Indians could invent were freely indulged in. The unpacking of the medicine water contributed not a little to the heightening of our festivities.
Accompanied by Jedediah Smith, Ashley left the day after the gathering and took his furs over South Pass and down the Bighorn Canyon to near present-day Thermopolis, Wyoming.
Louis in late October with sixty men, one hundred and sixty mules, and twenty thousand dollars worth of trade goods.
Ashley responded with twenty-three more men and mules. When the combined party reached Green River, Dr. Gowns states sixty to seventy trappers joined the caravan. From the Green River Valley several routes have been proposed for the route to Cache Valley, but most accounts have the caravan following Bear River into the north end of Cache Valley. The renowned historian Dr. Nothing material occurred.
But Just before arriving there I saw some indians on the opposite side of a creek. It was hardly worth while as I thought, to be any wise careful, so I went directly to them and found as near as I could judge by what I knew of the language to be a band of the Snakes.
I learned from them that the Whites, as they term our parties, were all assembled at the little Lake, a distance of about 25 Miles. There was in [the] this camp about Lodges of indians and as the[y] were on their way to the rendevous I encamped with them.
My arrival caused a considerable bustle in camp, for myself and party had been given up as lost. A small Cannon brought up from St. Louis was loaded and fired for a salute. Morgan took the term cache to mean where goods from the rendezvous were cached. Based on these assumptions, he located the rendezvous in the area of Hyrum, Utah. There are several fallacies to these assumptions.
I will state six, and if anyone is interested, email me and we can discuss several others. Morgan wrote that on Jedediah Smith return from California in , he had gone to a cache with blacksmith tools in the mouth of Blacksmith Fork Canyon, hence this is where the rendezvous must have been held.
Utah…at the time Dr. Morgan wrote the definitive book on Jedediah Smith, he states in the preface the Smith Gibbs Map had not come to light. The most likely place is John H. The trip from St. Louis had been a long hard journey; up to thirty men had deserted. Why would the men re-pack over one hundred mules and leave a well-known establish camp and travel another twenty-five miles south to Blacksmith Fork Canyon, especially when blacksmith tools were far more likely at Cove where Bridger, an apprentice blacksmith, had spent the winter with Weber?
There has been considerable discussion on the location of the rendezvous. As soon as someone does this please let me know and I will gladly make the appropriate changes.
The previous year, he had taken Jedediah Smith as his new partner; Andrew Henry left the Ashley-Henry partnership in Ashley had made enough money from the Rocky Mountain fur trade to quit the mountains and pursue his interests in beaver pelts, trade goods, and politics.
The trade goods sent out this year by Ashley is 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.
On the way back with the furs, Hiram Scott become ill, and was later abandoned. His body was found three years later near Scottsbluff, Nebraska. The rendezvous was the only rendezvous supplied by Ashley. Supplies and furs were marketed through Ashley, but Smith Jackson and Sublette were not obligated to buy all of the trade goods from Ashley.
The agreement signed by them in was only binding if they contacted Ashley before March 1 of the year preceding the rendezvous. There were few trade goods for the rendezvous on Sweet Lake.
Sublette had brought out the trade goods the previous fall, and they were pretty much gone. Indians stole their horses near South Pass, and they had to cache the trade goods. In both the and rendezvous, there were fights with the Blackfeet near the rendezvous sites. There were no trappers killed in the first battle, but Lewis Boldue was killed in the fight. There was a small gathering of mountain men on the Popo Agie, and as soon as the trading was concluded, Sublette left with the remaining trade goods to find his partners, Jedediah Smith and David Jackson.
Robert Newell recorded there was one hundred and seventy-five mountain men at this second rendezvous. The Rendezvous is sometimes referred to as a split rendezvous. Sublette left St. The supply caravan averaged fifteen- to twenty-five miles a day. Sublette stopped for a rest on July 4th, at a large rock outcropping on the Sweetwater River.
Sublette named the rock Independence Rock. The Smith Jackson and Sublette firm collected one hundred and seventy packs of furs with a value of eighty-four thousand four hundred and ninety-nine dollars. In , the traders figured out there was a lot of money to be made by transporting trade goods to the mountains and trading there for the furs. These annual summer gatherings were called rendezvous, and were held at a designated spot known to both trappers and traders.
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