September 12, 2012

IT HAS BEEN EXTREMELY DRY in the West this year; and there have been an usually high number of fires. California, Idaho and Wyoming have already exceeded their annual budgets for firefighting. When we left our cabin and drove south through the Jackson Hole, we could see heavy smoke just south of Jackson. We were concerned that we might not be able to use the only road to Pinedale, Wyoming, our destination for the day.

Our fears proved to be baseless, for we reached Pinedale within three hours, averaging close to 45 miles an hour on our mountain drive. Pinedale is a small town, but it is located in historic Green River Valley, near where six different rendezvous were held during the short-lived era of the mountain men.

While John Colter may have been the first true mountain man, he would be dead before fur trapping became a large-scale business. Fueled by a heavy demand for beaver skins from Europeans who used them for the then fashionable beaver hats, a couple of trading companies in St. Louis advertised for men who would trap beavers in the Rockies and sell them to the trading companies. Their ads attracted numerous men seeking both adventure and fortune. 

By the mid-1820s, hundreds of men became fur trappers. They were a very diverse group of men. Many had shady pasts, while others had perfectly respectful pasts but wanted some adventure in their lives. Some were literate, others were not even able to sign their names. Most of them found far more adventure and far less money than they had anticipated. Typically staying in the Rockies for around six months, the mountain men faced a variety of risks, including: Indians, rattlesnakes, broken limbs, grizzly bears, sicknesses, and extreme cold. A large number of trappers would perish each year, and often the location and the manner of their death would never be known. 

In late summer of each year, the fur trappers would meet at a prearranged date and site, called a rendezvous, to sell their furs and buy supplies for the next trapping season. Once their business was out of the way, they could proceed to the fun: racing, lying, fighting, drinking, gambling, wenching. In some years, as many as 200 trappers and 1,000 Indians would show up. A typical rendezvous would last for a couple of weeks or until the trappers ran out of money. Many of the famous mountain men such as Jim Bridger, Jed Smith, Bill Sublette were regulars at the annual rendevous.

The era of the fur-trapping mountain men was extremely short, from about 1825 to 1840 when the demand for beaver hats was replaced by a demand for silk hats. A few of the mountain men, such as Jim Bridger, found employment as guides for the increasing number of wagon trains heading west. Some like Jed Smith would not survive the era; he was attacked and killed by a group of Comanches in 1831.

Pinedale has a museum devoted to the mountain men. Containing exhibits of hundreds of items actually used by the mountain men, it is a fitting tribute to the almost mystical mountain men. At the end of our tour of the museum, I purchased a biography of one of the greatest of the mountain men, Jedediah Smith:  Like John Colter, Smith's contributions were overlooked by historians for many years. When parts of his journal came to light in the 1930s, scholars began to recognize that he may have been the greatest of the mountain men.