A Rendezvous (i)

 

When William Ashley, THE William Ashley of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, came back up to St. Louis from far up the Missouri, all the way to the Bighorn River that first time, the load of furs he took back with him was enough to blow out his pretty substantial pockets. It was 1824, and what Ashley had attended—he never trapped a beaver himself—was a celebration/festival/sales meeting of a hundred or more mountain men, his men, his employees, who had, like never before, gathered together near a fork in the Green River, somewhere close to where a town named McKinnon, Wyoming lies today.

It was Ashley’s idea to substantially alter the commonly held way in which fur companies gathered in the bounty. Instead of waiting for the trappers to get to St. Louis to bring in the county, it was Ashley’s idea to go get the furs himself, venture up the Missouri River to get to a place agreed upon for a “rendezvous,” the first of the famous rendezvous, rowdy celebrations, get-togethers of men who’d hardly seen other human beings for something close to a year.

William Ashley might have been a little scared of handling all that bounty, $50,000 worth, in fact, 1.5 million in pelts in today's cash, but then what he knew was that as long as he kept his head down, he wasn’t in imminent danger of being robbed. It’s not as if swash-buckling pirates roamed the Missouri back then. Few people were likely capable of imagining the wealth of what he had in the boat.

He must have worn a smile because his “rendezvous” idea was a winner he wasn’t about to abandon. All the way down the river, right here where the Big Sioux flows into the Missouri, he had to be thinking of what manner of vice and malefaction next year’s wilderness jamboree was going to entertain. If you stand up on the South Sioux City bridge, you can almost hear him cackle.

What he’d done, almost blindly, is hired some real ringers with an ad that ran, famously in an 1822 St. Louie newspaper: “One hundred enterprising young men… to ascend the Missouri River to its source, there to be employed for one, two, or three years,” which means, of course, that the winners all had to pass by our place at least once on their way up the Missouri River.

Who were the ringers? Well, Jim Bridger for one, who was 18 when he answered Ashley’s ad. He’d never been any further west than St. Louis. He spent the next 20 years wandering from the Canadian border to the Spanish forts of New Mexico, from Missouri to Utah. When he stumbled on the Great Salt Lake, he thought it was the Pacific Ocean. In fact, he may have been the first white man to Old Faithful blow its top.

Then there was Jedidiah Smith, the parson of the bunch, often credited with discovering overland routes that became major highways during the Gold Rush. Smith lost a scalp to a grizzly, but got it back when his buddies sewed it back on.

And who can forget Hugh Glass, mauled by a bear and left for dead, a man whose will to revenge kept him alive but sense of humanity finally conquered all those troubled demons in his memory, a legendary character still alive in the works of John Niehardt and Frederick Manfred.

How about James Beckwourth, an African-American who shows up almost everywhere across the continent, including a significant tour of duty with the Crows, serving, some say, as their head man.

Ashley’s home base was St. Louis, but when he went afield to pick up the good, he, like the others, passed right by the confluence of three river which became Sioux City. We can’t call them residents, but they were here, if not on the river then on the great river road you can still note with its brand new sign up on our Old Missouri River Trail.

Just go stand there sometime and imagine, with Ashley and his crew gracing our hills. Just imagining all those tough-as-leather mountain men, their wives, their donkeys, their furs—just imagining our story makes our world a bigger place.